CHANGELOG.md

History

Version 2.4 - 'Defrost'

Wednesday 11th February, 2015 (view commits)

A quick release following v2.3 to address an issue with the GUI freezing on specific CPUs. However, although this release has had a small development cycle, it ships with three fantastic features. Firstly we now have the spread fn which provides an amazing way to create interesting rhythms with very little code. Secondly we can now use cutoff: on any sample massively increasing their timbral range and finally we have three exciting new synths for you to play with. Have fun!

Breaking Changes

• Unfortunately 5 pre-release synths accidentally slipped into v2.3. Three of them have been polished up and are in this release (one with major changes including a name change). However, the other two have been removed.

New

• New fn spread for creating rings of Euclidean distributions. Great for quickly creating interesting rhythms.
• GUI now automatically appends a : to the FX param autocomplete list
• Synths and FX now raise an exception if any of their non-modulatable params are modulated. This is disabled when the pref 'check synth args' is unchecked.
• GUI now renders pretty UTF-8 └─ ├─ characters when printing in the log on RP.
• Improve docstrings for sample player.

Synths & FX

• New Synth :dark_ambience, an ambient bass trying to escape the darkness.
• New Synth :hollow, a hollow breathy sound.
• New Synth :growl, a deep rumbling growl.
• Sampler synths now sport built-in rlpf and normaliser FX. These are disabled by default (i.e. won't affect sound of the sample) and can by enabled via the new cutoff:, res: and norm: params.

Bug Fixes

• Fix insanely obsure bug which caused the GUI to freeze on certain platforms (32 bit Windows and RP2 with 2G/2G kernel).
• Remove DC Bias offset from Prophet synth (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC_bias)

Version 2.3 - 'Bitcrush'

Wednesday 28th January, 2015 (view commits)

Breaking Changes

• Playing chords with the fn chord now divides the amplitiude of each resulting synth by the number of notes in the chord. This ensures the resulting amplitude isn't excessive and is normalised.
• Chords now evaluate their args once and those args are used for all synth triggers. This means random values are only generated once and are similar across all notes in the chord. Previous behaviour can be obtained by calling play multiple times with no interleaved sleeps.
• Ensure each new thread's random number generator is unique yet seeded in a deterministic manner. This stops random vals across at from being identical.
• range is now exclusive: (range 1, 5) #=> (ring 1, 2, 3, 4)

New

• New fn density for compressing and repeating time Dr Who style. For example, wrapping some code with a call to density of 2 will double the bpm for that block as well as repeating it twice. This ensures the block takes the same amount of time to execute while doing double the work.
• New fns with_bpm_mul and use_bpm_mul which will multiply the current bpm by a specified amount. Useful for slowing down and speeding up the execution of a specific thread or live_loop.
• New fn rdist - generate a random number with a centred distribution
• New examples: square skit, shufflit and tilburg

Improvements

• Teach control to ignore nil nodes i.e. control nil, amp: 3 will do nothing.
• Teach Float#times to yield a float to the block. For example, 3.4.times {|v| puts v} will yield 0.0, 1.0 and 2.0.
• Synth, Sample and FX args now handle bools and nil correctly. true resolves to 1.0 and false, nil resolve to 0.0. This allows you to write code such as: play :e3, invert_wave: true
• Teach at to handle varying block arities differently. See docs for more detail. Original behaviour is preserved and only extended.
• App now checks for updates (at most once every 2 weeks). This may be disabled in the prefs.
• Teach :reverb FX to extend its kill delay time with larger room sizes to reduce the chance of clipping.

Synths & FX

• New FX bitcrusher - for crunching and destroying those hi-fi sounds.
• New FX flanger - a classic swhooshing effect typically used with vocals and guitars.
• New FX ring - ring modulation for that friendly Dalek sound
• New FX bpf - a band pass filter
• New FX rbpf - a resonant band pass filter
• New FX nbpf - a normalised band pass filter
• New FX nrbpf - a normalised resonant band pass filter

New Samples

• perc_snap - a finger snap
• perc_snap2 - another finger snap
• bd_ada - a bass drum
• guit_em9 - a lovely guitar arpegio over Em9

Bug Fixes

• Namespace live_loop fn and thread names to stop them clashing with standard user defined threads and fns.
• GUI no longer crashes when you start a line with a symbol.
• with_fx now returns the result of the block
• Kill zombie scsynth servers on startup for better crash recovery.
• Handle paths with UTF8 characters gracefully
• Force sample rate for output and input to 44k on OS X. This stops scsynth from crashing when output and input sample rates are different.

Version 2.2 - 'Slicer'

Thursday 18th December, 2014 (view commits)

This release brings a number of nice enhancements. However the main feature is the accurate timing for triggering FX. This means you can now reliably use FX for accurate rhythmic purposes such as wobbling, slicing and echoes.

Breaking Changes

• use_sample_pack_as now uses a double underscore __ as a separator between the user-specified alias and the sample name.

API Changes

• Teach synth args to take prefixed maps: play 50, {amp: 0.5}, {release: 2}, amp: 2
• Don't round Floats when user specifically prints them to log with puts
• with_fx FX synths are now triggered using virtual time rather than real time. This means that FX can now be used for rhythmical purposes.
• Work on new RingArray datastructure. This is essentially an array that wraps its indexes so you can use indexes larger than the array size.
• New fn ring - (ring 1, 2, 3) creates a new ring array.
• New fn knit - (knit :a1, 2, :c1, 1) returns (ring :a1, :a1, :c1)
• New fn bools - (bools 1, 0, 1) returns (ring true, false, true)
• New fn range - (range 70, 100, 10) returns (ring 70, 80, 90, 100)
• New fn sample_loaded? - to detect whether a specific sample has been loaded

Synths & FX

• Fixed regression in :tb303 synth - sound is reverted to v2.0 behaviour
• New Synth - :square - Pure square wave

GUI

• Help system now autodocks on close
• Preferences are now remembered across sessions
• On Raspberry Pi, previous volume and audio output options are forced on boot.

New Samples

• bd_tek - Bass drum

Bug fixes

• one_in now returns false if num is < 1
• Ensure live_loop's no-sleep detector works within nested with_fx blocks
• chord now returns a ring.

Version 2.1.1

Tuesday 25th November, 2014 (view commits)

• Windows version no longer needs special firewall exceptions to run
• Added license information to info window
• Minor grammar and spelling tweaks to tutorial

Version 2.1 - 'Core'

Friday 21st November, 2014 (view commits)

The focus of release is very much on technical improvements, efficiency and general polish.

The most obvious and exciting change is the introduction of the live_loop which will change the way you work with Sonic Pi. For more information on live_loop take a look at the new section in the tutorial. Another very exciting development is that v2.1 marks the official support for Windows thanks to the excellent work by Jeremy Weatherford. Finally, this release is also the first release where Sonic Pi has a Core Team of developers. Please give a warm welcome to Xavier Riley, Jeremy Weatherford and Joseph Wilk.

API Changes

• New fn live_loop - A loop for live coding
• New fn inc - increment
• New fn dec - decrement
• New fn quantise - quantise a value to resolution
• New fn factor? - Factor test
• New fn at - Run a block at the given times
• New fn degree - for resolving a note in a scale by degree such as :i, :iv
• New fn chord_degree - Construct chords based on scale degrees
• New TL fn use_sample_bpm - for changing the BPM based on a sample's duration
• New fn rest? - Determine if note or args is a rest
• New fn vt - Get virtual time
• New fn set_control_delta! - Set control delta globally
• wait now handles both sleep and sync functionality
• Allow first arg to play to be a proc or lambda. In which case simple call it and use the result as the note
• Teach play to accept a single map argument (in which case it will extract :note key out if it exists.
• Fns play and synth now treat 'notes' nil, :r and :rest as rests and don't trigger any synths.

GUI Modifications

• Updated and improved tutorial
• Much improved autocompletion
• Add HPF, LPF, mono forcer and stereo swapping preferences to new studio section for use when performing with Sonic Pi through an external PA.
• Shortcuts overhauled - now supports basic Emacs-style Ctrl-* navigation.
• Shortcuts Alt-[ and Alt-] now cycle through workspaces
• Shortcuts now work when toolbar is hidden
• Font sizes for individual workspaces are now stored between sessions
• Ctl-Mouse-wheel zooms font on Windows
• Links are now clickable (opening external browser)
• Entries in docsystem's synth arg table are now clickable and will take focus down to arg documentation
• Stop users accidentally clearing entire workspace if they type quickly after hitting run
• Hitting F1 or C-i over a function name now opens up the doc system at the relevant place

Bugs/Improvements

• Reworked examples.
• Much improved efficiency in many areas - especially for Raspberry Pi.
• Avoid occasional clicking sound when stopping runs
• Note Cb is now correctly resolved to be a semitone lower than C
• Non RP systems now start with more audio busses (1024)
• Array#sample and Array#shuffle are now correctly seeded with thread local random generator
• Log files are now placed into ~/.sonic-pi/log
• Chords and scales now wrap around when accessed from indexes outside of their range.
• rand_i and rrand_i now correctly return integers rather than floats
• rrand arguments now correctly handle a range of 0 (i.e. min == max)
• Line offset in error messages is now correct
• When saving files on Windows, CRLF line endings are used
• Stop users defining functions with same name as core API fns

Synths, Samples & FX

• New samples (bass drums, snares and loops)
• Allow mod_range param to have negative values (for oscillating with lower notes)
• Change slide mechanism to default to linear sliding with support for changing the curve type. All modifiable args now have corresponding _slide_shape and _slide_curve args.
• Improve TB303 synth - now supports separate cutoff ADSR envelopes. New args:
  • cutoff_attack,
  • cutoff_sustain,
  • cutoff_decay,
  • cutoff_release,
  • cutoff_min_slide,
  • cutoff_attack_level,
  • cutoff_sustain_level,
  • cutoff_env_curve

Version 2.0.1

Tuesday 9th September, 2014 (view commits)

• Fix recording functionality
• Improve documentation content and layout
• Close off OSC server from external clients
• Add History, Contributors and Community pages to info window
• Improve startup speed on OS X
• Re-work and add to shortcuts for key actions:
  • on RP they are all alt-* prefixed
  • on OS X they are all cmd-* prefixed
• Improve highlighting of log messages (cue/sync messages are more clearly highlighted)
• Log now communicates when a run has completed executing
• Fix bug encountered when stopping threads in super fast loops (stopped comms with server)

Version 2.0 - 'Phoenix'

Tuesday 2nd September, 2014 (view commits)

• Complete rewrite since v1.0
• Support for Live Coding - redefining behaviour whilst music is playing
• New timing system - timing now guaranteed to be accurate
• Many new synths
• New chainable studio FX system
• Support for sample playback
• Inclusion of over 70 CC0 licensed samples from http://freesound.org
• Support for controlling and modifying synth, fx and sample playback arguments after they have been triggered
• Completely re-designed GUI
• Help system with full documentation, tutorial and many examples
• Record functionality (for recording performances/pieces)
• Support for controlling system audio settings on RP