Drumstick Libraries 2.7.1 Released

Drumstick is a set of MIDI libraries using C++/Qt idioms and style. Includes a C++ wrapper around the ALSA library sequencer interface: ALSA sequencer provides software support for MIDI technology on Linux. A complementary library provides classes for processing SMF (Standard MIDI files: .MID/.KAR), RIFF MIDI (.RMI), and Cakewalk (.WRK) file formats. A multiplatform realtime MIDI I/O library and a GUI Widgets libraries are also provided for Linux, Windows, and Mac OSX.

This is another sonivox related release. Please see: https://github.com/pedrolcl/sonivox

I didn't want to make the sonivox dependency mandatory, because there may be good reasons for an user to avoid building drumstick with all its features. A final user may be interested in FluidSynth output only (which is also an optional feature) or even using ALSA sequencer only, without any soft-synth at all.

But what is a legitimate choice for a final user may be a questionable restriction for a distribution, because you may not know all use cases of your users. In this case, SonivoxEAS is the default Linux output for drumstick-vpiano and VMPK, because I think that any user installing those programs the first time should be able to hear sound by default, without needing to configure/investigate about MIDI or SoundFonts. Otherwise, there will be many users complaining that their Linux virtual pianos do not produce any sound!

On the other hand, until now the sonivox library sources were embedded inside the drumstick source tarballs, and statically linked to the SonivoxEAS backend. This was against most Linux distros packaging policy. Providing an standalone shared library instead, the issue has been fixed.

Changes in v2.7.1:

• Fixed ticket #45: the sonivox library dependency (for the SonivoxEAS synth backend) is optional, and easily forgotten by 3rd party packagers. The build system configuration now fails with an error message if the sonivox library is missing unless the cmake variables USE_SONIVOX and USE_PULSEAUDIO are set to OFF. Same failure with the FluidSynth backend and the variable USE_FLUIDSYNTH, and the ipMIDI Network backend and USE_NETWORK.
• Fixed underlinking in some RT backends.

Compilation minimum requirements for all platforms:

• C++11 compiler
• CMake 3.14
• Qt5 >= 5.9 or Qt6 >= 6.2 (with Qt6Core5Compat library dependency for Drumstick::File)

Feature dependencies (for some platforms):

• ALSA (Linux only)
• PulseAudio (Unix)
• D-Bus (Unix)
• Sonivox (Unix)
• FluidSynth (All platforms)

Copyright (C) 2009-2022, Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas License: GPL v3 or later

Project web site https://sourceforge.net/p/drumstick

Online documentation https://drumstick.sourceforge.io/docs/

Downloads https://sourceforge.net/projects/drumstick/files/2.7.1/