nope! still fresh

[David O'Toole]

Hey all. I'd like to say that the project is _not_ dead, it's just been 
temporarily quiet as things have been hectic and I've had some other 
work (building the software for an online electronic music magazine, 
doing shows and traveling.) I've kind of got the fire under me to finish 
it now, I just did 2 shows in NYC with "that other software" for windows 
and I was again frustrated by its limitations that I hope to fix with 
Octal. I'm pretty excited to get back into heavy development on this, 
and with winter coming (we had our first 1/2 inch of snow last night as 
I drove back from New York) I think I'll have lots of 
blizzard-staying-indoors-and-coding time :-) :-)

Now the magazine software is basically finished, and school is very 
light right now, so it is looking good for resuming work on the user 
interface.

Another thing that made this worse was that for most of the summer my 
GNU account was messed up---the alpha machines where Octal is stored 
were moved and got new names/setups and it took a while to find someone 
to fix it. So in the meantime I couldn't update stuff. In addition some 
files at the alpha site were lost because I installed some in the old 
location after they had copied them to the new one. So this didn't help 
either, it was very frustrating.

I've just been absorbing some of the recent discussion on the LAD 
mailing list, over ideas for improving plugin API's.... I've been 
learning from their efforts for a while, and I can say that our Octal 
plugin API has some definite advantages over any yet written LADSPA 
versions. I think this project really has a lot going for it, it just 
hasn't gone as quickly as we'd like :-). Slowly but surely, it is 
getting there.

Here are a couple things:

1. I'd like to make a couple tiny revisions to the 0.5 api and release 
an 0.6 document. Mostly stuff related to preventing "zipper effect" in 
fades and control data.

2. I'm on IRC all the time, just not on irc.linux.com where the Octal 
channel is. I am usually on irc.gimp.org or whatever now, I hang out on 
#gnome. I propose we move the project's official chat channel to #octal 
on the gimp network, how does everyone feel about this? That way you can 
all /msg me and yell at me to work on the code :-)     I definitely 
think it 's better if people can be in touch.

I know it's been slow lately but I hope people are still interested in 
seeing this fly... and for the machines, which do the real work of 
octal, the developer community is the basis of the whole thing :-). So I 
hope this answers your question Nicolas.

> > hi all :)
> > 
> > sorry for the abrupt question, but do we have to consider octal dead or 
> > are there people working on it? motivation problem or time problem?
> > 
> > -Nicolas Leveille (Knos)
> > 
>
>         Hi.
>
>                 I expect that David should release new 0.5-alpha release.
> A sugestion: How is the clipping managed? i supose that the method will be
> to clip to max/min.
>
>                                 Octal should not die  ;-)