The Rosegarden team have announced the release of version 1.2.3 of Rosegarden 4, the audio and MIDI sequencer and musical notation editor for Linux. This long-awaited release offers a variety of new features, bug fixes and enhancements.

Changes:

• The main segment canvas has been rewritten and is now faster, more responsive, more accurate, and marginally prettier than before (This work proved much more complex than hoped, and accounts for much of the time spent since the 1.0 release a year ago).
• A new percussion matrix editor has been added. MIDI devices can have user-configurable percussion key maps, stored in the same device files as bank and program definitions. Users are invited to contribute their own.
• Multi-track audio recording and simultaneous recording of audio and MIDI are now supported.
• A "project packager" has been introduced and integrated, facilitating the exchange of complete Rosegarden projects including associated audio data and any other required files.
• The Lilypond export function has been updated for Lilypond 2.6 and features a new Preview mode.
• You can now control Rosegarden's mixer and other twiddly bits using an external MIDI controller device such as the Behringer BCF2000.
• Rosegarden is now capable of synchronizing to MIDI Time Code in master and slave modes. MMC master and slave are also now supported.
• Rosegarden's ALSA MIDI ports can now be connected and controlled using an external ALSA connection manager such as qjackctl.
• The default sequencer timer selection should be better behaved than in 1.0 (eliminating the dreaded "Rosegarden only plays the first note" problem).
• Effects plugins can now be applied to groups of audio instruments at the bus stage.
• Many new icons and improved versions of old icons have been added.
• The build system now uses scons instead of autotools.
• This release also sees hundreds of bug fixes, including fixes to some long-standing issues with DSSI plugin support, JACK transport synchronization, and punch-in recording.