MusicKit V5.6.2 now available.

Leigh Smith — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 17:47:23 -0000

There is now a new release available of the MusicKit that will run on MacOS 10.4 through to 10.6 and GNUstep. Binaries for MacOS 10.6 Intel only are now also available. Versions of MacOS below 10.4 are no longer officially supported. Please refer to http://www.musickit.org/MusicKit_ChangeLog.txt for the official list of changes, but the highlights are:
* MacOS 10.6 is now supported.
* Vector hardware on MacOS X is supported for both PPC and Intel.
* Apple AudioUnits are now built as standard in the SndKit
* All nib files (including Ensemble and edsnd applications) have been upgraded to the latest InterfaceBuilder v3.0 format.

Binary for MusicKit V5.6.1 on MacOS X now available

Leigh Smith — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 22:13:47 -0000

I've recently posted a binary distribution of the MusicKit that will install and run on MacOS 10.4 & 10.5.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/musickit/files/MK/5.6.1/MK-5.6.1.b.MOX.dmg/download

This includes all the optional SndKit libraries and header files. To include these properly, you need to add /Library/Frameworks/SndKit.framework/Headers to your include path when compiling. Hopefully this should simplify the installation and use of the MusicKit. Please let me know if you have problems with the distribution.

Also, the sourceforge.net file release system has been dramatically changed such that there are no longer email notifications when a new file is released. This is unfortunate, but there is now an RSS feed for the MK that interested users can subscribe to:

http://sourceforge.net/api/file/index/project-id/9881/rss?path=/MK

(for the MK file releases only)

http://sourceforge.net/api/file/index/project-id/9881/rss

(for all files released by the MusicKit project)

I'm in the process of revamping the documentation of project plans now that trac will be the main method of documenting project milestones. The two main goals are to improve the operation on GNUstep and to finish the integration of native coded unit generators so we can do synthesis on all platforms.

MusicKit V5.6.0 released

Leigh Smith — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 19:00:14 -0000

After a period that is much longer than I had hoped for, a new release V5.6.0 of the MusicKit is now available. The change log (http://www.musickit.org/MusicKit_ChangeLog.txt) is huge, but the highlights are:

* Documentation (http://www.musickit.org) on building the MusicKit has been improved.

* Now builds on MacOS 10.5.X Intel or PPC and GNUstep.

* No longer requires external libraries to build. The system will be built with reduced functionality (mostly impacting the SndKit) if the dependent libraries are not installed.

* A more complete set of applications, utility commands and examples are built on both MacOS X and particularly on GNUstep.

* HelpViewer help documentation is now available for some Applications (ScorePlayer, Spectro, EnvelopeEd).

* A set of C language UnitGenerators by Julius Smith has now been incorporated into the distribution. A future version of the MusicKit will properly integrate these with the Objective-C unit generators for native synthesis. Julius' contribution greatly simplifies this process. Thanks Julius!

* A binary installation package for MacOS X is currently in preparation. At the moment, only the source is released.

Converted to Subversion

Leigh Smith — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 14:52:00 -0000

I've now converted the CVS repository to Subversion and disabled the CVS repository. If there is a very compelling reason to continue to use CVS, I'll re-enable it, but I recommend Subversion as worth the effort to learn. This is a precursor to a release of the MK that should improve Tiger and Linux support.

MusicKit 5.5.2 Released

Leigh Smith — Mon, 16 May 2005 01:38:49 -0000

The major features of this release is to enable compilation on MacOS 10.4.0 with Xcode 2.0 and the finicky gcc 4.0. There are a few warnings which are now generated, but the reason for not fixing them is those offending regions of the code are marked for modification anyway.

The framework (i.e API) documentation has also been converted from headerdoc to doxygen, which is much better supported. Doxygen has a C++ terminology which I've yet to discover if it can be tuned to use Objective-C terms. Documentation building is now incorporated into the Xcode and make build processes. There are still a number of warnings which are generated when running doxygen, but due to the error format of doxygen matching gcc, they can be inspected and fixed with Xcode.

Packaging of binaries has been completely overhauled so this should speed up releasing future versions.

MusicKit 5.5.1 Released

Leigh Smith — Sun, 10 Apr 2005 04:59:29 -0000

After far too long, there is a new MusicKit release. Of course, development has been progressing continuously since the 5.4.4 release, but somehow, things were always in such a state of flux that releasing a new distribution always required some extra work, and then a more pressing bug would appear, and the release would get put off to fix that and then another bug would loom...etc...

To atone for my tardiness, the new release does offer some definite improvements. The most apparent should be that the build process has now been massively simplified and modernised and the standard autoconf process put in place to allow users to get the code compiled without having to install all the dependent libraries. So ./configure; sudo make install should now work. On MacOS X, all the examples build. On GNUstep systems (Linux/Windows), only the frameworks are currently built until I can test the GNUstep build process (lacking Intel hardware at the moment).

The SndKit has been thoroughly overhauled and now has a low-latency pre-emptive queuing scheme for streaming, producing very fast playback of sounds. SndSoundStruct is now endangered and is in the process of being removed in a future release. There are good object oriented alternatives, so if developers are using that structure, now is the time to move off it. SndMP3 has been rewritten to use either pre-decompression or on-the-fly decompression, allowing the developer to select the trade off between speed and memory. libst (Sox) file I/O support has been replaced with libsndfile support which offers much better support for modern formats and cleans up the file I/O code considerably.

Many of the memory leaks of the MusicKit have been shaken out and work has begun on rewriting MKOrchestra to do native synthesis (as a subclass of SndStreamClient), although that is not yet operational. MIDI is now managed in a modern fashion, allowing devices with differing input and output ports to be reported and used.

There are just too many changes to even upload a ChangeLog anymore! You can get the gruesome details from the web site.

I should have a binary out soon.

MK 5.4.4 released

Leigh Smith — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 05:55:33 -0000

Version 5.4.4 of the MusicKit has been released. This addresses:

1. The SndKit is now integrated into the MusicKit source distribution and CVS repository, so there is now no separate SndKit download. This was always less useful than it first appeared, since you generally needed the MKPerformSndMIDI library anyway. This should help produce a single "make"/build operation since it now operates on a single code tree.

2. Windows support has been modernized. Since Stephens foray into the joys of developing on Win32/MinGW, many of the supporting libraries have changed, most particularly portaudio has been improved. This allowed removing the portaudio code which resided in MKPerformSndMIDI_portaudio and now linking against the portaudio library. This makes installing libportaudio yet another task to be done before building the MusicKit, but the upside is the platform support will continue at it's own pace not held back by the MK's meager support staff (me).

3. A gremlin deselected compilation of SndAudioProcessorMP3Encoder which caused linking errors, should now be fixed. Please continue to report any problems you may encounter installing the source and binary distributions as I'd like to get those rock solid, particularly the binary release. I'm hoping to add an Intel Linux and WIndows binary distribution soon.