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Sat Nov 25 22:24:28 2017 UTC (6 years, 4 months ago) by schoenebeck
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* Preparations for new release (Gigedit 1.1.0).

1 Version 1.1.0 (2017-11-25)
2
3 This release adds various improvements for the NKSP real-time instrument
4 script editor of gigedit. LinuxSampler's NKSP script editor API is now
5 used by gigedit to visualize all issues of scripts (errors and warnings)
6 in real-time while you are typing with the script editor. The respective
7 locations of script errors / warnings are automatically highlighted in
8 red and yellow color respectively and when the mouse pointer is moved
9 over those code locations, then the precise error / warning message is
10 displayed as tooltip. And since gigedit's script editor is now tightly
11 coupled with the sampler's script engine this way, all the heavy work of
12 handling all aspects of the script language is now performed by the actual
13 sampler's script engine and thus you can now be sure and immediately see
14 whether there are any issues with your scripts with any character you are
15 typing, and if yes what kind of issues exactly, and that without
16 requiring to actually load the script into the sampler. To use these
17 features, gigedit must be compiled and linked against liblinuxsampler.
18 If gigedit is not compiled with liblinuxsampler support then the old hand
19 written, error prone and very feature limited script editor implementation
20 is used instead. Needless to say that compiling gigedit without
21 liblinuxsampler support is discouraged. Additionally when clicking on the
22 script editor's "Apply" button or using Ctrl+S keyboard shortcut, then
23 the script is automatically reloaded by the sampler. So you no longer
24 have to reload the respective instrument manually while you are
25 developing instrument scripts. There are also visual enhancements for the
26 script editor, for example the line numbers are now shown on the left,
27 the font size can be altered by the user, and unused code portions (i.e.
28 disabled by NKSP preprocessor statements) are automatically striked
29 through.
30
31 Another major new feature in this release are macros. A macro is a set of
32 changes that should be applied to currently selected instrument. Such
33 macros can be reviewed and edited, and they can be saved permanently for
34 example as templates for common instrument creation tasks. Macros can be
35 assigned to F keys on the keyboard so that they can be quickly triggered,
36 you can transfer them over the OS clipboard and you can write comments
37 to your macros so that you never forget what kind of purpose you had in
38 mind for them. The macro features are based on libgig's new
39 "Serialization" framework and accordingly you need at least libgig 4.1.0
40 for using these macro features.
41
42 All user settings of gigedit are now persistently saved and automatically
43 restored. This also includes gigedit's windows' dimensions and positions.
44
45 Multi-row selection has been added to all list views now, so you can now
46 more efficiently apply actions to multiple samples, instruments or scripts
47 simultaneously at once, instead of requesting those actions for each item
48 individually.
49
50 Also modifying key features of several dimension region zones
51 simultaneously is now supported. That means you can now delete, split and
52 resize multiple dimension region zones at once.
53
54 You will also note that there are now icons displayed on the individual
55 regions and dimension region zones. Those icons visualize common key
56 features of regions and dimension region zones. For example if you forgot
57 to assign any sample to one of them, then you will see a red dot on the
58 respective region or dimension region zone. Another icon type is showing
59 you whether a region or dimension region zone uses a sample loop. This way
60 you can immediately see and control the key features of all regions
61 and their dimension region zones, without requiring to browse through all
62 of them individually.
63
64 Various new keyboard shortcuts have been added so you can work more
65 efficiently on your sounds. For example you can now use Ctrl+Left and
66 Ctrl+Right to navigate through all regions of the currently selected
67 instrument, and likewise you can use Alt+Left, Alt+Right, Alt+Up and
68 Alt+Down to navigate through all dimension region zones of the currently
69 selected region. Since there are many actions that can be either applied
70 on instrument level, or on region level, or on dimension region level, as
71 a general rule, for all keyboard shortcuts the Alt key is used by gigedit
72 for actions on dimension region level, whereas the Ctrl key is used on
73 region level and the Shift key is used for actions on instrument level.
74 So as another example you may copy all parameters of the currently
75 selected dimension region zone by hitting Alt+C, then you might select
76 another dimension region zone, or another instrument and then use Alt+V
77 to apply the parameters from the clipboard. While the parameters are
78 (as macro actually) on the clipboard you can also review, edit and
79 delete the individual parameters before applying them. As a final
80 example for new important shortcuts you may now use Shift+Up and
81 Shift+Down for switching between instruments.
82
83 Also the Combine Tool has been improved. You can now simply select the
84 (multiple) instruments you want to combine directly from the applications
85 main window, i.e. by Ctrl or Shift clicking them from the instruments
86 list view, and then right click to call the combine tool on that
87 selection. The Combine Tool now also shows you as preview the order in
88 which the selected instruments are going to be combined. This is
89 especially useful when combining instruments with certain dimension
90 types where the order matters for the actual resulting sound; for example
91 when using the velocity dimension. Simply use drag n drop to reorder
92 the previously selected instruments before combining.
93
94 Since LinuxSampler 2.1.0 added a Giga format extension which allows to
95 control the envelope generators' state machines more precisely; new
96 options have been added to gigedit to control these new EG features.
97 For example there are new check box which you can use to define for
98 each envelope whether the individual EG stages should still be completed
99 or rather aborted if a note-off was received. These new EG settings matter
100 a lot for certain instrument types like percussive instruments.
101
102 And last but not least a filter option field had been added to the
103 instruments list and samples list, which allows you to find specific
104 samples and instruments very quickly by typing search key words, which is
105 especially very helpful in case you are working on gig files which contain
106 a very large amount of samples or instruments in a single gig file.
107
108 Version 1.0.0 (2015-07-17)
109
110 With this release we added support for new GigaStudio 4 features, for
111 example there are now dialogs for editing some of the new so called
112 "iMIDI rules". These can be used i.e. to trigger notes by MIDI CC and to
113 define a set of legato samples. You may have heard that the GigaStudio
114 software has seen its last version with GigaStudio 4. Tascam officially
115 discontinued this product, its intellectual property has been sold several
116 times among companies and there is currently no way to buy a new copy of
117 GigaStudio anymore. However the GigaStudio format is still under active
118 development with gigedit and LinuxSampler. For the first time ever we added
119 our own extensions to the Giga format: one of it is major new feature
120 called "real-time instrument scripts", which allows to bundle small programs
121 with your .gig sounds, which extend the sampler with custom behavior for
122 specific sounds. You may know such kind of instrument scripts from
123 commercial software samplers. Find out more about this new feature on
124 http://doc.linuxsampler.org/Instrument_Scripts/. Another rather minor
125 extension to the Giga format is support for various other MIDI CCs which
126 were never supported by GigaStudio before. So you can now use any MIDI CC
127 for EG1 controller, EG2 controller and attenuation controller. Obviously all
128 those extensions will not work with any GigaStudio version, they only work
129 with a recent version of Gigedit and LinuxSampler. Gigedit will inform you
130 whenever you are using such kind of custom Giga format extension, so that you
131 are always aware in case your changes are not cross/backward compatible with
132 the GigaStudio software. A load of enhancements have been added to Gigedit
133 in the last six years: Until now you were only able to edit either exactly
134 one dimension region or all dimension regions simultaneously. With this
135 release you may now hold the Ctrl button and select a specific set of
136 dimension region zones in the dimension region selector area (on the very
137 bottom of the Gigedit window) with your mouse. All synthesis parameters you
138 then change, will all be applied to that precise set of dimension region
139 zones. Also managing dimensions have been improved: previously to change the
140 amount of zones of a dimension you had to delete and recreate the dimension.
141 Which was not just inconvenient, but you also had to redefine your synthesis
142 parameters from scratch. Now you can just open the dimension manager dialog
143 and increase or decrease the amount of zones of a dimension with few clicks.
144 Same applies to the dimension type: you may now simply open the dimension
145 manager dialog and alter the type of a dimension with few clicks.
146 When working on complex Giga sounds you certainly noticed that one could
147 easily get confused about which samples are exactly used by which instrument
148 or even whether a sample is actually used at all by any instrument or just
149 left orphaned and wasting disk space. This was also due to the fact that the
150 Giga format does not require unique names for samples. We have worked on
151 resolving this usability issue. In the sample list view you can now read the
152 amount of times a sample is referenced by instruments of your .gig file. If a
153 sample is not used at all, then it will be shown in striking red color in
154 the sample list view. You may also right click on a sample and select
155 "Show references...", a new window appears on your screen which will show you
156 where exactly that particular sample is used by, that is which by which
157 instruments and by which regions of those instruments. Also the other way
158 around has been addressed: when you now edit the synthesis parameters of a
159 particular dimension region, you may now click on the new "<- Select Sample"
160 button and Gigedit automatically selects and displays the respective sample
161 in the samples list view, which you may then might rename to some more
162 appropriate sample name, or you might check by which other instrument(s) that
163 sample is used by, etc. You may now also remove the current sample reference
164 from individual dimension regions (assigning a so called "NULL" sample) by
165 clicking on the new "X" button next the sample reference field on the
166 "Sample" tab of a dimension region; this allows you to define "silent cases",
167 that is a case where no sample should be played at all, for example this is
168 often used for very low velocity ranges of i.e. between 0 and 6. If you are
169 working on .gig files with a large amount of Instruments, then you might also
170 be glad to know that you can finally also re-order the instruments of a file
171 by simply dragging the instruments around in the instruments list view.
172 Another handy new feature for sound designers is the new "Combine" tool,
173 which you can reach from the main menu. It allows you to select two ore more
174 instruments (by holding down the Ctrl key while selecting with mouse click)
175 from your currently open Giga file and combine those selected instruments to
176 a new instrument. This way you may for example create stunning layered
177 sounds, or you may create velocity splits, crossfade sounds by MIDI
178 controller and much more, all with just a few clicks. This may sound like a
179 trivial task, but if you have worked on this before, you certainly noticed
180 that this was often a very time consuming and error prone task before,
181 especially with complex individual sounds which had custom region ranges,
182 custom velocity splits and much more exotic stuff to take care of. The
183 combine tool handles all such cases for you automatically.
184 Last but not least, the interaction of Gigedit with LinuxSampler (in so
185 called "live mode") had been improved: When you click on the "Edit" button of
186 a channel strip in QSampler or Fantasia, Gigedit will be launched with the
187 respective instrument automatically being selected. Vice versa you may now
188 also just select another instrument with Gigedit's instrument list view and
189 LinuxSampler will automatically load and play that instrument on the
190 respective sampler part for you. So no more need to switch between the
191 Gigedit window and QSampler/Fantasia window all the time while working on
192 your sounds.
193
194 Version 0.2.0 (2009-07-31)
195
196 When gigedit is running as a plugin in LinuxSampler the gigedit
197 keyboard may now be used to trigger notes. The settings in the file
198 properties window are now editable. A new function for replacing all
199 samples is added. Otherwise this is mostly a bug fix release, and
200 upgrading gigedit and libgig is strongly recommended, as previous
201 versions had bugs that may cause edited gig files to be corrupted.
202
203 Version 0.1.1 (2007-12-06)
204
205 Parameter edits can now be applied to multiple regions and dimension
206 regions simultaneously - three checkboxes were added that select if
207 changes apply to all regions and/or all dimension regions.
208
209 Version 0.1.0 (2007-10-15)
210
211 Many fixes have been made to make sure that the gig files created by
212 gigedit are working properly in LinuxSampler and GigaStudio. Gigedit
213 can now be run as a LinuxSampler plugin, allowing live editing of
214 loaded instruments. Sample loop parameters and instrument global
215 properties can now be edited. 24 bit samples can be imported. A
216 quick-start document has been added. Lots of other minor fixes and
217 improvements have been done.
218
219 Version 0.0.3 (2007-03-24)
220
221 First version of gigedit. The program is renamed from gigview to
222 gigedit as it is now an editor, not just a viewer. Basic support for
223 both editing existing gig files and creating new ones from scratch
224 is provided.
225
226 Version 0.0.2 (2006-11-05)
227
228 Quick fix for a thread initialization problem.
229
230 Version 0.0.1 (2006-11-05)
231
232 First version of gigview.

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