First impressions of 0.9

[steevc]

I've been following the progress of the project, but had not installed it until last night. I'm running Kubuntu Feisty. I installed the two deb files, but needed python-setuptools for Jokosher.

I had a quick play last night. I imported a backing track. It was fine some of the time, but at other times it was garbled, like it was playing under water or something.

I plugged my guitar into the line in and managed to record it. Under the input options it only offered me Default and nVidia 0 (I think). So no option to use a microphone. I'm using the sound on my Asus Geforce2 motherboard for now.

In the screen for managing instruments I got nothing in the dropdown. The OK button did not work.

It was generally stable, but I did manage to crash it once. I'll have to work out what I did then. I like the GUI. Does it have keyboard shortcuts for things like record? The functions for chopping the audio seem best aimed at things like podcasts as I can't see them being accurate enough for music. That's fine for me as I just want to do simple multi-tracking, not editing, but I can see a need for some form of loops.

The BPM tool is neat. Is it averaging over several taps? If not, it needs something like that to get it accurate.

Should I be seeing any effects?

I'd love to contribute, but my Python skills are very limited. Maybe this is a chance to remedy that. I'm away for the next week or so, but I'll be checking on my return to see how it's going.

BTW I enjoyed Jono's talk that's on Youtube. That gave me some good hints on what it could do. Perhaps someone should do a dedicated tutorial video to show off all the features. For this sort of app that is going to be much cleared than a set of screenshots.

Steve

[jono]

This is exactly the kind of feedback we are looking for, thanks! What would be useful now is if you could test it a few more times and list in detail when something does not work - list errors, detail the steps you went through etc. This will help us track down issues.

Thanks again.

[steevc]

[laszlok]

For the BPM tool is uses a rolling average of the fours last clicks i think. That means that it saves only the last four times you clicked and takes an average of that. That means that if you want to change the BPM without closing and reopening you just have to wait 4 beats.

As for the contributing, we always need more testers and we are gonna be setting up a quality assurance team for 1.0. At the end of the 1.0 development cycle there will be at least two or three beta releases and we need the testers and QA people to tell us what doesn't work.

I'm looking into getting some automates unit tests, and also into making a list of things that can't be automated (like if the GUI draws properly) so that we can go over the checkllist before each release. Any help in these areas require no programming and would be greatly appreciated.

[steevc]

I've had a couple more brief plays. The main issue is that the playback sound doesn't always work. Pausing and playing again sometimes gets it working.

I just managed to lock it up when I added a third instrument, switched on record for that one and hit the record button.

As for features

1. if you have multiple instruments on a single input should it only allow one of them to be recording at any time?

2. Is there a way to check input levels? This is fairly vital in getting a good recording.

3. Should there be a way to switch instruments between stereo and mono? What is it using by default?

I will try and make the IRC testing session, but I actually have a gig that afternoon! It's African drumming at a fete and involves no electronics at all, but I would hope to be home in time to join in.
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Very amateur guitarist, basic pianist and fledgling djembe player. Just want to lay down some tracks. Running Kubuntu on an AMD X2.