Lately there was initial work on KSpread to support OASIS format natively. This week we can already load simple OASIS document (like OpenOffice.org Calc files) without the import filter. If you have such files, just rename the extension from .sxc to .ksp and the native loader will work on them. There are many unsupported features yet, but hopefully in the near future we would be able to do the necessary improvements, until it reaches a usable state.

As you've already announced last week, Quanta got a new UI by using the KMDI library. Actually last week it was just a start, but as of now the transition to KMDI is basicly finished, only some minor polishing is needed. I can already recommend to anyone to try out the new version from CVS. As a side effect of this transition, it is possible to use other editors aside of Kate with Quanta. This was an often requested feature, but it is marked as (highly) experimental, and we don't have the power and time to actively maintain and support it. Users who want to play with it may enable the support for other editors with a configure switch. I let them discover the name of that switch. ;-)

The Rosegarden team are pleased to announce the release of Rosegarden-4 0.9.7, an audio and MIDI sequencer and score editor for Linux.

http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/

The main focus of this release is to introduce a new, more accurate and efficient audio layer with a mixer window, basic internal routing capabilities, more complete plugin support, and support for the JACK transport API.

This release also includes a number of other new features such as a dedicated tempo and time signature editor window, segment summary window, pitch-bend ruler, more useful controller rulers and various new editing operations and keyboard shortcuts in the graphical editors.

Features of Rosegarden include:

• Score, piano-roll, event list and track overview editors
• MIDI and audio playback and recording with ALSA and JACK
• Audio plugin support using LADSPA
• Score interpretation of performance MIDI data
• MIDI file I/O, Csound, Lilypond and MusicXML export
• Clear and consistent KDE-based user interface
• Shareable device (.rgd) files to ease MIDI portability
• Translations into Russian, Spanish, German, French, Welsh, Italian, Swedish and Estonian, as well as UK and US English.