I finally found a moment to sit down with Rosegarden.
Here's an acid test Rosegarden has to pass to be eligible for release:
1. Start Rosegarden from factory stock configuration
2. Make any necessary changes in the MIDI device manager to hook up the
right synth and keyboard ports
3. Use the Instrument Parameters box (IPB) to set track 1 to be a
harpsichord
4. Use the IPB to set track 2 to be a flute
5. Click on track 1 so the gray highlight bar shows on that track
6. Dink around on your keyboard. You should hear a harpsichord
7. Click on track 2 so the gray highlight bar shows on that track
8. Dink around on your keyboard. You should hear a flute
Rosegarden 11.11.42 passes this test smoothly and easily. Rosegarden 12.04
fails miserably. No matter what you do, you always hear a piano everywhere.
This is completely unacceptable, and Rosegarden cannot be released in this
broken state.
In my last message, I talked about setting up a channel or whatever when
arming an instrument for recording, but my hands on testing has made it
apparent that I expect to be able to hear whatever I have the program set to
on whatever track whether its armed for recording or not. This implies even
more triggers, like having the bank/program controls allocate channels, or
else it implies something else entirely. Really, it implies something else,
because if I set up default programs for this track and the other in my
autoload, I expect to be able to start a new composition, highlight those
tracks, and dink around without changing anything else.
It seems one potential solution is to set all the tracks to "fixed" in the
factory stock autoload.rg. That might work, but it seems to defeat the entire
purpose of this whole floating channel allocation thing. If Rosegarden only
works usefully with it turned off, then why have it?
Tom said something about this state of affairs being acceptable, because
Rosegarden never had the floating/fixed option before, and this is
undiscovered country. That's true in a way, but in the scheme of things this
floating channel thing may have been a huge and complicated little project,
but in of itself the ability to move segments around and have the controllers
play nice is very much a minor refinement compared with the basic meat and
potatoes functionality that is presently broken.
I hate to be so harsh, because I know this was incredibly complicated and
difficult to achieve, but I'm looking out for Rosegarden more than I'm looking
out for any developer's pet project. This pet needs much more taming before
it's fit for public consumption. This is disastrous. I did an utterly
miserable and useless job of testing this while it was in a branch, and never
should have approved the merge.
--
D. Michael McIntyre
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