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.

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.

The plan is simple:

* Take the list of bugs.
* Find out more about the causes of them.
* Fix them.

So we need people who can find bugs, fix bug, test bugs have been fixed, cheer on those doing the above, and obviously some people to totally blog about it (Jono)

Come along, get involved, you know you want to.

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.

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.

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!

In the last week (from the 28th Jan) there have been commits from no less then 7 different people, and a quick bit of maths gives us the shock result that Laszlo is tied with David Corrales to be this weeks most prolific commiter with 17 commits each. Congratulations not only to David and Laszlo but also Johnk, johng, luket, mikes and stuartl for all their hard work across the 47 commits (theres still a few hours to break the 50 barrier so get coding!)

Unsurprisingly pretty much all of these were bug fixes, with the Freesound extension having received some love and care, the search in the “add instrument” dialog being fixed, and many others happening.

The biggest feature is Mixdown profiles, described as a way “a musician can string together a set of things they want to do to export their Jokosher project, and then save that set of things so they can reload it and apply the same things to a different project.”

If you want to help out on the coding front then have a read of http://jokosher.python-hosting.com/wiki/CodeGettingInvolved for how to submit patches. (I’m still the only person whos had to resubmit a patch ) Take a look at https://launchpad.net/products/jokosher/ and pick something, or poke around untill you find one of your own (as a hint Mixdown profiles are new so could stand some serious testing by wouldbe bug fixers, sorry Aq!)

Of course if you dont code we still need your help. The point of a feature freeze is to stop working on new things, and instead fix all the bugs we can find in the existing ones. We can only fix bugs we know about and can reproduce so if you can download the latest svn version, test some features, and report back any problems you find and how to reproduce them (preferably via launchpad, but email and irc are also good, grabing us on the street and ranting at us probably less so ), it would be a huge help.

In other news after long debate Bug 78025 in jokosher “When playing, “Play” button should read “Pause”" , reported on here a cople of weeks ago has been rejected. We’re sticking with the current system. There are also no plans to add a pause button at the moment.

And finally (and slightly offtopic), I recently attended the inaugrual meeting of the West Midlands Python user group here in Birmingham (UK) with members ranging from those with many years of python experience (”my first computer used valves…”) to people who had never written a line of code but were interested in learning. Other python user groups exist so if you dont know python but are interested in getting involved try the tutorials on www.python.org and if they’re all Greek to you (assuming you’re not Greek of course) why not find a user group to try.

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

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

Go and download the show!