buzztard

buzztard project aims to provide a free replacement (or clone) of the currently windows only and closed source software Buzz. The buzz software is not really further developed, as the main developer has lost his source code.

We want to provide a music production environment, that is based on a very modular approach (following some of the ideas behind buzz), to allow many people to get involved. We hope that our software will have a better usabillity than buzz has although. We don't want to make this a 1:1 copy though.

The buzztard project itself has no direct link to buzz (apart from concepts). To allow migration for buzz users, we will provide song-file import and buzz-machine reuse.

The project's objective is a music application. If you've used programs like FastTracker or the original AMIGA SoundTracker, that will give you an idea. The buzztard editor uses a similiar concept, where a song consists of a sequence with tracks and in each track one uses patterns with events (musical notes and control changes). In contrast to the Tracker programs, tracks are not simply sample players. A song has a setup where one can arrange virtual audio plugins and link them together. Each of these machines can be controlled realtime or via patterns in the sequencer.

The buzztard editor will be just one possible application of the framework we will implement. Tools like a dj mixing application or a live session composer are other things that could be built using this framework.

The main goal is to get as far as buzz now is. Beyond that, we have thousands of ideas to make to improve the usability and production potential of such software. Buzztard should not be just a clone of buzz. It shall live beyond! Yay!

What is new in this release:

• The main feature of this release is full undo/redo support and journaling of the edit action and crash recovery. This way, chances of losing changes are quite low.
• Other UI improvements are: tip of the day, an improved spectrum analyzer, clipboard support, more commands in context menus, and many more.
• This release features a gstreamer decoder that enables playback of buzztard songs in any gstreamer based media player.
• The libraries and the applications have performance improvements and code cleanups.
• The docs have been improved a lot with tutorials, keyboard shortcut tables, better coverage, and man pages.

What is new in version 0.5.0:

• Internal pipeline management in buzztard was rewritten.
• One can now play partially connected songs, and add or remove plugins while playing.
• One can play notes while editing.
• Saving of songs is more robust.
• Lots of bugfixes and UI improvements were made.
• The user-guide was improved, including three small tutorials.
• Python and JavaScript are initially supported via gobject introspection.
• In gst-buzztard, lots of improvements were made in the buzzmachine wrapper, buzz index support was added for categories, and machines were made live-playable.
• In bml, the API was split into the library and the instance API.
• In bsl, bugs were fixed and compatibility was improved.

What is new in version 0.4.0:

• buzztard:
• As planned, main focus for this release was the wavetable support. Its done -
• buzztard can load what gstreamer can decode. The wavetable view has a nice
• waveform widget. Related to that buzztard has a new song-format that bundles the
• XML together with external files in a zip archive.
• Also the UI has seen a lot of improvements. The machine view looks nicer - Marc
• drew spiffy machine icons. In addition they now show real volume meters when
• playing. All meters are now properly synced.
• bml:
• Major addition is wavetable support for tracker plugins. Besides that the new
• release improves buzzmachine compatibility, performance and has a better build
• setup.
• bsl:
• Major addition is wavetable support. Several bug fixes and build system
• cleanups.
• gst-buzztard:
• API renaming to cleanup gst namespace usage. Now includes former gst-bml module.