News and History

This page contains the complete history of news items and announcements that have been posted on the main page.

Feb-04-2004 torbenh:

vocoder.ogg has been added to the examples. The vocoder will be packaged with galan-0.3.0-beta2 which will be released soon. I fixed 2 Bugs which made loading files segfault (one related to jack, and one related to some LADPSA plugins namely GLAME)

Jan-29-2004 nickrusnov:

galan_0.3.0+beta1-1_i386.deb and galan_0.3.0+beta1-1_sparc.deb are now available. They are binary packages built against Debian's sid distribution for i386 and sparc respectively, and are identical to the official packages uploaded today.

Jan-6-2004 torbenh:

galan-0.3.0_beta1 is released. The load Bug is finally fixed. There is the possibility to add a background image to a panel control.

July-22-2003 torbenh: i added some tracks to the Example Page.

July-10-2003 torbenh: galan is now featured on noizefarm. it would be nice if we posted some of our patches and tracks there.

July-8-2003 torbenh: galan-0.3.0_alpha1 is released. This adds support for jack transport to the sequencer plugins. General bugfixes. why is nobody using galan-0.3 ? please people. use it its better.

June-5-2003 nickrusnov: New Site Design! I have redesigned the site. Hope you all like it.

030511 torbenh: I have added some new screenshots to the Screenshots page.

030430 torbenh: galan-0.3.0-test3 is released. Includes jack in and out ports. FFT support for fast convolution structures. Sheet Lib structured.

030430 torbenh: I added a new track, to the Examples page look at hall-0....

030405 torbenh: galan-0.3.0-test2 is released. This Version includes the latest changes to the 0.2 branch... go and get them :)

030320 torbenh: galan-0.2.14 is released. This Version fixes the not working Z Buffer in the OpenGL stuff. Also sound improvement Bugfixes in the filter. LADSPA plugins are now nicely grouped if you have liblrdf on your system...

030226 torbenh: I added some tracks i have made, to the Examples page look at groupie01 and groupie02....

030201 torbenh: galan-0.2.13d is released. This release adds the sheet library. Fixes the endianess bug in the OSS Output. and also puts the pixmaps to prefix/share/galan/pixmaps... although the changes seem small this is the final step of the multisheet effort. now the refinement is to begin.

030114 torbenh: galan-0.3.0-test1 is This release contains gtk+-2.0 support and jack support... not all plugins work correctly but most... I dont have much time for finding those bugs... please send in bugreports and i will fix them...

030111 torbenh: galan-0.2.12 is released. This release includes some opengl stuff for experimentation. I will write up some docs for this soon. But my university workload is very high at the Moment. You can now select some components and move them. Alsa Midi in is supported. I will update on this issue later.

020902 torbenh: galan-0.2.11 is released. The abort of the configure script when alsa is not found is removed. Sorry. ALSA is of course optional and not required. Also there is the lights plugin which can show you which position the sequencers are currently playing. Does not look good yet but is usable.

020901 torbenh: galan-0.2.10 is released. Now the tutorial can be loaded with LANG=de . I also added a copy paste menu to the seqnote plugin. Control Group names are set according to the sheet name. The prefs dialog now works correctly. A statusbar showing the current connector name has been added. The control plugin now has a display connector which does not pass the event through.

020814 torbenh: galan-0.2.9 is released. This includes the control grouping. Also a sampler and alsa output which is hardcode configured for low-latency... configuring buffer size will be in the cvs soon.

020808 torbenh: I have updated the webpage. It now uses SSI. The current release has been changed to gAlan-0.2.8 which is the multisheet branch. I have merged this into the HEAD revision of the cvs. And cvs also includes control grouping which will be the main new feature of gAlan-0.2.9. With control grouping finally ready we can now begin to build a library of sheets, so that people who dont want to draw galan sheets can use the library.

010108 tonyg: Website finally updated - a couple of links corrected. I'm currently working, very very slowly, on a C++ rewrite of gAlan. I'm about 75% of the way there. Progress on the existing C version has been made, however: Torben Hohn has contributed a nifty oscilloscope plugin (!) which can be inserted into the mesh at any point. The next release will include this, along with some minor bugfixes to the main body of the code.

000402 tonyg: Development restarted. Note that I now have a full-time job, so progress may (will) be slow; if you're interested in helping out, please let me know. There are a couple of new entries in the FAQ; check them out if you're having trouble getting gAlan to work for you.

990924 tonyg: Version 0.2.2 released Changes since 0.2.1 include:

Updated configure.in now is more aware of its environment - specifically, checks for the presence of audiofile.h and esd.h are made (and the appropriate plugins are compiled conditionally on that check).
"Sources/Voltage Controlled Oscillator" becomes "Sources/Simple Oscillator"
Control over buffering is now available via the Preferences dialog
It's now possible to choose from the Preferences dialog which /dev/dspN device to use for record/playback
Bugfixes (specifically, in prefs.c)

New plugins since 0.2.1:

vco and sigctrl - make implementing an FM synthesis mesh possible
polyrart - first (poor) approximation to polyphonic sample playback
oss_input - allows (on cards that support full-duplex) gAlan to act as an effects-chain and/or record in realtime (Note: for OSS only - ESD not yet supported for sample input)

990924 tonyg: A couple of people have written to tell me that gAlan doesn't build if ESD is not installed (ie. the compiler can't find the ESD headers and libraries). Sorry about that - I meant to update configure.in earlier. I'll upload 0.2.2 shortly.

990922 tonyg: Version 0.2.1 released. Changes since 0.2.0 include:

gAlan now has ESounD (ESD) support, thanks to Elliot Lee
Some internal cleanups of the code (notably correcting misuse of g_return_*if_fail())
Brand new sequencer plugins - gAlan can now sequence an arbitrary number of bars, each bar at up to 32nd-note resolution
Preferences dialog
Choice of default output plugin (currently only OSS vs. ESounD)
gAlan now uses audiofile-0.1.7 for loading and saving sample files
Bugfixes and more sanity checks
The tutorial has been updated slightly
The User Guide now contains brief documentation on each plugin and a section on common motifs in mesh design

New plugins since 0.2.0:

esd_output - ESD support
pcm_out - WAV file output
reverse - plays a signal backward
patloop - strings together a series of measures in a loop

990921 tonyg: A new plugin, pcm_out, allows you to record gAlan output in stereo to a WAV file.

Some people have been having problems viewing the PNG files in the screenshots section. I've emailed my ISP, asking them to change the settings on their webserver, and they very promptly got back to me - so it should be better now.

990920 tonyg: A big batch of changes has been put through: as soon as I integrate libaudiofile and design some way of programming loops of measures, I'll release 0.2.1.

Update: I've got libaudiofile working on both Linux and Win32 for the loading of sound files. This means that gAlan now supports loading WAV files (and many other file formats that audiofile supports - they still have to be 16-bit mono, though).

990919 tonyg: Elliot Lee has contributed an esd_output plugin. There may be some problems with realtime-output/latency issues, but it's a great start (and the problems are more flaws in ESD, anyway). Thanks Elliot!

Elliot also kindly pointed out some (non-fatal, thankfully) shortcomings in my code. I expect to release 0.2.1 shortly.

990918 tonyg: Version 0.2.0 released. I've reorganised the clock code. This fixes several minor niggles, and allows plugins to act as timestretchers or pitchshifters more easily. Thanks to Steve Hoek for the inspiration for these changes.

Minor news:

gAlan is now being developed out of CVS
several new plugins, including a first hack at a level-sequencer and a note-sequencer
a quick'n'dirty resampler (it's not the cleanest sounding - anyone want to contribute a better one?)
environment variable GALAN_PLUGIN_DIR now overrides SITE_PKGLIB_DIR when gAlan is searching for plugins
the file format has changed to something more flexible - not XML, but similar
basic, primitive, poor-quality Win32 audio

990903 tonyg: The Win32 port is underway. Currently gAlan loads, and all the plugins load (bar oss_output, obviously), but I haven't written any Win32 sound support yet. Getting that done will give me some important clues about the new time model. Information about compiling for Win32 can be found in the README.w32 file in the main directory of the source distribution.

gAlan version 0.1.3 is the first to have Win32 support.

990827 tonyg: Thanks to an email from Steve Hoek of serato, I am starting to get a better grip on the issue of realtime.

I've also pretty much decided to go to an XML-based file format - it's far more futureproof than the awful ad-hoc file format currently in use.

gAlan will go into CVS soon. I'm thinking about options for setting up a mailing-list and CVS server for public access.

990825 tonyg: Development started on the 1st of August, 1999, and the first pre-alphas went out on the 19th of August. The website went live for the first time on the 25th, and alphas will be sent out to a select few over the next few days.

Currently, I hope to announce the project on Freshmeat (and elsewhere - the drone-gear mailing list and select newsgroups) by mid-September.