Qtractor 0.5.1 released with VST improvements

Apparently support for native VST on Linux is gaining momentum. That’s definitely the case for the new version of Qtractor.

Following recent announcement by Ardour team Rui Nuno Capela improved existing support for VST in Qtractor, his own MIDI sequencer for Linux. The VeSTige header was updated to fix some bugs on 64bit systems, support for MIDI-fx plug-iins was added (both VST and LV2), and editing settings in the generic plug-in form is now back and working too. Rui also introduced a workaround for JUCE based VST plug-ins.

There’s also a number of other back-from-the-deads like bank selection for plug-ins (inclding VST again) and playback of MIDI files from the browser that finally works. Quite a bit of work has been put to usability, especially with regards to automation curves (thanks for listening, Rui). Finally, there’s an initial implementation of linked clips and support for MIDI names.

You can find the full list of changes here. Builds for SUSE are available along source code archive, and it won’t be long until updates land to KXStudio PPA for Ubuntu.

Since I know that Rui reads this anyway, it would be great if colors for clips could get a contrast punch by default. The screenshot above uses a customized theme, where most backgrounds have 160 for saturation and 255 for luminance, and all foregrounds have 50 for saturation and 85 for luminance. Without a doubt, these values could be further tweaked. Saturation is probably less essential, but luminance values for FG and BG need a bigger difference.