Origin of a Legend
Chris Cannam and Andy Green began Rosegarden in 1993 while working together at the University of Bath under the tutelage of John ffitch, of Csound fame. Andy was responsible for the MIDI sequencer, and Chris the notation editor.
Rosegarden was originally written for the SGI® IRIX® platform. Richard Bown got involved in late 1995, and began work on a port to Linux. Richard took over responsibility for working on the Linux sequencer engine, which was written using the OSS/Voxware drivers. Not long after, Guillaume Laurent showed up with a big patch of code and a lot of enthusiasm. Rosegarden (the version now known as "X11 Rosegarden") began moving along quite quickly from there.
After a few years, the project started to show its age. Its dated user interface and a lack of internal organization meant that a rewrite was inevitable at some point. After a few false starts, Guillaume got the project restarted, and designed most of the GUI using KDE and Qt. Guillaume kept the project spurred on with his admonition on June 2001 that "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."
Thus encouraged, the current incarnation of Rosegarden clawed its way out of limbo. Chris worked on notation again, and Richard continued working on the sequencer, eventually adding support for audio playback through JACK. The first public alpha release was in October of 2001. Ron Kuris, the first outside contributor, came in with some cleanups that nobody can quite remember, and Randall Farmer provided some chord labelling code. Then Hans Kieserman stepped in with the idea of writing an engine to export Rosegarden's internal music notation to LilyPond, and he began work on internationalization.
In 2002, D. Michael McIntyre became a member of the project when Chris addressed his complaints about MIDI applications on the Linux Audio Users list, suggesting that most of Michael's problems were due to a lack of documentation. Chris suggested "What might be more handy would be a tutorial from someone other than the developers...." Thus what eventually became Rosegarden Companion was born with about 600 lines of HTML and 36 images. Michael had never written a tutorial before, and had no idea what he was doing. Some would argue that he still doesn't, but that hasn't stopped him yet.
Guillaume added Michael as a developer so that he could continue to work on his tutorial. He began as a documentation writer, and eventually outlasted everyone except Chris to become the project's most outspoken and visible personality, and the longest running contributor who didn't have some tie to the original X11 Rosegarden. Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas came along right after Michael, and and began to help and contribute actively, bringing about countless improvements to MIDI handling, in particular, though he has been involved in many different aspects of the application, including putting together two build systems, help with the translation framework, and pioneering the entire concept of track parameters.
Together these five, along with a long list of contributors, carried Rosegarden through to a 1.0 release in 2005.
Shortly thereafter, Heikki Junes showed up out of the clear blue sky, and demanded developer access. He went on to transform the LilyPond export code from something useful but quirky to something that just works most of the time, and he continued the trend of sorting out the final few details the rest of us missed. Finally, French translator Yves Guillemot revealed that he had been hiding his programming skills all along, and began to embark on increasingly ambitious projects, beginning with the notation editor track headers feature, and continuing right along to be surprisingly and quietly effective over the years.
Many people have come and gone in the years since the project's humble beginnings, and together the Rosegarden development team have brought the application from a fun bit of schoolwork all the way to the world-class application before you today.
Rosegarden currently stands at version 1.7.3, with the new Qt4-based Rosegarden "Thorn" slated for release at some point in 2009, if possible.
Current Project Managers
Rosegarden is currently managed by Chris Cannam, D. Michael McIntyre, and Heikki Junes.
Chris Cannam
cannam at all-day-breakfast dot com
Chris has been working on one incarnation or another of
Rosegarden since the end of 1993.
Chris has worked on nearly every aspect of Rosegarden at some point, having been responsible for most of the notation rendering and editing, some of the file and data representation, and much of the audio and MIDI sequencing, recording, plugin, and MIDI studio management subsystems. He lives in London.
D. Michael McIntyre
dmmcintyr at users dot sourceforge dot net
Michael lives in Christiansburg, Virginia, in the United States of
America. He has been doing computer music since the TRS-80 Color
Computer. He currently handles most of the project's administrative tasks,
and a little bit of pretty well everything else, but the hardcore
programmings jobs he leaves to people who actually have a formal education
in software engineering, or at least the people who didn't flunk math class.
Michael has been through a string of layoffs recenty, and is currently working as an "Automotive Service Specialist" for a major international retailer. Michael is very broke these days.
Heikki Junes
hjunes at gmail dot com
Heikki is a graduate student at the Low Temperature Laboratory
at the Helsinki University of Technology in Helsinki, Finland, where he is
currently working with helium crystals.
Heikki just showed up out of nowhere one day and asked for developer access. He has gone on to make dramatic improvements in the LilyPond export engine, and is almost single-handedly responsible for how useful and reliable it has become as a vehicle for producing high-quality printouts. He has done a lot of work on the Rosegarden Wiki, and has become quite the organizer.
Interviews
There have been a handful of interviews with Rosegarden developers published over the years:
- Interview with D. Michael McIntyre by Joe Barr, January 2007
- Interview with Chris Cannam on mstation.org by John Littler, December 2006
- Interview for SourceForge.net Project of the Month, December 2006
- Interview in LinuxDevCenter by Howard Wen, December 2004
- Interview with Richard Bown on mstation.org by John Littler, 2003
Friends of Rosegarden
An ever-growing list of people are helping and have helped with coding, documenting, translating and testing Rosegarden.