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revision 1119 by persson, Sat Mar 24 14:04:30 2007 UTC revision 3882 by schoenebeck, Sun May 9 12:33:39 2021 UTC
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1    Version 1.2.0 (2021-05-09)
2    
3      This release provides various new features and as always of course also
4      numerous fixes.
5    
6      A C++11 compliant compiler is now at least required to build Gigedit from
7      source.
8    
9      The real-time instrument script editor supports now syntax highlighting for
10      LinuxSampler's new standard measuring units (kHz, c, ms, dB, etc.) feature for
11      the NKSP script language. On the right hand side of Gigedit (the main working
12      area actually) there is now a new tab "Script" which reveals a list of so
13      called NKSP "patch" variables, which are variables published by instrument
14      script authors to be directly accessible from the instrument editor and allows
15      to override the values of certain instrument script variables on a per
16      instrument basis in order to fine tune certains aspects of a script for
17      individual instruments.
18    
19      Latest LinuxSampler 2.2.0 added various gig format extensions which are now
20      available on Gigedit side as well: for instance for LFOs you can select from
21      multiple wave forms (sine, triangle, square and saw) and you can fine tune
22      the start phase of each LFO. To make it more intuitive the resulting LFO wave
23      is drawn as preview on screen according to the chosen LFO parameters. Another
24      gig format extension by latest LinuxSampler are new filter types which can be
25      chosen from (along to the already existing filter types which will continue to
26      co-exist): lowpass 1/2/4/6-pole, highpass 1/2/4/6-pole, bandpass 2-pole and
27      bandreject 2-pole.
28    
29      A new dialog has been added to access the meta info of individual samples,
30      similar to the meta info dialog that already existed for individual
31      instruments.
32    
33      Gain can now be set to any arbitary value between -96 dB .. +96 dB. Previously
34      it was only possible to set gain to max. 0 dB and there was a checkbox which
35      allowed a hard coded boost to exactly +6 dB. The previous appearance
36      replicated the appearance of GigaStudio's original instrument editor. The
37      previous limitation of having just a single possible value for positive gain
38      was unfortunate, but as it turned out this was actually not a limitation of
39      the original gig file format. And in fact we have not added any gig file
40      format extension for this reason to achieve this new freedom of arbitrary gain
41      settings. So setting a positive gain of e.g. let's say +1.45 dB does not break
42      compatibility of your sounds with GigaStudio.
43    
44      And last but not least various minor convenience functions have been added,
45      for instance the default double click behaviour on instruments (which would
46      open their meta info dialog) can now optionally be disabled, window size,
47      position and vertical spliter position are now auto saved and restored among
48      Gigedit sessions and the up/down buttons' steps have been individually
49      adjusted to make more sense for the individual synthesis parameters they
50      control. And regarding the latter: remember that the up/down steppers do
51      actually have two distinct operations per button: a regular left-mouse click
52      for small changes and middle-mouse click for larger changes. Both have been
53      adjusted appropriately for the individual synthesis parameters they control.
54    
55    Version 1.1.1 (2019-07-27)
56    
57      This is a maintenance release with numerous fixes and the following
58      few new features:
59    
60      From the file properties dialog you can now choose to specifically save a
61      gig file in GigaStudio v4 file format (from the main menu select
62      "File" -> "Properties" -> "File Format"). So you can override the file
63      format version of already existing gig files that way.
64    
65      There is now a combo box and checkbox on "Misc" tab which allow to define
66      when precisely release trigger samples shall be played. This is an
67      extension of the original gig file format. You have the option to play
68      release trigger samples only on note-off events (which is now the default
69      behaviour in the latest release version of LinuxSampler), or only on
70      sustain pedal up events, or both on note-off events and on sustain pedal
71      up events. These are options on dimension region level, so you can
72      override this behaviour even for individual cases, not just for the
73      entire instrument.
74    
75      When working on gig files with more than one real-time instrument script
76      per file, it was sometimes a bit tedious to keep track of which instrument
77      was using which script exactly, because it involved a right-click on the
78      individual instrument to get to the script slots dialog of the instrument,
79      which finally listed the scripts being used. You no longer have to do that
80      just to check which scripts are being used: Just hover your mouse over the
81      "Scripts" column of the instruments table on the left hand side of
82      gigedit; a coloured popup will appear with the list of scripts currently
83      being assigned to the instrument.
84    
85      Likewise it is a very common task to remove all scripts from an
86      instrument. There is now a keyboard shortcut for that: Just select the
87      instrument from the instruments list and then hit Shift + Backspace.
88    
89      Gigedit provides a large number of tooltips when you are hovering your
90      mouse over the huge amount of individual controls and menu items the
91      application is offering in the meantime. In case you find that annoying,
92      you can now disable those particular tooltips which are specifically
93      intended for beginners from the main menu by unchecking "View" ->
94      "Tooltips for Beginners". All other tooltips that are still useful for
95      daily work with gigedit are still being shown when this option is
96      unchecked.
97    
98      The previous release of gigedit introduced "Macros" for quickly
99      performing frequently used sequences of editor actions, and you were able
100      to assign your macros to keyboard function keys F1 .. F12. In this release
101      you can now also assign macros to function keys up to F19, in case you own
102      one of those keyboards with such a large amount of function keys.
103    
104    Version 1.1.0 (2017-11-25)
105    
106      This release adds various improvements for the NKSP real-time instrument
107      script editor of gigedit. LinuxSampler's NKSP script editor API is now
108      used by gigedit to visualize all issues of scripts (errors and warnings)
109      in real-time while you are typing with the script editor. The respective
110      locations of script errors / warnings are automatically highlighted in
111      red and yellow color respectively and when the mouse pointer is moved
112      over those code locations, then the precise error / warning message is
113      displayed as tooltip. And since gigedit's script editor is now tightly
114      coupled with the sampler's script engine this way, all the heavy work of
115      handling all aspects of the script language is now performed by the actual
116      sampler's script engine and thus you can now be sure and immediately see
117      whether there are any issues with your scripts with any character you are
118      typing, and if yes what kind of issues exactly, and that without
119      requiring to actually load the script into the sampler. To use these
120      features, gigedit must be compiled and linked against liblinuxsampler.
121      If gigedit is not compiled with liblinuxsampler support then the old hand
122      written, error prone and very feature limited script editor implementation
123      is used instead. Needless to say that compiling gigedit without
124      liblinuxsampler support is discouraged. Additionally when clicking on the
125      script editor's "Apply" button or using Ctrl+S keyboard shortcut, then
126      the script is automatically reloaded by the sampler. So you no longer
127      have to reload the respective instrument manually while you are
128      developing instrument scripts. There are also visual enhancements for the
129      script editor, for example the line numbers are now shown on the left,
130      the font size can be altered by the user, and unused code portions (i.e.
131      disabled by NKSP preprocessor statements) are automatically striked
132      through.
133    
134      Another major new feature in this release are macros. A macro is a set of
135      changes that should be applied to currently selected instrument. Such
136      macros can be reviewed and edited, and they can be saved permanently for
137      example as templates for common instrument creation tasks. Macros can be
138      assigned to F keys on the keyboard so that they can be quickly triggered,
139      you can transfer them over the OS clipboard and you can write comments
140      to your macros so that you never forget what kind of purpose you had in
141      mind for them. The macro features are based on libgig's new
142      "Serialization" framework and accordingly you need at least libgig 4.1.0
143      for using these macro features.
144    
145      All user settings of gigedit are now persistently saved and automatically
146      restored. This also includes gigedit's windows' dimensions and positions.
147    
148      Multi-row selection has been added to all list views now, so you can now
149      more efficiently apply actions to multiple samples, instruments or scripts
150      simultaneously at once, instead of requesting those actions for each item
151      individually.
152    
153      Also modifying key features of several dimension region zones
154      simultaneously is now supported. That means you can now delete, split and
155      resize multiple dimension region zones at once.
156    
157      You will also note that there are now icons displayed on the individual
158      regions and dimension region zones. Those icons visualize common key
159      features of regions and dimension region zones. For example if you forgot
160      to assign any sample to one of them, then you will see a red dot on the
161      respective region or dimension region zone. Another icon type is showing
162      you whether a region or dimension region zone uses a sample loop. This way
163      you can immediately see and control the key features of all regions
164      and their dimension region zones, without requiring to browse through all
165      of them individually.
166    
167      Various new keyboard shortcuts have been added so you can work more
168      efficiently on your sounds. For example you can now use Ctrl+Left and
169      Ctrl+Right to navigate through all regions of the currently selected
170      instrument, and likewise you can use Alt+Left, Alt+Right, Alt+Up and
171      Alt+Down to navigate through all dimension region zones of the currently
172      selected region. Since there are many actions that can be either applied
173      on instrument level, or on region level, or on dimension region level, as
174      a general rule, for all keyboard shortcuts the Alt key is used by gigedit
175      for actions on dimension region level, whereas the Ctrl key is used on
176      region level and the Shift key is used for actions on instrument level.
177      So as another example you may copy all parameters of the currently
178      selected dimension region zone by hitting Alt+C, then you might select
179      another dimension region zone, or another instrument and then use Alt+V
180      to apply the parameters from the clipboard. While the parameters are
181      (as macro actually) on the clipboard you can also review, edit and
182      delete the individual parameters before applying them. As a final
183      example for new important shortcuts you may now use Shift+Up and
184      Shift+Down for switching between instruments.
185    
186      Also the Combine Tool has been improved. You can now simply select the
187      (multiple) instruments you want to combine directly from the applications
188      main window, i.e. by Ctrl or Shift clicking them from the instruments
189      list view, and then right click to call the combine tool on that
190      selection. The Combine Tool now also shows you as preview the order in
191      which the selected instruments are going to be combined. This is
192      especially useful when combining instruments with certain dimension
193      types where the order matters for the actual resulting sound; for example
194      when using the velocity dimension. Simply use drag n drop to reorder
195      the previously selected instruments before combining.
196    
197      Since LinuxSampler 2.1.0 added a Giga format extension which allows to
198      control the envelope generators' state machines more precisely; new
199      options have been added to gigedit to control these new EG features.
200      For example there are new check box which you can use to define for
201      each envelope whether the individual EG stages should still be completed
202      or rather aborted if a note-off was received. These new EG settings matter
203      a lot for certain instrument types like percussive instruments.
204    
205      And last but not least a filter option field had been added to the
206      instruments list and samples list, which allows you to find specific
207      samples and instruments very quickly by typing search key words, which is
208      especially very helpful in case you are working on gig files which contain
209      a very large amount of samples or instruments in a single gig file.
210    
211    Version 1.0.0 (2015-07-17)
212    
213      With this release we added support for new GigaStudio 4 features, for
214      example there are now dialogs for editing some of the new so called
215      "iMIDI rules". These can be used i.e. to trigger notes by MIDI CC and to
216      define a set of legato samples. You may have heard that the GigaStudio
217      software has seen its last version with GigaStudio 4. Tascam officially
218      discontinued this product, its intellectual property has been sold several
219      times among companies and there is currently no way to buy a new copy of
220      GigaStudio anymore. However the GigaStudio format is still under active
221      development with gigedit and LinuxSampler. For the first time ever we added
222      our own extensions to the Giga format: one of it is major new feature
223      called "real-time instrument scripts", which allows to bundle small programs
224      with your .gig sounds, which extend the sampler with custom behavior for
225      specific sounds. You may know such kind of instrument scripts from
226      commercial software samplers. Find out more about this new feature on
227      http://doc.linuxsampler.org/Instrument_Scripts/. Another rather minor
228      extension to the Giga format is support for various other MIDI CCs which
229      were never supported by GigaStudio before. So you can now use any MIDI CC
230      for EG1 controller, EG2 controller and attenuation controller. Obviously all
231      those extensions will not work with any GigaStudio version, they only work
232      with a recent version of Gigedit and LinuxSampler. Gigedit will inform you
233      whenever you are using such kind of custom Giga format extension, so that you
234      are always aware in case your changes are not cross/backward compatible with
235      the GigaStudio software. A load of enhancements have been added to Gigedit
236      in the last six years: Until now you were only able to edit either exactly
237      one dimension region or all dimension regions simultaneously. With this
238      release you may now hold the Ctrl button and select a specific set of
239      dimension region zones in the dimension region selector area (on the very
240      bottom of the Gigedit window) with your mouse. All synthesis parameters you
241      then change, will all be applied to that precise set of dimension region
242      zones. Also managing dimensions have been improved: previously to change the
243      amount of zones of a dimension you had to delete and recreate the dimension.
244      Which was not just inconvenient, but you also had to redefine your synthesis
245      parameters from scratch. Now you can just open the dimension manager dialog
246      and increase or decrease the amount of zones of a dimension with few clicks.
247      Same applies to the dimension type: you may now simply open the dimension
248      manager dialog and alter the type of a dimension with few clicks.
249      When working on complex Giga sounds you certainly noticed that one could
250      easily get confused about which samples are exactly used by which instrument
251      or even whether a sample is actually used at all by any instrument or just
252      left orphaned and wasting disk space. This was also due to the fact that the
253      Giga format does not require unique names for samples. We have worked on
254      resolving this usability issue. In the sample list view you can now read the
255      amount of times a sample is referenced by instruments of your .gig file. If a
256      sample is not used at all, then it will be shown in striking red color in
257      the sample list view. You may also right click on a sample and select
258      "Show references...", a new window appears on your screen which will show you
259      where exactly that particular sample is used by, that is which by which
260      instruments and by which regions of those instruments. Also the other way
261      around has been addressed: when you now edit the synthesis parameters of a
262      particular dimension region, you may now click on the new "<- Select Sample"
263      button and Gigedit automatically selects and displays the respective sample
264      in the samples list view, which you may then might rename to some more
265      appropriate sample name, or you might check by which other instrument(s) that
266      sample is used by, etc. You may now also remove the current sample reference
267      from individual dimension regions (assigning a so called "NULL" sample) by
268      clicking on the new "X" button next the sample reference field on the
269      "Sample" tab of a dimension region; this allows you to define "silent cases",
270      that is a case where no sample should be played at all, for example this is
271      often used for very low velocity ranges of i.e. between 0 and 6. If you are
272      working on .gig files with a large amount of Instruments, then you might also
273      be glad to know that you can finally also re-order the instruments of a file
274      by simply dragging the instruments around in the instruments list view.
275      Another handy new feature for sound designers is the new "Combine" tool,
276      which you can reach from the main menu. It allows you to select two ore more
277      instruments (by holding down the Ctrl key while selecting with mouse click)
278      from your currently open Giga file and combine those selected instruments to
279      a new instrument. This way you may for example create stunning layered
280      sounds, or you may create velocity splits, crossfade sounds by MIDI
281      controller and much more, all with just a few clicks. This may sound like a
282      trivial task, but if you have worked on this before, you certainly noticed
283      that this was often a very time consuming and error prone task before,
284      especially with complex individual sounds which had custom region ranges,
285      custom velocity splits and much more exotic stuff to take care of. The
286      combine tool handles all such cases for you automatically.
287      Last but not least, the interaction of Gigedit with LinuxSampler (in so
288      called "live mode") had been improved: When you click on the "Edit" button of
289      a channel strip in QSampler or Fantasia, Gigedit will be launched with the
290      respective instrument automatically being selected. Vice versa you may now
291      also just select another instrument with Gigedit's instrument list view and
292      LinuxSampler will automatically load and play that instrument on the
293      respective sampler part for you. So no more need to switch between the
294      Gigedit window and QSampler/Fantasia window all the time while working on
295      your sounds.
296    
297    Version 0.2.0 (2009-07-31)
298    
299      When gigedit is running as a plugin in LinuxSampler the gigedit
300      keyboard may now be used to trigger notes. The settings in the file
301      properties window are now editable. A new function for replacing all
302      samples is added. Otherwise this is mostly a bug fix release, and
303      upgrading gigedit and libgig is strongly recommended, as previous
304      versions had bugs that may cause edited gig files to be corrupted.
305    
306    Version 0.1.1 (2007-12-06)
307    
308      Parameter edits can now be applied to multiple regions and dimension
309      regions simultaneously - three checkboxes were added that select if
310      changes apply to all regions and/or all dimension regions.
311    
312    Version 0.1.0 (2007-10-15)
313    
314      Many fixes have been made to make sure that the gig files created by
315      gigedit are working properly in LinuxSampler and GigaStudio. Gigedit
316      can now be run as a LinuxSampler plugin, allowing live editing of
317      loaded instruments. Sample loop parameters and instrument global
318      properties can now be edited. 24 bit samples can be imported. A
319      quick-start document has been added. Lots of other minor fixes and
320      improvements have been done.
321    
322  Version 0.0.3 (2007-03-24)  Version 0.0.3 (2007-03-24)
323    
324    First version of gigedit. The program is renamed from gigview to    First version of gigedit. The program is renamed from gigview to

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