Re: [Rosegarden-devel] Sounds Expo 2004 report

[Chris C. <ca...@al...>]

OK, here's a bit more detail.

With six people on the stand and two of them Rosegarden developers, RG 
was inevitably somewhat overrepresented -- also because as I was the 
only person there who actually lives in London, I was able to bring a 
desktop machine, and so the most obvious, fastest machine was mostly 
running Rosegarden.  That said, since this was very much an audio 
show, we probably did more talking about JACK than anything else: 
demos usually consisted of something trivial playing in Rosegarden 
through something like qsynth, some effects in jack-rack, then into 
JAMin to show off its cool EQ monitoring doobrie, and showing the 
JACK transport sync with JAMin and qjackctl.  We didn't show Ardour 
on the desktop much, but Steve was walking people through it on his 
laptop.

But while we had plenty of interesting stuff to show, stability was a 
disappointment.  Rosegarden in particular crashed several times, with 
a crash that (yay) turned out to be the same one each time, but that 
(boo) I haven't quite worked out the true cause of yet.  (Will report 
in a separate email.)  Other problems included a reappearance of that 
old problem when recording MIDI, that the record segment would 
sometimes disappear when you stopped recording; and a strange effect 
in the notation editor where dragging the Zoom slider would cause the 
thing to zoom off to the far end of the scale and never give you 
control back again.

We also had some hardware troubles -- my machine mysteriously froze up 
twice on the final morning and I had to rebuild the ReiserFS tree the 
second time.

Also I got into a bit of a mess with the KDE 3.1 desktop launcher: I 
placed some shortcuts to applications on the desktop only to find 
that some of them (including Ardour, which is why I wasn't trying to 
run it much) would bring down my X server immediately when started 
from the desktop, even though never when started from a terminal.  I 
never normally use these KDE desktop shortcuts; do other people have 
the same sort of problem with them?

Altogether we had significantly worse demo gremlins than at either of 
the previous two shows I've done, which is a shame given that this 
show was probably more significant.  I was demoing the CVS version, 
which perhaps didn't help, but I would guess that only one of the 
above problems (the crash) is at all likely to be specific to 
post-0.9.6 code, whereas most of the new audio stuff that we needed 
to have available (e.g. JACK transport) was not in 0.9.6.


Chris