Features of Rosegarden 2.1pl2
- A musical notation editor supporting multiple staffs with chords, manual and automatic beaming, dynamic markings, slurs, ties, textual marks, triplets and various other conveniences.
- A MIDI sequencer and editor with textual event and piano roll display.
- Tool integration allowing music in MIDI form to be viewed and edited as notation, and notation to be sequenced.
- A scripting language ("Petal") for writing filters to process MIDI tracks and notation staffs.
- Ability to produce Csound output.
- Support for musicTeX output for typesetting and printing (although it's rather shoddy and normally needs quite a lot of hand-editing).
- Comprehensive hypertext help.
- Portability to several flavours of Unix, although only IRIX, Linux, FreeBSD and platforms that support the OSS sound API can actually make any noise so far.
- Ability to use your own MIDI playing program on systems where the built-in playback is unavailable or inadequate.
- Mostly POSIX-compliant ANSI C code, should you wish to try and port it to some other machine.
Changes between 2.1 and 2.1pl2
Editor
- A number of bugs have been fixed.
- MIDI channel numbers can be assigned to staffs at will, and will
be saved in the
.rose
file. This is intended to improve the support for percussion channels.
Sequencer
- The OSS code now uses
/dev/sequencer2
rather than/dev/sequencer
, following a patch from Torsten Duwe for Caldera.
Changes between 2.0.1 and 2.1
Editor
- A full multi-level per-buffer Undo, with Redo, has been added.
- Automatic chord naming has been added to complement the chord construction from names that was added to 2.0.1.
- The Editor can now do some optional experimental velocity heuristics when writing out MIDI from a score with dynamic marks. `Dynamic' is now a distinct Text field type.
- There is a new search-and-replace function on combinations of pitches in chords.
- Output to OpusTeX and PMX are now included as an alternative to MusicTeX. The OpusTeX output in particular needs more work, but from now on it'll probably get more development time than the MusicTeX code.
- The Petal scripting language has been integrated, although so far only with an initial proof-of-concept interface.
- The menus have been rearranged slightly. There is a new Chord menu, and the Tools menu has disappeared and most of its functions moved onto File.
- Cut and Paste now retain any complete slurs, ties or dynamics encountered.
- The palette has been extended to include breves and breve rests.
- There's a little vertical bar that follows the insertion cursor to track the insertion point (very exciting).
- A keyboard control for Transpose Up/Down has been added.
- The range of notes and rests available from the palette has been extended to include breves.
Sequencer
- The sequencing code has been completely rewritten for multiple simultaneous devices, with a new device mapper library. You can send individual tracks to individual MIDI devices, and there is a new All Device meta-device which routes events to (surprise!) all the available devices.
- You can now step forwards and backwards through the piece, and start playback at any point.
- Selected tracks can be muted during playback.
- The piano-roll now shows a piano keyboard layout, rather than five-line staff layout. It now shows note velocity information, and is zoomable.
- Events can be opened and edited from event-list windows with a double-click action. All kinds of events can now be inserted from the Event List menu.
- With a soundcard synth and OSS sound drivers, drum patches are available on MIDI channel 10 (represented as channel 9 in Rosegarden).
- The MIDI menu Reset functions are (partly) implemented.
- You can record while playing, although this hasn't been tested very thoroughly and shouldn't be expected to work reliably in this release.
- The Petal scripting language has been integrated, although so far only with an initial proof-of-concept interface.
In general
- File boxes work a bit better: some obvious things that didn't work before now do (click on the file name field, type in the name of a directory and hit Return -- the directory will be listed in the expected manner)
- The look and feel when using the 3d Athena widget set (Xaw3d) is slightly improved.
- New "configure" and "do-install" scripts have been added to the source distribution.
- This Web page has been overhauled, and there's a new FAQ file.
Changes between 2.0 beta 3 and 2.0.1
Editor
- A few paltry keyboard modifiers have been added to marginally speed note entry.
- Selection has been improved: in addition to left-button drag, you can now double-click to select a whole bar, treble-click for the whole staff, and shift-click to extend an existing selection. The selection now persists after scrolling (although still not after editing).
- You can now create chords from their guitar chord notation names, using some groovy code contributed by Guillaume Laurent.
- MusicTeX output is a bit better, handling sign changes, complicated beamed groups, etc., more gracefully; but it still doesn't write slurs.
- The Editor will, if requested (see below) attempt to track the Sequencer's MIDI playback on the musical score during play.
Sequencer
- FreeBSD explicitly available as a compile option, although we haven't been able to test it.
- Playback dialog removed, and toolbar stop button added instead.
- Cursor changes during playback on Linux.
- Insert Program Change and Modify Event dialog boxes fixed.
- Default playback information always included somewhere in a track following recording.
- Linux MIDI device field is now editable.
- Recording paradigm for Linux has changed slightly. Before it would wait for the first input event and start timing from there. This would mean that the first output event would occur at time 0 and generally get lost in the miasma of setup events at output time. Now there's an arbitrary delay inserted when the first note comes back, so that the whole track can be recorded and then played back as is. Note that the sequence/record code will probably be thoroughly overhauled before the next release.
- Sequencer can now attempt to use the Editor to track the playback on a notation score during play. Three levels of tracking are available (none, every bar or every note).
In general
- The Rosegarden top box can now be started up with a filename as a command-line argument. If there is a Rosegarden session already running, it will try to use that session to open the file. MIDI files are opened with the Sequencer, and .rose files with the Editor.
Changes between 2.0 beta 2 and 2.0 beta 3
No new features have been added; but some bugs have been fixed.
Changes between 2.0 beta 1 and 2.0 beta 2
Editor
- The palette has been restyled; the Palette menu has disappeared, and notes, rests and clefs all occupy the one fixed palette.
- Key signatures are now available through a menu option on the Bar menu, with a key chooser dialogue box allowing selection visually (by number of sharps or flats) or by name. There is an option to transpose the affected part of the score when inserting a new key signature.
- The file format has changed. I/O of dynamic marks in particular is more reliable. Files saved with older versions can be imported and converted to the new format.
- Ties and slurs have been implemented.
- The time signature is now associated with each bar instead of being stored as a separate musical object within the score. Time signatures thus no longer move around irritatingly during editing.
Sequencer
- Linux USS-Lite sound support is now provided for recording and playback under Linux.
- Several glaring bugs, ancient and modern, have been fixed.
- You can now simply double-click on a track's name in the main Track List to call up an event list or piano-roll window for that track.
In general
- The file chooser dialogue boxes have changed slightly so as by default only to list files with the `right' suffix (.rose, .mid etc). The full listings are still available as a menu option.
Changes between 0.0 and 2.0 beta 1
Editor
- Exporting notation files to MusicTeX format is now possible without using midi2tex. The resulting output is better than midi2tex normally produces, but still rather poor. It will improve in future releases.
- Triplets and other tuplets have been implemented, and are exported to MIDI with the correct timing.
- Hairpin dynamic marks have been added.
- MIDI imported straight from a file (as opposed to through the Sequencer) can now be quantized before being converted to notation.
Sequencer
- No significant changes.
In general
- All applications have acquired pictorial button toolbars to accelerate the more commonly used menu options.