Jokosher 0.10 Released

After almost a year and a half, we got another release out the door. As I mentioned last time this release did not have as many features as the long wait would suggest. Instead there are a few modest features, many welcomed stability fixes, as 0.10 sets the stage for a faster release cycle and development time for Jokosher. Barring any major disasters with the development team, the last year of stagnation is over. Of course it will go even faster if we get more of you involved in planning, testing, etc.

PulseAudio and JACK support

I have been putting a good chunk of time towards developing the new audio backend feature. It allows the user to select any recording backend and any playback backend that Gstreamer supports. Currently it has been tested with ALSA, OSS, PulseAudio and JACK, but if you know the name of the Gstreamer element you want to use you can specify it as a custom backend in the preferences dialog (think recording from network stream). This feature will make an appearance in 0.11 in time for Ubuntu Jaunty, but you can see a screenshot of it right now, or checkout the custom-audio-src branch and try it yourself.

Jokosher 0.10.1 Bug Fix Release

After releasing 0.10, we continued to do testing ourselves and got a lot of feedback from other users. This made us aware that there were many small bugs which had been overlooked, and could be easily fixed in a few weeks. We did just that and released the bug fix update 4 weeks after 0.10. The source tarball is available on the launchpad release page, where you will also find the list of bugs fixed. We released 0.10 just in time for the feature freeze in Ubuntu Intrepid, and then released 0.10.1 just in time for the Ubuntu beta freeze. Both times the wonderful Daniel Holbach from the Ubuntu MOTU team packaged our release and uploaded it to the Ubuntu universe repository within a few days. If you know any other distros that have the newest version of Jokosher, please let us know and we will add them to the download page.

Multichannel Recording Works!

After years of talking about it, Jokosher was able to finally record multiple channels simultaneously from professional audio cards which offer up to 8 channels. The code for this feature was put into the custom-audio-src branch just a few days ago, and reports have been very positive. There are a few bugs to be worked out before this can be merged into trunk but it would be great if you can try out the branch yourself and report any bugs you encounter. You should expect to see this wonderful feature available in 0.11 along with the JACK and PulseAudio support.

Bazaar and Launchpad Transition

We have just completed our transition to the Bazaar version control system. Our code will now be hosted in Bazaar branches on Launchpad. If you were used to using SVN for getting the latest code here are the equivalent Bazaar commands:

bzr branch lp:jokosher
Which replaces:
svn co http://svn.jokosher.python-hosting.com/

bzr pull
Which replaces:
svn update

The use of Bazaar has the added advantage that you can commit any changes you like to your own branch without requiring developer access. Of course if you want us to copy your changes, please let us know on the mailing list.

Crash Recover Feature

We have started to make use of the flexibility of Bazaar by developing the new crash recovery feature in a separate branch. Last weekend it was merged into the main Jokosher branch. Look for this in the next release of Jokosher, it will definitely be the most visible feature.

User Success/Hate Story

bjwebb on #jokosher reports that he has recently recorded a podcast using Jokosher. The reason he chose it is because it was the only tool which made it possible to record from two sounds cards at once. Jokosher worked well enough to record an entire podcast, but not well enough to avoid becoming the target of the gripe-filled but somewhat constructively criticizing “two minutes of hate segment”. Well done, and we will try our best to avoid the mentioned problems in the future.

Improving PulseAudio Support

While looking into removing the DBus/HAL code which queries the ALSA sound card information, I (Laszlo) discovered that there were many problems with the sound card information in the PulseAudio Gstreamer element. Three days and five patches later, PulseAudio works nicely and one Gstreamer-ALSA bug was fixed as well. This will open the door to using any number of recording systems in the future such as DirectShow on Windows, OS X Audio for Mac, and maybe even JACK if the jacksrc element is ever completed. These fixes should be in the next version of Gstreamer, but because of the tight deadline it probably won’t make it into the next Jokosher release.

Purchasing A Multichannel Sound Card

There has been much discussion on #jokosher about supporting multichannel sound cards. This idea originally started years ago back when Jokosher was very young. Now we are finally getting near to being able to record multiple channels from a single sound card at the same time, and insert them as separate tracks in Jokosher. Since only a few of our testers have access to multichannel cards, we are looking to purchase one or more for developers to use. If you have any interest in making multichannel recording work in Jokosher, or have suggestions for which sound cards are best supported by ALSA please let us know.

The 0.10 Release

We are planning to release next week! During this release cycle we had some big plans, and unfortunately we ended up missing many of the features that would be most visible in the interface. Nonetheless there are many worth while improvements and we will be releasing within two weeks, just in time to replace the very old 0.9 package in Ubuntu Intrepid. Please help us test, and give us your thoughts!

Last Sunday we concluded the IRC meeting, and we decided on a list of things to do for the 0.10 release. We decided for certain that the release will be in August. The tentative release date is August 14th, 2008. All features must be completed by the end of July, or they will not be included in the release. This is to ensure that there is no possibility of the release slipping. We have waited long enough and at this point no feature or bug fix is big enough to be worth missing the distro release cycle.

Here is the list of things you can look forward to in August, or sooner if you run Jokosher from SVN:

• Auto save project recovery. Constant or very frequent auto saving to an alternate location to allow project recovery when Jokosher starts up from a crash. See bug #76750.
• More accurate waveform drawing with more efficient backend to save levels to disk. Fixes bug #88335, as well as makes Jokosher load projects faster. This has already been committed to SVN.
• Replace the obnoxious dialog boxes with passive yellow messages below the toolbar like in Gedit or Firefox.
• Check on startup to make sure recording from the sound card is possible. If not Jokosher will let you change the default sound card, or the sample rate settings to correct the problem. We may also have time to make an option to attempt to automatically detect the proper settings.
• Project templates! This feature has been available in SVN since last year, but it will be cleaned up and made simpler for the next release.
• Many other bug fixes such as #72267, #87785, #212635, and #223115.

You can find the full notes from the IRC meeting in the mailing list archives, and feel free to send in your ideas and comments as well.

The Jokosher team would like to announce the long awaited version 0.10, which will be coming out in August. We are looking forward to getting an updated version of the code into the next Ubuntu release, as the current one is from one year ago. Certainly many Hardy Heron users are getting annoyed that their new distribution still contains the old stale version of Jokosher. Many of you have reported crashes and other bugs, many of which have already been fixed. So even if the next release of Jokosher isn’t perfect (it’s not 1.0 yet), it will certainly be an improvement and a step in the right direction.

At the same time, we are also announcing a feature discussion meeting on IRC this Sunday at 18:00 UTC. Just to be clear this is 8pm in Europe, and 2pm on the east coast of North America. For those of you unfamiliar with IRC, you can join our meeting on Sunday by going to our online chat page, and selecting a unique username.

We welcome everyone’s input for the next release, and we will be discussing everyone’s ideas on Sunday. If you can make it to the meeting feel free to give us any suggestions in the chat room. If you cannot make it on Sunday, feel free to post them on the mailing list instead.

For those who are interested, you can read the full text of the announcement from the mailing list.

Once again, a large number of Jokosher community members were present at LugRadio Live 2007 in Wolverhampton, UK. Jono Bacon and Stuart Langridge were the hosts of the event, and I (Laszlo Pandy) and Michael Sheldon were both giving presentations. Some other familiar faces from #jokosher were Ben Thorp, John Green, and Chris Proctor. Below I will share some of the notable Jokosher related bits of the conference.

Jokosher as a text editor

After having attended and hosted the Jokosher BOF at LugRadio Live 2006, I was invited to give a lightning talk for this year’s event. Even though it is called a lightning talk, it is still 30 minutes long, and there was plenty of time for me to talk about Jokosher and give an interesting demo. My talk entitled “Inside Jokosher” covered the internal and development aspects of the program. I started my talking about why we chose to use Python and Gstreamer and how their dynamic nature make Jokosher the most flexible and hackable audio editor available.

In my demo, I showed how it was possible to use the dynamic features to reprogram Jokosher to do anything you could imagine. Using the new extension console, and the API search extension I wrote on the train while travelling to the conference, people new to the Jokosher code can search the documentation for the function they need to do anything the GUI can do, but with more precision. The example I used was splitting at exactly 10 seconds (event.Split(10)) instead of trying to aim the mouse perfectly on the 10 second mark.

At the end of the presentation I managed to turn Jokosher into a text editor, that could also save to a file when you clicked File->Save all using the extension console. The point of this is to encourage people who don’t know how to program to make simple function calls in Jokosher and see what the result is. Once you do that it is only a small step to writing a complete Jokosher extension, to customize or add any feature you (yes I mean you!) want in Jokosher.

The BOF

The Jokosher BOF was attended by Stuart, Mike, Jono, Henrik Karlsson, and I. Unfortunetly just as we were about to start Jono realized he had lost his mobile (again!) and had to leave to retrieve it. As a result Mike, Stuart and I were forced to imagine what Jono’s opinion would be for the following topics, and then completely ignore it.

• Extension API: My talk introduced the idea that it was much more flexible and easier to use the core Jokosher API instead of the contrived Extension API that was introduced in version 0.2. Thanks to David, the core is now well documented and extension writers should not have any problems using it. Since there are no extensions maintained by non-Jokosher developers that we know of, the Extension API will be removed in 1.0. If you do rely on the Extension API, come talk to us in #jokosher.
• Workspace Buttons: Jono has made an issue on the mailing list about the recent changes in SVN to make the workspace buttons toggle individually. With two buttons this allows four different combinations, one of which (both off) is totally useless. At the BOF we decided (without Jono present) that since there are only two views, and the recording view is still visible when in the mix view, both buttons can easily be replaced with a single “Show Mixers” toggle button.
• Testing Team: The points decided on during the 1.0 planning meeting regarding the testing team and unit tests were reiterated. We still need help writing down the expected functionality of Jokosher, and once that is finished it can be turned into unit tests, or a manual testing checklist. Hopefully we can have this done by the end of the summer, and ready for when the betas some out in September. Helping us write down the way Jokosher is expected to function is a really simple way to learn about how Jokosher works. Unlike coding it takes very little time to get to a point where you can contribute something, so if you haven’t already, come chat with us and start helping out.

The LugRadio Quiz

Bruno Bord hosted the LugRadio Live quiz at the end of the day on Sunday. After a few rounds of intense competition, it came down to one tie-breaker question: “How many lines of code are there in the Jokosher 0.9 release?” After Stuart guessed wrong, Bruno revealed that the “correct” answer was: “It doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t bloody work anyway!” While he does have a point, I would just like to point out for the record that there are 20 242 lines of code, including extensions, in the Jokosher 0.9 release.

This Sunday June the 10th at 16:00 UTC will be the first meeting of the new Jokosher testing team, followed by a Gstreamer debugging tutorial to show you how to find and report useful information for all the most hated playback and recording bugs. 16:00 UTC translates to 5pm in England, 6pm in Europe, 9am in Western North America, and 12pm in Eastern North America.

Anyone is free to join, or just help out the testing team from time to time. Here is a list of the team’s responsibilities and what we will focus on during the meeting:

• Creating a checklist of everything that must be working for the next release.
• Prioritise bugs in the bug tracker. Make sure the developers know which bugs are most important to our users,
  and negotiate with them to see what can be implemented in time for the release.
• Advise the developers on the quality of the betas and decide when it is ready to be released.
• Help the developers implement automated and semi-automated testing to make sure there are no regressions.

If you would like to get involved and make a positive impact on Jokosher but you don’t know how to code, this is a perfect opportunity. This is also a chance to make sure your own bugs are fixed before our grand 1.0 release. Recording and playback are top priorities so if Jokosher doesn’t work on your computer, get in touch to make sure it does for 1.0.

Hope to see you all there!

Update: If you didn’t know already, the place to meet is the #jokosher channel on the IRC server irc.freenode.net. This is where we have all our meetings as well as our general day to day discussion on all Jokosher issues. If you are new to IRC just go to the Jokosher chat page and it will open up the chat room in your browser.

Spured on by last weeks revelation that David Coralles and Lazslo had gone patch for patch all week Monday turned into a sprint with 16 commits between them, with Davids score of 10 comfortably beating Lazslos 6, however as the week went on Laszlos more consistant form began to pay off, with the final results for the week at Laszlo holding the leaders yellow jersey with 19, David the sprinters green with 18, and bonus points for Johng 3 and Johnk 1, with the rest of us in the peloton trying (not always that successfully) to support the leaders.

However a stewards inquiry is underway as 2 of Lazslos patches were actually submitted by white jersey contender ThijsVermeir. Thanks and welcome to the Jokosher project!

Just to add to the confusion David confessed that he had actually been working on Jokosher since 1998 and was enhancing his performance by creative use of a time machine.

So there you go, clear as mud. All in all I think it might be easier to figure out the the results of the 2006 Tour de France.

What is clear however is that progress contiues apace, 26 bugs reported in Launchpad this week, 41 patches committed surely the best way round for those stats.

One of Davids commits has fixed 70799 where the timeline was not being redrawn properly after being covered over, so things like this would happen. This may not have been the most serious bug ever reported but its been around for months and several people (including me) have had a crack at fixing it without success, so congratulations David. (If you’ve ever wondered why the add instrument dialog opens where it does it was a workround to prevent this bug manifesting itself!)

In other news Jono put out a Call for testers including having written a simple guide for testers saying:-

I am serious here - we really, really need your help testing Jokosher. It is critical that we get as many bug reports as possible about things that don’t work quite right so we can nail them for the next version, which will be making an appearance in most distros when it is released. Now is the time, test it, report it, discuss it!

I couldn’t have put it better myself!

The totals from my little competition last week are that we deleted 60 spam posts from 18 user accounts which goes to show that if you cant, or dont have the time to contribute, code or documentation then you can still help us (or any other open source project) by simply reading the forums, and the news comments, and reporting any spam or other abuse you find. Find us on #jokosher on irc.freenode.net.

If you have some more time, testing is always appreciated. This weeks highlights for you to look at are:

• Changes to the zoom so that you can always zoom out far enough to see the entire project in one go
• An “Add Audio File” button was added to the main toolbar which creates a new “Audio File” instrument and prompts you for a file to import. This should make it a little more obvious how to get started on a new project at the expense of a slightly more cluttered interface. If you have an opinion on this, post to the mailing list or add a comment below.
• Events can now be controlled entirely with the keyboard, this is a big step forward both in terms of accessability and lets you position events very precisely. Left and right cursors move events, the Ctrl key speeds up the movement by a factor of 10.
• 35 other changes, bug fixes, and polishing of the effects system.

By now you’ve probably already seen/heard Jonos podcast recorded entirely in Jokosher (http://www.jonobacon.org/stateofjokosher-1.ogg) which bought a a few issues to light, but more importantly shows that Jokosher is pretty much there for production use. There is still some work to do before they can record a full episode of Lugradio using Jokosher but that goal is getting closer to realisation with every commit.

And finally Thilo Pfennig has been busy packaging Jokosher for Foresight Linux (http://www.foresightlinux.com), not a distro I know much about I confess but if they package Jokosher it must be good

Jono presented “Jokosher: The GNOME approach to audio production” to the assembled masses at LCA 2007 held in Sydney 15th-20th January. It was videod and some of the nice people from the lugradio community are hosting mirrors for us (be warned, this is a 140.8MB file).

Master:
http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2007/video/tuesday/tuesday_1100_GNOME.ogg

Mirrors:
Xalior’s mirror
pickle’s miror
neuro’s mirror

(A big thank you to Xalior for the heads up)

[UPDATE]
There is now a torrent here

A sample podcast recorded by Jono Bacon has been recorded, edited, mixed and exported entirely in Jokosher. The podcast shows the kind of recording you can do in Jokosher with recorded audio, imported audio, fades and cuts. The process of recording the show also unveiled a number of bugs which have been fixed within hours of them being recorded.

Go and download the show!