I’m very happy to announce the 1.2.2 release of Hydrogen!

Starting with this release we will also provide AppImages for our Linux user base! If you haven’t heard about this technology yet: it’s a portable bundle containing the compiled Hydrogen binary as well as its dependencies and resource files. It runs on most Linux OSs (at least recent ones) and is very easy to handle. Just download it, make it executable, and run it.

Apart from that there were a couple of bug fixes and minor changes:

Added

  • Hydrogen is now released as AppImage for Linux as well.
  • Playlist dialog can now be resized and remembers geometry, position, as well as visibility.
  • Save and restore Director position, geometry, and visibility.
  • New and properly licensed AppStream metainfo files org.hydrogenmusic.Hydrogen.metainfo.xml replace old org.hydrogenmusic.Hydrogen.appdata.xml.
  • Hydrogen shows an error dialog and exits on the first invocation with no hydrogen.conf file present on user and system level (application was not properly installed).
  • A new cmake option WANT_DYNAMIC_JACK_CHECK was introduced. When set Hydrogen does check on startup whether jackd, jackdbus, or pw-jack is installed and disables JACK support in case none of them was found. This is intended for bundled builds, like AppImage and Flatpak, and can be overridden by setting the audio driver manually to “Jack” in the hydrogen.conf or by passing the “-d jack” CLI option.

Changed

  • Spanish translation updated.
  • Minor tweaks in French and German translation.
  • On Linux the order of audio drivers tried when selecting Auto changed from “JACK > ALSA > OSS > PulseAudio” to “JACK > PulseAudio > ALSA > OSS”.

Fixed

  • Style combo box in Preferences > Appearance > Interface is working again.
  • Fix segfault on hitting “Panic” button while transport was rolling.
  • Instrument/strip-specific actions, like MIDI action STRIP_MUTE_TOGGLE, did void the instrument selection of the Instrument Editor if the specified instrument was not the currently selected one.
  • Do not start playback at cursor when cursor in Song Editor is beyond the current song length.
  • Fixed compatibility with PortMidi version 217 (Hydrogen v1.2.1 was incompatible) (#1795). All versions of Hydrogen >=1.3 will, however, require on a more recent PortMidi version (at least v2.0.1).
  • Fixed allowed range of MIDI output notes to be [0,127] again (#1828) (introduced in v1.2.0).
  • Hydrogen does now successfully startup even if no data folder is present on user and system level.
  • Allow an arbitrary number of notes in a pattern (#1827).
  • Fix playback track volume fader (#1449)

Source code and binary releases can be found as usual on GitHub