
Rosegarden v1.2.4
=================

Rosegarden is a MIDI and audio sequencer and musical notation editor.

  http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/

Please keep an eye on the FAQ for known problems and workarounds:

  http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/resources/faq/

When you find bugs, first check whether a newer version of Rosegarden
has been released yet; if not, please continue on to:

  http://rosegarden.sourceforge.net/tutorial/bug-guidelines.html


About this release
------------------

Release 1.2.4 of Rosegarden is a bug-fix release that fixes several
issues with the prior 1.2.3 (which was a major feature release).
These fixes include, briefly:

 * Avoid crash on startup if /dev/snd/seq does not exist
 * Fix incorrect sequencer status report ("no driver")
 * Fix MIDI Text Marker export
 * Fix text encoding for Lilypond 2.6 (UTF8 instead of ISO-8859-1)
 * Fix stuck notes in matrix after pressing a stop button
 * Fix crash when erasing a duplicated key signature
 * Fix crash when switching documents with a tempo editor window open
 * Fix incorrect sorting and insertion logic in marker editor
 * Fix hang in main canvas when a segment has zero duration
 * Fix audio preview display for repeating audio segments
 * Update percussion matrix when a different drum mapping is selected
 * Avoid crash when deleting a device with percussion matrix open
 * Fix matrix display for notes outside range of current key mapping
 * Ensure correct segment is acted on when clicking overlapping segments
 * Fix sequencer crash when playing back tiny audio files
 * Avoid display hang when too many segments overlap
 * Fix several build system bugs, and compilation with gcc-4.1.2

This release also includes several new MIDI device definition (.rgd)
files, as well as updates for Catalan, Russian, Swedish, Czech and
Italian translations and a completely new Finnish translation.

Finally, with this release the name of the project has officially
changed to Rosegarden.  Formerly it was referred to as Rosegarden-4 in
order to mark the current application as newer than the long-obsolete
"Rosegarden 2.1", a quite different and more basic application.  
We have been phasing out the use of the 4 suffix in online
documentation and other places, and we have now officially dropped it.
Whereas the previous release was "Rosegarden-4 v1.2.3", this release is
"Rosegarden v1.2.4".  Any remaining references to Rosegarden-4 are bugs.


Build requirements
------------------

The big requirement is KDE 3.1, or later, or more specifically the KDE 3.1+
development libraries (you don't need the whole KDE environment).

Our code compiles with gcc-3.x and gcc-4.x.

For MIDI support on Linux, you need ALSA 0.9.x or 1.0; for audio you
need JACK 0.77 or newer; for synth plugins you need DSSI 0.9.x or
newer; for synth plugin GUI support you need liblo 0.7 or newer.

We have recently switched from automake/autoconf/make to scons for
building.  Please see the section on Compiling from Source below for
details.


Compiling from source
---------------------

You will need to obtain and install scons.  If you are not familiar with
scons, it's a more modern alternative to "make".  See this page:

  http://scons.sourceforge.net/

For a typical end-user installation with no unusual requirements, simply run

  scons configure
  scons
  scons install

The build system should automatically detect your installation prefix
and various optional installed libraries with no further effort on
your part.  It will tell you if something it needs does not appear to
be available.

For special requirements, a few options are supported.  These take the
format scons configure option=[0|1], for example

  scons configure debug=1

To see a list of available options, use

  scons configure --help

To perform the equivalent of a "make clean" or "make distclean" use

  scons -c

To uninstall, use

  scons -c install

NOTE: The installation prefix should be the same as the one of your
KDE installation. However you can install to another directory, but
then you'll have to append it to your KDEDIRS variable. For instance :

KDEDIRS=/usr:/home/glaurent/rosegarden


Running Rosegarden
------------------

Just run the "rosegarden" application (found in the KDE bin directory
after installation).  The sequencer process is started automatically
when the gui is started, provided it has been correctly installed (by
"make install") in the global KDE directories.  If you have any
problems running the application, consult the FAQ:

  http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/resources/faq/

or if that doesn't answer your question then use the rosegarden-user
mailing list on SourceForge.

You can also "scons -c install" if you decide it's a waste of your time.


User documentation
------------------

There is a lot of documentation for Rosegarden available through the
Help menu.  Go to Help -> Rosegarden Handbook for the reference
manual, and Help -> Online Tutorial for a tutorial.


SPECIAL NOTES FOR PACKAGE MAINTAINERS
-------------------------------------

DSSI

Many distros released their packages of Rosegarden v1.0 compiled
without the optional DSSI/synth plugin support.  We received a lot of
complaints on our lists from your users and ours about your packages
being built without this feature.

We would like to request that you please take whatever steps are
necessary within the framework of your particular distro to ensure
that Rosegarden is built with DSSI support, and ideally that some of
the currently available DSSI plugins are also packaged for your
distro.  Thank you.  For details on DSSI, see:

  http://dssi.sourceforge.net/


Notes for developers
--------------------

We are actively seeking developers who are interested in coding new
parts of the application, adding features, and fixing bugs.  See the
bug and feature request trackers at SourceForge for inspiration.  If
you intend to do anything, please discuss it on the rosegarden-devel
mailing list (of course, providing working code will make your
argument extra persuasive).

Be warned that we tend to be fairly strict about code quality... as
far as that's possible, given the not always superb standards of our
own code.


Developer documentation
-----------------------

All the documentation we have (not enough) is in the docs/
subdirectory, including:

  docs/code/global_design.txt -- which classes do what, more or less
  docs/data_struct/units.txt -- how we store pitch and time
  docs/data_struct/sets.txt -- some terminology explained

  docs/howtos/alsa-notes -- brief notes about getting and installing the
	ALSA sound drivers (we recommend ALSA for use with Rosegarden)
  docs/howtos/artsd-mcop-notes.txt -- notes on how to get sound with aRts
	(not recommended!)


Authors and copyright
---------------------

* Rosegarden is Copyright 2000-2006 Guillaume Laurent, Chris Cannam
  and Richard Bown.

* The moral right of Guillaume Laurent, Chris Cannam and Richard Bown
  to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted.

* Parts of Rosegarden are derived from X11 Rosegarden 2.1, which is
  Copyright 1994 - 2001 Chris Cannam, Andrew Green, Richard Bown and
  Guillaume Laurent.

* For musical notation display Rosegarden uses pixmaps derived from
  the Feta font, part of the Lilypond software (http://lilypond.org/)
  which is Copyright 1997 - 2004 Jan Nieuwenhuizen and Han-Wen Nienhuys.

* Other major contributors include Randall Farmer, Ron Kuris, Hans
  Kieserman, Michael McIntyre, and Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas.  See AUTHORS for
  more details, and the individual source files for copyright attributions.

* The Rosegarden splash-screen image is Copyright 2005 Carolyn H. McIntyre,
  used by permission.  (It is a photograph of a rose growing in Michael
  McIntyre's real live rose garden.)

Rosegarden is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at
your option) any later version.  See the file COPYING included with
this distribution for more information.

