KGuitar / News: Recent posts

A few words on what's going on in Subversion. Guitar Pro import is coming smoothly, this time Guitar Pro 3. Old GP3 code was throughly replaced with the same unified Guitar Pro loader that was released with 0.5.1. Adding other versions of format is always a bit tricky, so, to make sure we won't break anything in GP4 and to ease development/reversing, test units were added into repository. Sadly, I can't publish real-world GP3/GP4 files, as they're copyrighted, but at
least trivial test examples would be stored there.

KGuitar is powerful KDE-based music tabulature editor with support of guitar, drums, classic note scores, MIDI synthesizer output, chord, scales, modes, melody and rhythm construction and analysis tools, lots of tab effects, Guitar Pro files import.

After a long period of silence, I'm pleased to announce KGuitar 0.5.1 - a major bugfix release that covers most of issues for the last few years :)

* Compatiblity fixes: added support for autoconf 2.61, automake 1.10, gcc 4.2. Removed last bits of qt2->qt3 transition deprecations. Internal structures refactoring.
* Added zoom level (Ctrl Minus, Ctrl Plus), introducing multiple bars per row, automatically tuning to available window width;
* Finally introduced new exception-based framework for converters load/save. Makes converters much more bullet-proof and easier to write and debug.
* Guitar Pro import undergone major rewrite. Now it properly loads all gp4 files I have. Guitar Pro v3 and v5 formats are coming next. Anyway, Guitar Pro loader is now much more helpful about what errors it gets and less crash-prone. It detects and helps debug problems it encounters.
* Lots of displaying, mouse and keyboard control, printing fixes and prettifying. Track pane now has a header and it's synchronized with track list. Melody editor now has trapezoid and shark fin inlays.
* New QMap-based API for song metainformation - stores not a fixed number of fields, but key=value pairs.
* Misc things: project transitioned to Subversion.... [read more](/p/kguitar/news/2008/01/kguitar-release-051/)

Things roll out somewhat smoothly. There's already new, much more bullet-proof version of converter runner now, based on exceptions. It allows new Guitar Pro loader work much cleaner: it includes now lots of runtime checks and it's much less prone to crash whole application in case of unsupported file. On the contrary, it's now a tool for format exploration and debugging: it will find the out-of-sync place in file with substage and structure precision, allowing to find an incomplatibility and fix it quickly.... read more

It's more like "we're still alive" style of post. Although, to be honest, nothing much happened in last 1.5 years, things are somewhat rolling. Our latest additions:

* CVS repository transitioned to SVN
* Some cleanup and compatibility fixes (new autoconf, automake, gcc)
* Removed last bits of legacy Qt code

I guess a new release would come shortly (0.5.1) as mostly bugfix release, but maybe there would be some minor feature additions.

KGuitar aims to develop a free, full-featured guitarist helper program, focusing on tabulature editing and MIDI synthesizers support.

Version 0.5 is a huge milestone release, first in a very long time. Lots of refactoring work: greatly improved internal
architecture, modularized lots of internal components. More KDE3 standartization. Full-featured Guitar Pro 4 import support. Improved song printing / display - displaying and printing use the same codebase - including classic notation. New chord finder - one can instanly get chord by its text name. Improved melody editor: added scales & modes, beautiful inlay/graphics options, better interactivity. Greatly improved and much stable MIDI playback Multiple usability fixes and tons of bug fixes. gcc3.4 and MusicXML DTD 0.7a compatibility.

Latest file release can be found at

http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=316110

KGuitar aims to develop a free, full-featured guitarist helper program, focusing on tabulature editing and MIDI synthesizers support.

Ported to KDE3 the first time officially, introduced basic KDE help center documentation. More usability features (zooming, navigation). Brand new tools - melody/solo editor, rhythm constructor, support for native Qt tabulature printing (with standard notescore notation). More complete MIDI playback
feature, more complete MusicXML support. New Guitar Pro 3 import support. And, as usually, lots of refactoring and numerous bug fixes.... read more

0.4.1 released. New features include TSE3 MIDI support, MusicXML support, support for Guitar Pro 2 import, several new features with effects & tabulature editing and several other things, including bugfixes.

Released RPMs for KGuitar 0.4.

Released version 0.4, with full multitracking support (including working drum track mode), editing
(cut, copy, paste, undo/redo) and lots of bugfixes
and optimizations. Feel free to download, test and
comment.

Released another new version. Most work done is implementing KPart with Browserextension and basic MIDI Output (Chord Constructor and Tab View). Also several other less significiant changes and bugfixes.

Released another major new version. Most work done is KDE2 porting and making the program to withstand KDE2 standards. Also several other less significiant changes and bugfixes.

Released a new major version, this one is without MIDI playback, but still with a lot of other changes, namely renewed chord dialog with strumming support, MIDI and MusiXTeX export and several bugfixes.

KGuitar release 0.2 is here. Please download and try to enjoy it,
if you can :-) It's the somewhat stable release and already could be useful for tab editing. That's better than making ASCII tabs
by hand, anyway :)

The fruit of 2+ weeks labor is here at last! Be sure to check it out and
take a look at our homepage!

The very first version of KGuitar's official homepage was uploaded.
Go check it out on http://kguitar.sourceforge.net/ and tell me what
you think about it.

Version 0.0.3 released. If no serious bugs would be encountered, this one is gonna be the last chord dialog-only version. Next 0.1 version would be with basic tab editor. See release notes & ChangeLog for more info on updates.

Release v0.0.2 today. Lots of changes in chord dialog, most music theory related things are completely rewritten for both speed and functionality enchance. Look at ChangeLogs and README for more details.

Hello everyone, it's the first news message on the project. It's progressing, and in a few days I'll release a newer version with almost completed and helpful chord dialog. Today I've set up task lists, the web page and CVS sources would be available shortly too.