Drumstick Time

A new Drumstick version is in the oven, with two tasty novelties:

1. OVE file parsing support (files created by the Overture program).
The code for this feature has been contributed by Rui Fan. This file format can be played by the included program drumstick-guiplayer, in addition to the SMF and WRK formats. There is also a new drumstick-dumpove CLI utility to inspect the file contents as text.

2. Acquisition of real-time priority, using RealtimeKit.
Until now, the thread processing MIDI input from ALSA tried to acquire real-time priority using the RLIMIT_RTPRIO mechanism, which requires some configuration and administration work. If the above mechanism is not available, now Drumstick tries to acquire real-time priority from RealtimeKit.

This release is scheduled for sometime during next week.

What's next?

At this moment there are two libraries: drumstick-alsa (Linux) and drumstick-file. There will be two more: drumstick-win and drumstick-mac. The foundations of these two new libraries are already implemented in KMid2. On the other hand, it is desirable to unify all the backends for all platforms and file formats under a single set of multiplatform interfaces: drumstick-simple. VMPK will benefit from this, because replacing RtMIDI by Drumstick will be easier to implement features like MIDI file recording, playback and arpeggiator.