Mellite

statement

Mellite is a computer music environment, implemented as a graphical front end for SoundProcesses. It is (C)opyright 2012–2023 by Hanns Holger Rutz. All rights reserved. Mellite is released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3+ and comes with absolutely no warranties. To contact the author, send an e-mail to contact at sciss.de. The website for Mellite is www.sciss.de/mellite.

Please consider supporting this project through Liberapay (see badge above) – thank you!

The file mellite-app-licenses.csv contains the license data for all dependencies and transitive dependencies. For the binary release of Mellite, source code is not included but available via the respective OSS project pages, as indicated in the license files, or—in compliance with GPL/LGPL—on request via E-Mail. All source code with group-id de.sciss is available from github.com/Sciss.

The Mellite icon is based on the file MELLITE Taillée Hongrie.jpg, provided by Didier Descouens under CC BY 4.0 license.

download and installation

A binary (executable) version is provided via archive.org or GitHub releases. We provide a universal zip for all platforms as well as a dedicated Debian package. These need an additional JDK installation (see below). Even better, for the common Intel 64-bit architecture, you can use the "full" packages that bundle the JDK, available for Linux, Windows, macOS (10.10 or newer).
The source code can be downloaded from codeberg.org/sciss/Mellite or github.com/Sciss/Mellite.

In order to run the application when not using the "full" bundle, you must have a Java Development Kit (JDK) installed. The recommended version is JDK 11. On Linux, to install OpenJDK, use sudo apt install openjdk-11-jdk. In general, you find good binary builds for all platforms on adoptopenjdk.net.

For real-time sound reproduction, the SuperCollider server is needed. The recommended version is 3.10.0 or above (technically 3.7.0 or higher should work).

issues

When using JDK 8 under Debian and GNOME, there is a bug in the assistive technology (Atk) which results in performance degradation over time, as some parts of the UI are used. To solve this problem, create a plain text file ~/.accessibility.properties (that is, in your home directory) and put the following contents inside:

javax.accessibility.assistive_technologies=

Mellite has now also been tested with JDK 11. You will see some warnings/errors when starting, including "An illegal reflective access operation has occurred" and "ERROR com.alee.utils.ProprietaryUtils - java.lang.NoSuchFieldException: AA_TEXT_PROPERTY_KEY". These are related to the Web Look-and-Feel, and can be ignored. However, JavaFX is not available as a system-wide package for JDK 11, so the API browser currently does not work under JDK 11.

running

The standalone jar, created via ./sbt mellite-app/assembly produces app/Mellite.jar which is double-clickable and can be run via:

$ java -jar app/Mellite.jar

Runnable packages can be created via ./sbt mellite-app/universal:packageBin (all platforms) or ./sbt mellite-app/debian:packageBin (Debian).

documentation

Video and text tutorials, as well as API docs can be found online here: www.sciss.de/mellite

Please do not hesitate to ask on the Gitter channel.

contributing

Please see the file CONTRIBUTING.md

linking

If you want to use Mellite as a "library" in your project, you can link to a Maven artifact.

The following artifact is available from Maven Central:

"de.sciss" %% "mellite-core" % "3.12.13"
"de.sciss" %% "mellite-app"  % "3.13.9"

building from source

See the section 'download and installation' for requirements (JDK, JavaFX).

Mellite builds with sbt and Scala 2.13, 2.12. The last version to support Scala 2.11 is 2.38.1. The last version to support Scala 2.10 is 2.10.2. The default target and the binary distribution of the application are currently based on Scala 2.13. Scala 2.12 was used up to Mellite v2.43.0.

The dependencies will be downloaded automatically from Maven Central repository, except for snapshots during development.

Dependencies not found are all available from their respective git repositories, so in case you want to build a snapshot version, you may need to check out these projects and publish them yourself using sbt publishLocal.

See section 'running' for ways of building and installing standalone bundles.

building with bundled JDK

We are currently experimenting with a build variant that bundles the JDK using the JLink plugin for sbt-native-packager. In order to build this version, run sbt mellite-full/universal:packageBin. This must be done on a host JDK 11. The produced installation is platform dependent, so will create a version that only works on the OS you are building from.

Note that should probably specify an explicit java-home, otherwise the bundled package might be unreasonably large:

sbt ++2.13.7 -java-home ~/Downloads/OpenJDK11U-jdk_x64_linux_hotspot_11.0.9_11/jdk-11.0.9+11 clean update mellite-full/debian:packageBin

creating new releases

This section is an aide-mémoire for me in releasing stable versions.

check that no SNAPSHOT versions of libraries are used: cat build.sbt | grep SNAPSHOT. Change commonVersion and appVersion appropriately.
if releasing a new minor version, make sure it is binary compatible: sbt mimaReportBinaryIssues
check that libraries are up-to-date, and that there are no binary conflicts: sbt mellite-core/dependencyUpdates mellite-core/evicted
if the version bump is minor and Negatum and Freesound are not involved, skip to step 8
otherwise, there is a "ping-pong" process, and the need to publish (locally) a new version of mellite-core, then of negatum-core and negatum-views. The core library should be published using JDK 8 (I use script java-use-8 which calls update-java-alternatives). Then: sbt +mellite-core/clean +mellite-core/update +mellite-core/publishLocal.
Check Negatum: sbt negatum-core/dependencyUpdates negatum-core/evicted. Publish locally: sbt +negatum-core/clean +negatum-core/update +negatum-core/publishLocal and sbt +negatum-views/clean +negatum-views/update +negatum-views/publishLocal
Check ScalaFreesound: sbt dependencyUpdates evicted. Publish locally: sbt +clean +update +test +publishLocal
now for app: sbt mellite-app/dependencyUpdates mellite-app/evicted
License information is updated by running sbt mellite-app/dumpLicenseReport via sbt-license-report. Output is found in app/src/main/resources/de/sciss/mellite/mellite-app-licenses.csv.
Make sure the XFree desktop file version is set: vim app/src/debian/Mellite.desktop
Update the release versions in README.md
Update the release notes in changeLog of build.sbt
Test the app building: sbt +mellite-app/clean +mellite-app/update +mellite-app/test mellite-app/assembly

publish to Maven Central

scripts/publishSignedApp.sh will release the Scala 2.13 build of the app module. If the core module has been updated, it must be published separately and explicitly with scripts/publishSignedCore.sh.

fully bundled standalone

We're currently publishing the following artifacts:

mellite_<version>_all.zip
mellite-full_<version>_linux_x64.zip
mellite-full_<version>_amd64.deb
mellite-full_<version>_win_x64.zip
mellite-full_<version>_mac_x64.zip

To build for Linux:

java-use-8
sbt mellite-app/universal:packageBin
java-use-11
sbt -java-home '/home/hhrutz/Downloads/OpenJDK11U-jdk_x64_linux_hotspot_11.0.9_11/jdk-11.0.9+11' mellite-full/universal:packageBin mellite-full/debian:packageBin

Copy the artifacts to a safe location now. To build for Mac and Windows, we need to publish all libraries now to Maven Central (use JDK 8 again!). Then Windows can be built on Linux using wine:

rm -rf full/target (otherwise Jlink fails)
wine cmd.exe and Z:\home\hhrutz\Downloads\OpenJDK11U-jdk_x64_windows_hotspot_11.0.12_7\jdk-11.0.12+7\bin\java.exe -jar Z:\home\hhrutz\Downloads\sbt-1.4.2\sbt\bin\sbt-launch.jar then in sbt console: project mellite-full and universal:packageBin
quit wine and rm -r null (some Coursier junk)

N.B.: sbt 1.4.x seems no longer to work under wine due to coursier updates; for now we can still build by setting the version in build.properties to 1.3.13 and removing versionScheme from build.sbt temporarily!

For Mac, we need a bloody fruit company machine:

git fetch; git merge origin/work
./sbt -java-home /Users/naya/Downloads/jdk-11.0.9+11/Contents/Home clean update mellite-full/universal:packageBin
We need to set the execution bits on Linux after copying the zip to the Linux machine, and unpacking it: rm mellite-full_<version>_mac_x64/bin/mellite.bat then rm mellite-full_<version>_mac_x64.zip then chmod a+x mellite-full_<version>_mac_x64/bin/mellite then chmod a+x mellite-full_<version>_mac_x64/jre/bin/*
Repackage: zip -y -r -9 mellite-full_<version>_mac_x64.zip mellite-full_<version>_mac_x64

sciss / mellite 2.29.1