Background to the Rosegarden-4 project

(written by Chris Cannam, part of a previous version of Rosegarden's web site)

From a developer's perspective, the Rosegarden-2.1 code reached the end of its useful life about five years ago.

Its internal representation had become inadequate for the things we were wanting to do, and it was becoming too difficult to extend it without introducing some serious stability issues. The GUI was looking rather antiquated, and it was too closely coupled with the rest of the application to be straightforward to replace. We wanted closer communication between the notation-editing and sequencing parts of the application and the existing code just wasn't designed that way.

Previous attempts

Over the years, we've made several attempts to rewrite Rosegarden. Here are some of them:

And that's where we are at the moment. Our mantra is now:

"If we lose focus again, Rosegarden is dead. It has already been brought back from limbo a couple of times, there won't be a next one."
(© Guillaume)

At the time of writing, we've made the 0.1 release (in October) plus a couple more, have passed 3,500 CVS commits and have written vastly more lines of code than we managed in any of the previous rewrites. Things are looking modestly positive.