Ardour 3.2 has been released featuring the videotimeline and a lot of other things that I've been working on on the past years, months and weeks!

I count myself lucky that after all that work, I don't need to write the announcement by myself. Let the buzz begin.

There's…

• the official Announcement on Ardour.org including a detailed what's new page.
• a great Article by Alexandre Prokoudine at libregraphicsworld.
• ..and the russian version of the same (I do like the screenshots there).
• the H online features a short news item…
• …and there's a stub at Linux Weekly News.
• G+ is covered and the tweeting commenced.
• Last but not least, there's the manual, too.

Many thanks to everyone who contributed, provided feedback and support. In particular Chris Goddard, Thomas Vecchione and Paul Davis. Not to mention the projects on who made this possible in the first place – most notably ffmpeg.

The source-code is available out there and if you don't want to get the official ready-to-run application, various multimedia GNU/Linux distributions have already picked it up.

I've started to tackle a major todo item on the setBfree issue-tracker: the Organ needs a GUI :)

Well, strictly speaking it does not. All controls are available as MIDI-CCs, so when playing it using a midi-keyboard, a GUI is uncalled for. The GUI is completely optional. But setting up those MIDI-CC maps and midi-program-presets in the first place can be quite an advanced talk for musicians who are not comfortable with editing text config files. Also using when using the organ synthesizer as plugin in a sequencer MIDI-CCs are unwieldy for visualizing drawbar settings. Last but not least the GUI is bi-directional: the GUI is updated if the synth receives MIDI messages and can be used to quicky check the state (e.g. when loading midi-programs/presets) and changing values in the GUI sends corresponding midi feeback to the connected device.

A major factor in the GUI design decision was that GUI should run cross-platform and can be used in LV2 plugin hosts without causing ABI conflicts. The toolkit should also be reasonably lightweight. This basically ruled out gtk+, QT, FLTK and NTK :( Luckily there's OpenGL!

So if GL, why not 3D too?! In the context of an audio-plugin it's one of the most superfluous uses of 3D, ever, but WTH!

setBfree running as LV2-plugin in ardour – of course you can pan, zoom and tilt the 3D view :)

The 3D model was made with blender and the textures with gimp, the files are available with the source-code at github. The folder also contains a readme file with basic information.

Now, I'm not much of a 3D artist, hence Alexandre Prokoudine from http://libregraphicsworld.org/ has issued an open call.

For inspiration, here are some pictures that google found searching for Hammond B3.

Work on the GUI is still ongoing. It is already functional but work on many of the planned features - like interactive midi-maps, presets, etc - has only just begun.

Have you ever wanted to include raw data - such as images - in an executable application file?
An application that can be compiled for any platform including Windows, Linux and OSX?
– Well, while I was working on harvid, I did.

It turned out to be quite easy - once you know how :) gnu/ld rocks, but as usual there are some issues – in particular on OSX.

Check out the complete embedding resources in executables story.

First heads up in 2013: I got nerd-sniped shortly after x-mas and reverse-engineered the Digi 003 Firewire protocol with Damien Zammit. The details are a long story, but linux-support for it is underway:

The rebased driver code is at http://gareus.org/gitweb/?p=alsa-driver.git and the broken-out digi003 driver is available from https://github.com/x42/003amdtp.

The submission deadline for the 3rd Computer Art Congress - PostDigital Art - has been extended until June, 18.

CAC.3 invites artists, intellectuals, engineers and scientists to share and discuss their imaginations, creations, inventions and visions of the post digital art. The Call for Papers and Artworks can be found here.