Subject: (maybe a bit long?)
Announcement: Traverso, a multitrack audio recording, editing and mixing program for GNU/Linux


The Traverso Team is happy to announce the release of Traverso 0.30.0, a GPL licensed multitrack audio recording and editing program for GNU/Linux.
This release is the first in a series towards the final 1.0.0 release.


Traverso offers an innovative User Interface concept, with which it tries to distinguish it from other multitrack audio applications and, more importantly, supplies the user with a powerfull tool to easy and quickly record, edit, add effects(filters) and mix recorded or imported Songs.


Website addresses:

The source, distribution packages (Debian, Gentoo), or ready to run binary can be obtained from the Project's website which is hosted on Savannah:

Project central development webpage:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/traverso/

Download link:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/files/?group=traverso


User Interface concept:

Traverso uses a contextual interaction interface.

Instead of using (only) the mouse to operate on certain objects, the mouse and keyboard are used together to control the program.

This results in a higher ability to controll the program compared to the 2 or 3 mouse buttons available if the mouse was used alone.
The concept differs also from the more generally known "key shortcuts" which do not operate in a context, or only on "hard selected" objects.

The contextual interaction is not limited to a small set of key shortcut types, but has a number of different types, which are grouped together in an intuitive way, even making analogue adjustments possible, which adds great value to an audio application!

Contexts are not bound to the pointed object, but also to the objects beneath it, resulting in a very flexible and powerfull way to (de)activate/manipulate objects that are covered by others and obsoletes the need of numerous buttons/menu's, and very importantly avoids mouse movements over a long distance to do regular editing actions!

To help new users to learn this way of controlling an application, Traverso offers "Contextual Menus" which are similar to the regular menus, but differ in that they try to teach you the more efficient way of using Traverso.


Internals:

Traverso is a native Qt program, and uses the new Qt 4.1 toolkit which makes it a lightweight, fast program which is light on system resources.
It uses the highly popular libsoundfile and libsamplerate libraries to read/write from/to audio files.
Both audio file reads and writes are done with use of lockless ringbuffers to improve real time audio processing behaviour.
Both ALSA (native) and Jack are supported, and great care is taken to make the internal sound processing routines Real Time friendly.
The audio processing is done with normalized 32 bit floats.
See the Changelog for more details.


Where to place Traverso:

The goal of Traverso is to create an easy, fast to controll and workflow based audio recording and editing application, and certainly isn't supposed to be a second Ardour/Audacity/other !

The interface concept, though not completely unknown, has been taken to a higher level then most applications have done, and as such is an experiment which so far has seen good results!

Traverso' still lacks a number of features, however major components have been created including un/redo framework, a 100% seperation of Core and GUI, and reasonable solid playback/recording routines, either using native ALSA or Jack which can be switched at runtime.


History:

Traverso is a fork of the Protux project, and continued on the code base as of September 2005.


We hope Traverso can be of any use for you, and we encourage you to use it, and we would be very pleased if you give your (valuable) feedback, so we can make Traverso better then we ever have hoped it would be!


The Traverso Team.