Leonard Ritter

Two years ago, I wrote an article about a ZUI desktop system, dreaming of a framework to run ZUI applications in a shared desktop environment, being to ZUI what Gnome is to the traditional desktop paradigm. That idea is still too much for me to chew.

Since then, little has happened. Work on Aldrin had already begun and is still ongoing, yet my dream of a sequencer with a zoomable UI has not vanished. I still want to do it, I just get a headache thinking about what it should feel like to work with it. What it would look like, how a piece of music would be organized on a zoomable 2D desktop, how this could work and interact with technologies like Jeff Han's Multi-Touchscreen. It is really hard for me to figure this out, and I hope it's not just a technology searching for an application, but a work flow that benefits from a new approach to an old problem.

Here is something to do if you feel awfully bored.

for the number π (Pi), substitute each decimal number after following table:

0 = One empty note (pause)
1 = Transpose all following notes by +1
2 = A
3 = B
4 = C
5 = D
6 = E
7 = F
8 = G
9 = Transpose all following notes by -1

put the result into a tracker, then hit play.

This article serves mostly as an attempt to gather my thoughts on the issue of getting Aldrin to work with the new libzzub 0.3 API, which most prominently features support for undo/redo, but also requires some major reworking of application structure and, something which Aldrin lacks tremendously, a disciplined design.

Aldrin is an open source modular music sequencer/tracker for the GNU/Linux operating system.

We're proud to announce the release of Aldrin 0.12 (Luna).

I guess that you are probably wondering what is going on since there has been little, or precisely no update on this site since our last release a few months ago.

Aldrin is an open source modular music sequencer/tracker for the GNU/Linux operating system.

We're proud to announce the release of Aldrin 0.11 (Terra).

This release is the third release of the "planet" release cycle. Aldrin has been transitioned entirely from wxWidgets to GTK+.

Here is a short overview of the most relevant features introduced in this version:

Just a few hours after I posted the movie, CDM released an article about Aldrin. Head over to their site to read it!

I put up a small recording of Aldrin 0.10.1 in action on YouTube. Here it is:

I keep bouncing an idea in my head, thinking about how to strengthen the bonding between open source software developers and software users.

How is a beginning open source project funded, usually? Most of the time not at all. The site features a donation button, and users are encouraged to donate.

In my quest to equip Aldrin with some serious collaboration features, I spent the past week adding support for The Freesound Project.