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Revision 3540 - (show annotations) (download)
Sat Jul 27 18:50:28 2019 UTC (4 years, 8 months ago) by schoenebeck
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* Preparations for new release (Gigedit 1.1.1).

1 Version 1.1.1 (2019-07-27)
2
3 This is a maintenance release with numerous fixes and the following
4 few new features:
5
6 From the file properties dialog you can now choose to specifically save a
7 gig file in GigaStudio v4 file format (from the main menu select
8 "File" -> "Properties" -> "File Format"). So you can override the file
9 format version of already existing gig files that way.
10
11 There is now a combo box and checkbox on "Misc" tab which allow to define
12 when precisely release trigger samples shall be played. This is an
13 extension of the original gig file format. You have the option to play
14 release trigger samples only on note-off events (which is now the default
15 behaviour in the latest release version of LinuxSampler), or only on
16 sustain pedal up events, or both on note-off events and on sustain pedal
17 up events. These are options on dimension region level, so you can
18 override this behaviour even for individual cases, not just for the
19 entire instrument.
20
21 When working on gig files with more than one real-time instrument script
22 per file, it was sometimes a bit tedious to keep track of which instrument
23 was using which script exactly, because it involved a right-click on the
24 individual instrument to get to the script slots dialog of the instrument,
25 which finally listed the scripts being used. You no longer have to do that
26 just to check which scripts are being used: Just hover your mouse over the
27 "Scripts" column of the instruments table on the left hand side of
28 gigedit; a coloured popup will appear with the list of scripts currently
29 being assigned to the instrument.
30
31 Likewise it is a very common task to remove all scripts from an
32 instrument. There is now a keyboard shortcut for that: Just select the
33 instrument from the instruments list and then hit Shift + Backspace.
34
35 Gigedit provides a large number of tooltips when you are hovering your
36 mouse over the huge amount of individual controls and menu items the
37 application is offering in the meantime. In case you find that annoying,
38 you can now disable those particular tooltips which are specifically
39 intended for beginners from the main menu by unchecking "View" ->
40 "Tooltips for Beginners". All other tooltips that are still useful for
41 daily work with gigedit are still being shown when this option is
42 unchecked.
43
44 The previous release of gigedit introduced "Macros" for quickly
45 performing frequently used sequences of editor actions, and you were able
46 to assign your macros to keyboard function keys F1 .. F12. In this release
47 you can now also assign macros to function keys up to F19, in case you own
48 one of those keyboards with such a large amount of function keys.
49
50 Version 1.1.0 (2017-11-25)
51
52 This release adds various improvements for the NKSP real-time instrument
53 script editor of gigedit. LinuxSampler's NKSP script editor API is now
54 used by gigedit to visualize all issues of scripts (errors and warnings)
55 in real-time while you are typing with the script editor. The respective
56 locations of script errors / warnings are automatically highlighted in
57 red and yellow color respectively and when the mouse pointer is moved
58 over those code locations, then the precise error / warning message is
59 displayed as tooltip. And since gigedit's script editor is now tightly
60 coupled with the sampler's script engine this way, all the heavy work of
61 handling all aspects of the script language is now performed by the actual
62 sampler's script engine and thus you can now be sure and immediately see
63 whether there are any issues with your scripts with any character you are
64 typing, and if yes what kind of issues exactly, and that without
65 requiring to actually load the script into the sampler. To use these
66 features, gigedit must be compiled and linked against liblinuxsampler.
67 If gigedit is not compiled with liblinuxsampler support then the old hand
68 written, error prone and very feature limited script editor implementation
69 is used instead. Needless to say that compiling gigedit without
70 liblinuxsampler support is discouraged. Additionally when clicking on the
71 script editor's "Apply" button or using Ctrl+S keyboard shortcut, then
72 the script is automatically reloaded by the sampler. So you no longer
73 have to reload the respective instrument manually while you are
74 developing instrument scripts. There are also visual enhancements for the
75 script editor, for example the line numbers are now shown on the left,
76 the font size can be altered by the user, and unused code portions (i.e.
77 disabled by NKSP preprocessor statements) are automatically striked
78 through.
79
80 Another major new feature in this release are macros. A macro is a set of
81 changes that should be applied to currently selected instrument. Such
82 macros can be reviewed and edited, and they can be saved permanently for
83 example as templates for common instrument creation tasks. Macros can be
84 assigned to F keys on the keyboard so that they can be quickly triggered,
85 you can transfer them over the OS clipboard and you can write comments
86 to your macros so that you never forget what kind of purpose you had in
87 mind for them. The macro features are based on libgig's new
88 "Serialization" framework and accordingly you need at least libgig 4.1.0
89 for using these macro features.
90
91 All user settings of gigedit are now persistently saved and automatically
92 restored. This also includes gigedit's windows' dimensions and positions.
93
94 Multi-row selection has been added to all list views now, so you can now
95 more efficiently apply actions to multiple samples, instruments or scripts
96 simultaneously at once, instead of requesting those actions for each item
97 individually.
98
99 Also modifying key features of several dimension region zones
100 simultaneously is now supported. That means you can now delete, split and
101 resize multiple dimension region zones at once.
102
103 You will also note that there are now icons displayed on the individual
104 regions and dimension region zones. Those icons visualize common key
105 features of regions and dimension region zones. For example if you forgot
106 to assign any sample to one of them, then you will see a red dot on the
107 respective region or dimension region zone. Another icon type is showing
108 you whether a region or dimension region zone uses a sample loop. This way
109 you can immediately see and control the key features of all regions
110 and their dimension region zones, without requiring to browse through all
111 of them individually.
112
113 Various new keyboard shortcuts have been added so you can work more
114 efficiently on your sounds. For example you can now use Ctrl+Left and
115 Ctrl+Right to navigate through all regions of the currently selected
116 instrument, and likewise you can use Alt+Left, Alt+Right, Alt+Up and
117 Alt+Down to navigate through all dimension region zones of the currently
118 selected region. Since there are many actions that can be either applied
119 on instrument level, or on region level, or on dimension region level, as
120 a general rule, for all keyboard shortcuts the Alt key is used by gigedit
121 for actions on dimension region level, whereas the Ctrl key is used on
122 region level and the Shift key is used for actions on instrument level.
123 So as another example you may copy all parameters of the currently
124 selected dimension region zone by hitting Alt+C, then you might select
125 another dimension region zone, or another instrument and then use Alt+V
126 to apply the parameters from the clipboard. While the parameters are
127 (as macro actually) on the clipboard you can also review, edit and
128 delete the individual parameters before applying them. As a final
129 example for new important shortcuts you may now use Shift+Up and
130 Shift+Down for switching between instruments.
131
132 Also the Combine Tool has been improved. You can now simply select the
133 (multiple) instruments you want to combine directly from the applications
134 main window, i.e. by Ctrl or Shift clicking them from the instruments
135 list view, and then right click to call the combine tool on that
136 selection. The Combine Tool now also shows you as preview the order in
137 which the selected instruments are going to be combined. This is
138 especially useful when combining instruments with certain dimension
139 types where the order matters for the actual resulting sound; for example
140 when using the velocity dimension. Simply use drag n drop to reorder
141 the previously selected instruments before combining.
142
143 Since LinuxSampler 2.1.0 added a Giga format extension which allows to
144 control the envelope generators' state machines more precisely; new
145 options have been added to gigedit to control these new EG features.
146 For example there are new check box which you can use to define for
147 each envelope whether the individual EG stages should still be completed
148 or rather aborted if a note-off was received. These new EG settings matter
149 a lot for certain instrument types like percussive instruments.
150
151 And last but not least a filter option field had been added to the
152 instruments list and samples list, which allows you to find specific
153 samples and instruments very quickly by typing search key words, which is
154 especially very helpful in case you are working on gig files which contain
155 a very large amount of samples or instruments in a single gig file.
156
157 Version 1.0.0 (2015-07-17)
158
159 With this release we added support for new GigaStudio 4 features, for
160 example there are now dialogs for editing some of the new so called
161 "iMIDI rules". These can be used i.e. to trigger notes by MIDI CC and to
162 define a set of legato samples. You may have heard that the GigaStudio
163 software has seen its last version with GigaStudio 4. Tascam officially
164 discontinued this product, its intellectual property has been sold several
165 times among companies and there is currently no way to buy a new copy of
166 GigaStudio anymore. However the GigaStudio format is still under active
167 development with gigedit and LinuxSampler. For the first time ever we added
168 our own extensions to the Giga format: one of it is major new feature
169 called "real-time instrument scripts", which allows to bundle small programs
170 with your .gig sounds, which extend the sampler with custom behavior for
171 specific sounds. You may know such kind of instrument scripts from
172 commercial software samplers. Find out more about this new feature on
173 http://doc.linuxsampler.org/Instrument_Scripts/. Another rather minor
174 extension to the Giga format is support for various other MIDI CCs which
175 were never supported by GigaStudio before. So you can now use any MIDI CC
176 for EG1 controller, EG2 controller and attenuation controller. Obviously all
177 those extensions will not work with any GigaStudio version, they only work
178 with a recent version of Gigedit and LinuxSampler. Gigedit will inform you
179 whenever you are using such kind of custom Giga format extension, so that you
180 are always aware in case your changes are not cross/backward compatible with
181 the GigaStudio software. A load of enhancements have been added to Gigedit
182 in the last six years: Until now you were only able to edit either exactly
183 one dimension region or all dimension regions simultaneously. With this
184 release you may now hold the Ctrl button and select a specific set of
185 dimension region zones in the dimension region selector area (on the very
186 bottom of the Gigedit window) with your mouse. All synthesis parameters you
187 then change, will all be applied to that precise set of dimension region
188 zones. Also managing dimensions have been improved: previously to change the
189 amount of zones of a dimension you had to delete and recreate the dimension.
190 Which was not just inconvenient, but you also had to redefine your synthesis
191 parameters from scratch. Now you can just open the dimension manager dialog
192 and increase or decrease the amount of zones of a dimension with few clicks.
193 Same applies to the dimension type: you may now simply open the dimension
194 manager dialog and alter the type of a dimension with few clicks.
195 When working on complex Giga sounds you certainly noticed that one could
196 easily get confused about which samples are exactly used by which instrument
197 or even whether a sample is actually used at all by any instrument or just
198 left orphaned and wasting disk space. This was also due to the fact that the
199 Giga format does not require unique names for samples. We have worked on
200 resolving this usability issue. In the sample list view you can now read the
201 amount of times a sample is referenced by instruments of your .gig file. If a
202 sample is not used at all, then it will be shown in striking red color in
203 the sample list view. You may also right click on a sample and select
204 "Show references...", a new window appears on your screen which will show you
205 where exactly that particular sample is used by, that is which by which
206 instruments and by which regions of those instruments. Also the other way
207 around has been addressed: when you now edit the synthesis parameters of a
208 particular dimension region, you may now click on the new "<- Select Sample"
209 button and Gigedit automatically selects and displays the respective sample
210 in the samples list view, which you may then might rename to some more
211 appropriate sample name, or you might check by which other instrument(s) that
212 sample is used by, etc. You may now also remove the current sample reference
213 from individual dimension regions (assigning a so called "NULL" sample) by
214 clicking on the new "X" button next the sample reference field on the
215 "Sample" tab of a dimension region; this allows you to define "silent cases",
216 that is a case where no sample should be played at all, for example this is
217 often used for very low velocity ranges of i.e. between 0 and 6. If you are
218 working on .gig files with a large amount of Instruments, then you might also
219 be glad to know that you can finally also re-order the instruments of a file
220 by simply dragging the instruments around in the instruments list view.
221 Another handy new feature for sound designers is the new "Combine" tool,
222 which you can reach from the main menu. It allows you to select two ore more
223 instruments (by holding down the Ctrl key while selecting with mouse click)
224 from your currently open Giga file and combine those selected instruments to
225 a new instrument. This way you may for example create stunning layered
226 sounds, or you may create velocity splits, crossfade sounds by MIDI
227 controller and much more, all with just a few clicks. This may sound like a
228 trivial task, but if you have worked on this before, you certainly noticed
229 that this was often a very time consuming and error prone task before,
230 especially with complex individual sounds which had custom region ranges,
231 custom velocity splits and much more exotic stuff to take care of. The
232 combine tool handles all such cases for you automatically.
233 Last but not least, the interaction of Gigedit with LinuxSampler (in so
234 called "live mode") had been improved: When you click on the "Edit" button of
235 a channel strip in QSampler or Fantasia, Gigedit will be launched with the
236 respective instrument automatically being selected. Vice versa you may now
237 also just select another instrument with Gigedit's instrument list view and
238 LinuxSampler will automatically load and play that instrument on the
239 respective sampler part for you. So no more need to switch between the
240 Gigedit window and QSampler/Fantasia window all the time while working on
241 your sounds.
242
243 Version 0.2.0 (2009-07-31)
244
245 When gigedit is running as a plugin in LinuxSampler the gigedit
246 keyboard may now be used to trigger notes. The settings in the file
247 properties window are now editable. A new function for replacing all
248 samples is added. Otherwise this is mostly a bug fix release, and
249 upgrading gigedit and libgig is strongly recommended, as previous
250 versions had bugs that may cause edited gig files to be corrupted.
251
252 Version 0.1.1 (2007-12-06)
253
254 Parameter edits can now be applied to multiple regions and dimension
255 regions simultaneously - three checkboxes were added that select if
256 changes apply to all regions and/or all dimension regions.
257
258 Version 0.1.0 (2007-10-15)
259
260 Many fixes have been made to make sure that the gig files created by
261 gigedit are working properly in LinuxSampler and GigaStudio. Gigedit
262 can now be run as a LinuxSampler plugin, allowing live editing of
263 loaded instruments. Sample loop parameters and instrument global
264 properties can now be edited. 24 bit samples can be imported. A
265 quick-start document has been added. Lots of other minor fixes and
266 improvements have been done.
267
268 Version 0.0.3 (2007-03-24)
269
270 First version of gigedit. The program is renamed from gigview to
271 gigedit as it is now an editor, not just a viewer. Basic support for
272 both editing existing gig files and creating new ones from scratch
273 is provided.
274
275 Version 0.0.2 (2006-11-05)
276
277 Quick fix for a thread initialization problem.
278
279 Version 0.0.1 (2006-11-05)
280
281 First version of gigview.

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