Sunday, June 5, 2011

VMPK 0.4.0 Released

This release adds touch screen support (multi-touch) for all platforms, if it is supported by the OS and hardware. New RtMidi classes have been merged, which includes Jack MIDI support and a new network MIDI driver (UDP multicast) compatible with IpMIDI and QMidiNet. A Symbian^3 port has been made. There are new translations to Dutch and Swedish. A bug crashing the program when changing the octave base has been fixed.

My suggestion is to use the packages provided by your distribution when possible. If you prefer to compile the program yourself, I would like to give you some advices to build VMPK with the new features. First of all, you need CMake 2.8. The touch screen feature is available on all platforms, thanks to Qt >= 4.6 (but is better supported in Qt 4.7). There are two new build options:
  • RTMIDI_DRIVER: selects the RtMidi backend. The default one depends on the OS. Allowed values: ALSA, JACK, COREMIDI, IRIX, WINMM, NET.
  • PROGRAM_NAME: selects the executable name.
In Linux, you can compile VMPK with ALSA, JACK or NET drivers, but only one each time. You may build the program with different names, though, if you want several versions installed at once. For instance:

$ mkdir build-jack
$ cd build-jack
$ cmake .. -DRTMIDI_DRIVER=JACK -DPROGRAM_NAME=vmpk-jack -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=release
$ make

$ mkdir build-net
$ cd build-net
$ cmake .. -DRTMIDI_DRIVER=NET -DPROGRAM_NAME=vmpk-net -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=release
$ make

For the network version, there is a new help page here: http://vmpk.sourceforge.net/m/


Enjoy!

4 comments:

  1. Hi Pedro.

    VMPK is a great piece of software. I'm having some problems with 0.3.3 sending any syx files that are larger than 12 bytes or contain multiple commands however. Could this likely be fixed in 0.4.0 with the new version of RTMIDI?

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  2. Hi Pedro. I've found a way to send my sysex commands via the Terminal using amidi. Happy sticking with 0.3.3 for now, does everything I need :)

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  3. This is a fantastic piece of software; thank you for taking the time to write it!

    Does anyone know if there is some where we can discuss it...?

    Im really keen to find away to add an Auto Accompaniment mode? Be it through a specific soundfont or multi note mappings?

    If anyone has any suggestions please let me know.

    Thanks

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  4. @mtwelve: thanks.

    VMPK has a mailing list:
    https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/vmpk-devel

    Web Forums:
    https://sourceforge.net/projects/vmpk/forums

    And trackers for bugs and feature requests:
    https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=236429

    Regards,
    Pedro

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