Rosegarden v15.08

D. Michael McIntyre today announced the release of version 15.08 of Rosegarden, an audio and MIDI sequencer and music notation editor.

Rosegarden is a slightly crazy piece of work.

As a project it has existed for more than two decades, and the repository containing its current code was initialised in April 2000. It’s not a huge program, but it is quite complicated, and during its most active period it was run by three argumentative developers all trying to accomplish slightly different things. I wanted to replace Sibelius, and typeset string quartets. Richard wanted to replace Logic and run his home studio with it. Guillaume wanted to replace Band-in-a-Box and make jazz guitar arrangements. We ended up with something that is essentially a MIDI sequencer, but with some audio recording and arrangement capacity and a lot of interesting (fragile) logic for adjusting score layout of music that is stored as MIDI-plus-notation-metadata rather than directly as notation.

Rosegarden has all sorts of rather wild features which even its developers routinely forget. It has a “triggered segment” feature that replaces single notes with algorithmically expanded sequences at playback time, intended for use in playing ornaments from notation but also potentially usable for simple algorithmic compositions. It knows the playable range and transpositions of large numbers of real instruments, and can transpose between them and warn when a part’s notes are out of range. It has a note-timing quantizer that aims to produce notation as well as possible from performed MIDI recordings, but that doesn’t change the underlying recorded MIDI, instead trying (futilely?) to keep tabs on the adaptations necessary to make the raw MIDI appear well on the score. It can record audio, play back MIDI through audio synth plugins, apply effects, and do basic audio editing and timestretching. It has a feature which surely nobody except me has ever used, that allows you to tap along on a MIDI keyboard to the beats in an audio recording and then inserts tempo events in your MIDI (assuming it represents the same score as the audio you were tapping along to) that make it play back with the same tempo changes as the audio.

Rosegarden contains about 300,000 lines of C++, excluding all its library dependencies, with (ahem) no tests of any sort. It has seen well over 10,000 commits from about 40 contributors, in a single Subversion repository hosted at SourceForge. (Previously it was in CVS, but the move from CVS to Subversion was hard enough that it has never moved again. Some of its current developers use git, but they do so through a bridge to the Subversion repository.) Although the code is moderately portable, and lightly-supported ports to Windows and OS/X have appeared, the only platform ever officially supported is Linux and the code has only been officially published in source code form—it is assumed that Linux distributions will handle compilation and packaging.

Despite its complexities and disadvantages, Rosegarden has survived reasonably well; it appears still to be one of the more widely-used programs of its type. Admittedly this is in a tiny pond—Linux-only audio and music users—but it has persisted in spite of all of its early active developers having left the project. Here are the top three committers per year since 2000, by number of commits:

Some developers (Tom Breton for example) flatten numerous commits from git into single Subversion commits for the official repo and are probably under-represented, but this gives the general shape. Richard Bown mostly retired from this project in 2005, although his 794 commits in 2002 seems still to be the record. (Ted Felix has made 231 so far this year.) Guillaume Laurent forcefully moved to OS/X in 2007, and I faded out in 2010 after a big push to port Rosegarden from Qt3 to Qt4. What is most notable is the unifying thread provided by D. Michael McIntyre.