Monthly Archives: December 2009

A little present

Merry Christmas 🙂 As a little present, we are happy to announce the release of the alpha versions of the Zong! Viewer and Zong! Player, which are both licensed under the GPL.

Interested developers can check out the source code in our public Git repository. We have also prepared a demo for the Zong! Viewer. Notice, that you need Java 6 to run the applications.

We hope that this release encourages some people to join our development team. If you are interested, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

The parrot is fledged

Our work weekend was quite successful and the alpha versions of the Zong! Viewer and the Zong! Player are about to be released.

  • The startup document now contains a friendly welcome screen instead of a chaotic test score like before
  • A toolchain for automatic building and creation of packages for Windows, Linux, MacOSX and Solaris (all i586) was created
  • Setup of a public git repository and bugtracker was prepared
  • English and German translations are complete
  • First drafts of a logo (the parrot :)) and icons
  • Some improvements in display, musical layout and loading MusicXML

Zong! Viewer Alpha Screenshot

However, we need much more time to improve the musical layout engine, which is the heart of Zong!. Expect major progress in this area for the next versions.

Work Weekend 1 started

Uli and I have begun our first Zong! Work Weekend. We will use the time to bring the project a great step forward. If we reach our goal, we can release the first public alpha version of the free Zong! components already in this year. Keep your fingers crossed 🙂

Zong! Player is finished

Today I finished the Zong! Player, which is the successor of the Xenoage Player, which is not maintained any more. It is able to open MusicXML files and to play and save them as MIDI files. It can also convert whole directories of MusicXML files into MIDI files in a single step.

Compared to the old Xenoage Player, there are some new features available. First of all, it is now based on the Zong! modules (core, musicxml-in and midi-out), which means, that many new features written for the Zong! Viewer and Zong! Editor are automatically integrated into the player and there is a much more stable codebase. Worth mentioning is also the support of soundbanks (like *.sf2 soundfonts) through the new Java Sound engine Gervill. And finally, we have added support for both compressed MusicXML files (*.mxl) and MusicXML opus files (nested in any depth). Of course, there is again an applet version of the player.

We will release it for public beta testing together with the viewer in a few weeks (hopefully before christmas).