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!

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!