The big news this week is the commit from David Corrales of a redesigned effects system with a polished easy to use interface and the (sometimes cryptically named) effects divided into categories by what they actually do.

Combined with the pipeline changes commited previously you can now tinker around adding and removing effects, changing and tweeking settings while the track is playing, and hear the results as you make the changes. This is (in my opinion at least) a huge step forward in ease of use.

Initial testing has shown this to be pretty solid and stable, some areas such as the reordering of effects are still in development but its very much ready for beta testers and early adopters to get to work, so give it a try and report any issues back to us.

Add in some performance enhancements to the waveform drawing, and changes to the ALSA device code to allow multiple similar soundcards and you have another busy week in the life of your favourite audio editor.

Lastly I’ve decided to hold a competition (no prizes, just for glory) “How many pieces of spam and associated user acounts will have to be deleted for the forums this week (22-28th Jan)”? The rules are that nearest vote wins, and deleted acounts are disqualified (so no rigging the results by posting your own spam). To give you a hint the running total so far (as of 09.15GMT 22-01-07) 15 posts and 3 users deleted, its a busy morning. Winners and answers to be anounced next week.

I wouldn’t say its quiet round here but the dust bunnies have moved out looking for somewhere with a more atmosphere

The reason is simply that everyone has been busy hacking. Its the predictable answer but is also true, there have been 200 checkins since our last blog post.

So to rectify this problem I have borrowed the keys to Jokosher Towers (”go to Amundsen-Scott station, head south, you cant miss it, dont break anything, remember to feed he cat”) and can now reveal whats going on and what the plan is:

The next release will be 14th March, a date chosen because it fits the rough 5-6 month release cycle we want to maintain, its realistic target for the features we wanted, and allows us to be included in the repositories for Ubuntu Feisty Fawn which freeze shortly afterwards.

This release will be 0.9 or possibly 1.0 (to be decided nearer the date), depending very much on wether the features planned for 1.0 are ready and release quality.

This feature list is:-

• Multi channel support to allow recording of several instruments at once.
• Mix down profiles, a way to pre-program several actions to perform when exporting a project.
• Changes to enable the user to make alter the project while its playing and hear the results imediately allowing a more “try it and see if it works” approach.
• New extensions
• A whole bunch of tidying ups, tightening ups, bug fixes, and general improvements that are too numerous to list in detail but actually turn Jokosher from a rough and ready work in progress to a solidly usable fully featured audio editor perfect for all your recording and podcasting needs.

Feature freeze is planned for the 1st Febuary and after that it’ll be a race to apply the polish, translate, and find and squash the bugs before release.

So thats the plan. If you want to help (and we *always* need help) get the latest version of the code, check out the list of bugs, and add anything you’ve noticed, or pick one and fix it, or look at the documentation wiki and add your hints, tips and howtos, or help the translation team localize Jokosher into your locale (were still missing that all important Linear B translation), or maybe head over to the forums to chat with other jokosher users and brag about your audio 1337ness.

Oh and remember to check back here for the latest updates on whats going on, and we’ll try to the news reasonably…erm new!

Nov 20th 2006, The Internet, The Jokosher team are proud to announce the second pre-release of their simple yet powerful audio studio for the GNOME desktop. The new 0.2 version of the software has been in active development since July, and has packed Jokosher with the core features to perform full audio recording and production on the Linux desktop.

Jokosher sports the following features:

• Intuitive, usability focused interface - Jokosher has been designed from the ground-up and every detail has been scrutinised for ease of use and flexibility. This has resulted in a simple and intuitive environment.
• Full multi-track recording - record from your sound card on a number of instrument tracks, and rename, mute and solo those tracks. Jokosher also supports multi-channel sound cards.
• Full mixing - instruments can be mixed, soloed, muted, panned and more, as well as controlling the master volume.
• Volume Curve Mixing - with an intuitive selection system, you can easily draw volume curves that occur in realtime to produce an unlimited number of fades and volume control.
• Non destructive editing tools - Jokosher includes a range of editing tools including splitting, trimming, moving and volume control point snapping. All editing operations are entirely non-destructive.
• Effects Support - support for LADSPA effects can open up your projects to all kinds of creative opportunities. Multiple effects can be layered together, and each effect can be fine tuned to get just the right setting.
• Effects Presets - in addition to LADSPA support, you can load and save effects presets, making it easier to find and reuse of those all important effects combinations.
• Extensions - Jokosher includes support for installable extensions. This allows third party developers to make their own extensions with our extensions API. Jokosher also includes an Extensions Manager to track which extensions are installed.
• Metronome - a configurable metronome click track is included to keep you perfectly in time when recording.
• Intuitive instrument management - Jokosher provides a unique method of minimising instruments for specific mixing requirements.
• Extensive documentation and community - the Jokosher team have worked to create manuals, tutorials, FAQs and other documentation, as well as growing the Jokosher community on the forums (http://www.jokosher.org/forums/).

In addition to these features, the Jokosher community have worked to make the application available in a number of languages, including Chinese (China), Danish, Dutch, English (Philippines), English (United Kingdom), Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Latvian, Norwegian Bokmål, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Welsh.

Go and Download it!

This past Sunday we had a Jokosher Cleanup Day, and it was a great success. Over half the files in the project were tidied up and commented, making it easier for new developers to get to grips with the code (and some existing developers, one of whom commented “now I understand the Events stuff!”), some of the developer documentation was updated, we made great strides towards having the official documentation and user documentation websites up, and Elleo put a system in place to automatically build API documentation based on all our lovely new comments. Thanks to john_G, Elleo, Jason Field, RealNitro, Jono, and Aq for all their hard work!

This Sunday 10th Sep 2006 we have a Jokosher Day. The idea of the day is tidy up some chunks of Jokosher and do the following:

• Go comment-crazy and comment uncharted chunks of code.
• Write docs
• Update the wiki
• Fix bugs

Importantly, the day is a great opportunity for those who are interested in getting involved in the project to come along and get to know the team and ask questions. We are screaming out for more developers, so do come along and get involved.

The whole shebang takes place in #jokosher on irc.freenode.net all day on Sunday.

Yesterday we had some server downtime due to a problem at the hosting company that hosts the Jokosher website. But, now we are back. Sorry for the downtime!

Thats right people, fans of the hugely popular Linux Format magazine will be pleased to see that Jokosher 0.1 has been included on the cover disc. Jokosher world domination continues…

If you spot Jokosher somewhere, do let us know - feel free to use the comments form below to share where you have seen the Jokosher love.

For those of you who who are wondering who the Jokosher development team are, here is a photo taken at LUGRadio Live 2006 in Wolverhampton, UK with some of the team:

From left to right:

Michael “Elleo” Sheldon, Chris “nibil” Proctor, Stuart “Aquarius” Langridge, Jono “jono” Bacon, Edward “bilboed” Hervey, Laszlo “laszlok” Pandy, xinfinityx

The Jokosher forums is where the new Jokosher community can meet to talk Jokosher, music, recording techniques and more. Today a new forum was added - Gear Chat - that provides a place to talk about audio equipement, computer specs, recording gear and more. The forum should be useful for those who want to find out what is the best equipment for using Jokosher.

Head over to the Gear Chat forum!

The Jokosher development team have been hard at working adding new features, creating new art and translating Jokosher into a number of different languages. The 0.2 release in November is sure to be an exciting edition of Jokosher, and recently the following progress has been made:

• Jokosher is being translated into into a number of languages via Launchpad. This includes languages such as Chinese (China), Danish, Dutch, English (United Kingdom), Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog and Welsh. If you can help with translations, see the Launchpad translations page.
• Support for LADSPA digital audio effects is now working. This means that you can add a number of digital effects to your instruments. You want delay, reverb, distortion, amp simulation, flanger, phaser and more? You got it. Each effect has its own configurable settings that can be used to fine tune the effect.
• To compliment the LADSPA support, effect preset support has been added. This allows you to save single effect settings as well as collections of effects in the same preset. Presets can be saved and loaded right inside Jokosher, so creating presets is a piece of cake.
• The new Jokosher Extension support has recently been added. Although the code is still being written and maturing, this exciting feature will allow third-party developers to write extensions that can be dynamically loaded into Jokosher. This opens the door for all kinds of extra features, additions and custom extensions to be written.
• More instruments have been added, including Violin, Harmonica and Trumpet.
• A new documentation site is in the works that will not only make official documentation easier to manage, but also allow Jokosher users to easily create guides, HOWTOs and other content.
• Bug fixing and small improvements. Lots of small additions, bug fixes and other features are being added.

As ever, we need your help for coding, translations, documentation and more - feel free to join the developer mailing list.