Rosegarden 11.11 "Edelweiss" released

The Rosegarden team have announced the release of version 11.11 of Rosegarden, the audio and MIDI sequencer and musical notation editor for Linux. A long time in the making, this release combines a number of bug fixes with two major sub-projects that happened to come together right at the same time, and several completely new features as well. It is probably the most substantial offering since the landmark 10.02.

Ian Gardner and Yves Guillemot have worked together for nearly a year to invent, implement, and refine the new concept of linked segments, which allow you to maintain a master performance in one segment while copying it to other places, or even other tracks.

When manipulating segments in the main window, Ctrl+Alt+drag creates a linked segment from an existing one, and there is a new "Turn Links into Copies" entry on the Segment menu. Repeated segments may be displayed in the notation editor (in gray), and depending on the state of the configuration option, the original segment may or may not be modified in notation from its repeating copies. Redundant clefs and keys may be hidden automatically, within one segment or a chain of consecutive segments. This new work also improves Rosegarden's long-standing problems with anacrusis in notation.

Tom Breton added several new features, and carried out a number of internal optimizations. "Composition ? Fit Existing Beats to Beat Segment" takes a beat track and adjusts tempo to put real time and beats exactly on the given notes. "Segment ? Expand Block Chord Segments by Figuration" lets you define a bar of figuration and expand it for every block chord in a segment. Finally, "Edit ? Clear Range of Tempos" allows you to remove all tempo changes falling within a defined range.

Additionally, Daren Beattie, Alvar Udras, and D. Michael McIntyre formed a miniature version of the original porting team. The 10.02 release saw Rosegarden transformed from a KDE 3 application into a Qt 4 application, but much work remained to be done to remove all lingering remnants of the old code. With this release, Rosegarden improves its chances of long-term survival by eliminating its reliance on the Qt 3 support layer. With these ties to the past removed at last, it should be much less involved when the future arrives, and we find ourselves needing to port to Qt 5.

New Features:

• Linked segments.
• "Turn Links into Copies" entry is added to the segment menu.
• Repeated segments may be may be displayed in the notation editor in several optional ways.
• Redundant clefs and keys may be hidden automatically.
• In the configuration dialog a new tab controls the preceding features.
• Changed the behavior of SegmentSplitCommand to ensure that if a segment was selected before being split, the two new split segments would also be selected.
• FitToBeatsCommand. In contrast to CreateTempoMapFromSegmentCommand which takes a beat track and adjusts tempo to puts the beats evenly in real time, FitToBeatsCommand takes a beat track and adjusts tempo to put real time and beats exactly on the given notes.
• Made PasteConductorDataCommand an actual command, adding code to make it safe when there are existing tempos and time signatures.
• EraseTempiInRangeCommand.
• ExpandFigurationCommand, which lets you define a bar of figuration and expand it for every block chord in a segment.
• Improved performance of VU meters.
• Linked segments can be used to create repeats with 1..n alternate endings (with some caveats).
• Segment ? Create Anacrusis automates a tedious sequence of steps, making it a snap to start pickup notes at precisely the right time, with all the following segments lining up properly.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed B#/Cb octave export problem in MusicXML and Mup.
• Fixed problem with segments repeating when they shouldn't have been.
• Fixed the solo buttons in the transport toolbars in the notation and matrix editors, and changed the behavior so that the solo button is in the same state everywhere, no matter what content is being displayed in a particular window.
• Fixed the settings amnesia problem with the main window parameter area.
• Fixed a bug where events beyond the end marker of the first segment in a join would appear in the joined segment.
• After joining segments, the newly created segment is now selected.
• Pitch tracker now tracks pitches when they are in octaves below notated with "ignore octave error" on.
• Pitch tracker honors "ignore octave error" flag.
• Default pitch tracker settings are no longer stupid.
• Flats were not cancelled on a C-maj key change.
• Rulers in notation were desynchronized when a segment was deleted while some zoom factor was in use.
• The "anacrusis problem" which was giving a broken notation when a segment in contact with a preceding one was not starting at the beginning of a bar.