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Latest News

After mistaking KGuitar for a dead and abandoned project, I (Ryan) have decided to take the role of Unofficial PR Manager. KGuitar is currently still at an alpha level of development but has been ported to KDE4.

I'll get more detailed news up as soon as I figure out what else been going on for the last two years and also put up a more recent tarball.

A few words on what's going on in Subversion. Guitar Pro import is coming smoothly, this time Guitar Pro 3. Old GP3 code was throughly replaced with the same unified Guitar Pro loader that was released with 0.5.1. Adding other versions of format is always a bit tricky, so, to make sure we won't break anything in GP4 and to ease development/reversing, test units were added into repository. Sadly, I can't publish real-world GP3/GP4 files, as they're copyrighted, but at least trivial test examples would be stored there.

After a long period of silence, I'm pleased to announce KGuitar 0.5.1 - a major bugfix release that covers most of issues for the last few years :)

• Compatiblity fixes: added support for autoconf 2.61, automake 1.10, gcc 4.2. Removed last bits of qt2->qt3 transition deprecations. Internal structures refactoring.
• Added zoom level (Ctrl Minus, Ctrl Plus), introducing multiple bars per row, automatically tuning to available window width;
• Finally introduced new exception-based framework for converters load/save. Makes converters much more bullet-proof and easier to write and debug.
• Guitar Pro import undergone major rewrite. Now it properly loads all gp4 files I have. Guitar Pro v3 and v5 formats are coming next. Anyway, Guitar Pro loader is now much more helpful about what errors it gets and less crash-prone. It detects and helps debug problems it encounters.
• Lots of displaying, mouse and keyboard control, printing fixes and prettifying. Track pane now has a header and it's synchronized with track list. Melody editor now has trapezoid and shark fin inlays.
• New QMap-based API for song metainformation - stores not a fixed number of fields, but key=value pairs.
• Misc things: project transitioned to Subversion.

As always, comments and especially bug reports are welcome. Also keep in mind that KGuitar is now registered at Ohloh, so, take a look there too :)

Things roll out somewhat smoothly. There's already new, much more bullet-proof version of converter runner now, based on exceptions. It allows new Guitar Pro loader work much cleaner: it includes now lots of runtime checks and it's much less prone to crash whole application in case of unsupported file. On the contrary, it's now a tool for format exploration and debugging: it will find the out-of-sync place in file with substage and structure precision, allowing to find an incomplatibility and fix it quickly.

In other news, KDE4 is out there and I've stared a KDE4 port of KGuitar - I guess that'll make it to 0.6.

It's more like "we're still alive" style of post. Although, to be honest, nothing much happened in last 1.5 years, things are somewhat rolling. Our latest additions:

• CVS repository transitioned to SVN
• Some cleanup and compatibility fixes (new autoconf, automake, gcc)
• Removed last bits of legacy Qt code

I guess a new release would come shortly (0.5.1) as mostly bugfix release, but maybe there would be some minor feature additions.

In the heat of release, I completely forgot to mention what really deserved to be mentioned. Everaldo created a really nice icon for KGuitar in his famous Crystal style. Here it is in the full galore, now proudly supplied with the latest release and used on the homepage:

Also, due to popular demand, RPMs for KGuitar 0.5 are here. They're built for ALT Linux distribution, but they shall run fine on most modern systems. You can get them at the download page.

Well, after waiting for so long, I'm pleased to announce KGuitar release 0.5 at last. It's a fruit of long labours, and has some really interesting potential. List of news is really long:

• Also a huge milestone release in a very long time. Lots of internal refactoring, fixes after big changes in 0.4.9 and even bigger changes by itself.
• Build system is refreshed (updated from current KDE SDK), obsolete things removed, should compile smoothly on most boxes. TeTeX support is not installed by default.
• Huge refactoring work inside KGuitar: greatly improved internal architecture, modularized all import / export procedures, improved options handling.
• More KDE3 standartization: better and cleaner shell / KPart separation, standartized UI, actions, KDE-based dialogs with standard features and cleaner API, better support for BiDi interfaces, numerous layout fixes in lots of windows.
• Pretty full-featured Guitar Pro 4 import support. Imports smoothly most of the files I've tested it on, had some known problems with percussion tracks, but generally comprehends almost all difficulties in GP4 files and gracefully ignores them. More testing and patches are welcome!
• Improved song / track printing / display - now all tabulature / notestaff rendering is maintained in single class and both displaying and printing use the same codebase. It made possible displaying note scores on screen while editing tabs - however, it requires Feta fonts installed, as previously for printing. Check out the documentation for instructions.
• Chord dialog - added chord finder: you can enter pure text name of chord in top chord name string, push one button and you'll get chord diagrams, fingerings and other info instantly. Chord finder also supplies a "Quick insert by name" button that makes entering something like "Am / C / F / E" chord rhythm a breeze.
• Melody editor - got lots of improvements: added scales & modes showing on fretboard, added more inlay/graphics options, working action / advance functions that act as stated in options page.
• Song properties - added simple tempo support in song properties dialog - that "initial tempo" was in file format for ages, but, finally, it's user-editable.
• MIDI playback improvements - much better monitoring due to absolute time values in MIDI events, fixed stuck notes after song stop, lost patch/bank presets, etc. Added panic (shut down all notes) after stop and tempo track support.
• Multiple usability fixes: more column duration actions, keyboard combos to move cursor by 1 bar (currently bound to Ctrl+Left / Ctrl+Right), chord dialog - better tab ordering, default pushbutton, accelerators for non-default functions (Ctrl+Enter and Shift+Enter).
• Lots of other fixes: gcc3.4 compatibility, MusicXML DTD 0.7a support, proper status bar handling, proper updates when pasting / select all / delete track, fixed compile errors without TSE3, selection of negative track bug, lots of display problems with TrackPrint usage, mouse select handling bug, multiple memory leaks and segfaults.

Comments are really welcome on this one. There are some known bugs, but, generally, this release should be pretty stable and usable. More screenshots and other stuff will follow.

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