Annotation of /libgig/trunk/NEWS

Version 4.1.0 (25 Nov 2017)

  This release adds support for files much larger than 2 GB for GigaStudio /
  Gigasampler (.gig), DLS, as well as for RIFF files in general. This file size
  limitation existed for a very long time due to the RIFF format's historical,
  internal 32 bit file offsets. To circumvent this file size limitation the
  concept of so called "extension files" was added in the past to the
  GigaStudio format, which means that the GigaStudio instrument editor splitted
  the respective overall instrument file into a set of files (.gig, .gx01,
  .gx02, ...), each being max. 2 GB in size, and all of them were expected to be
  located in the same directory for the sampler to load the entire large
  instrument successfully. libgig always supported only reading such gig
  extension files, however libgig never supported to create .gig files with
  extension files, nor did it support modifying existing ones. In this release
  it was necessary to finally get rid of this overall file size limitation in
  libgig. Now when that concept of extension files was introduced years ago, it
  made sense at that point, because there were still many systems out there
  which still had no support for large files (on either OS or file system
  level). However today even on low end mobile devices support for large files
  is already a broad standard. Accordingly instead of adding write support for
  extension files in libgig, the problem was addressed at its root by
  transparently using appropriate, automatic file offset sizes. So when writing
  .gig/DLS/RIFF files smaller than 2 GB there are still 32 bit file offsets
  being used by libgig. Accordingly such files are still backward compatible
  with older software. However if the overall file size to be written is 2 GB or
  larger, then 64 bit file offsets are automatically used by libgig instead.
  Note though that due to that circumstance such files >= 2 GB are not backward
  compatible with older versions of libgig, nor could they be loaded with the
  original GigaStudio software.

  Another major new feature in this libgig release is the entirely new
  serialization API (Serialization.h) which provides a powerful and easy way
  to serialize and deserialize an arbitrary set of native C++ objects into an
  abstract data stream. Which means you can simply save the entire runtime state
  of an application to a file or send it as data over "wire" (i.e. over network
  or to another process) and restore that runtime state from that data there at
  any time. In contrast to other C++ serialization frameworks out there, this
  framework provides two major benefits:

  1. This serialization framework is designed to be very robust regarding
     potential versioning changes of the native C++ classes being
     (de)serialized. So even if the C++ classes have seen massive software
     changes between the point where they were serialized and the point where
     they are to be deserialized; for example if class member variables of
     serialized C++ objects were renamed in meantime, or if variable offsets, or
     variables' data types had been changed, then the deserialization algorithm
     can still cope with such common software changes automatically in many
     cases, that is as long as the deserialization algorithm can "guess" what
     the changes were exactly. If the serialization framework is unable to
     automatically detect the precise software changes, then it will abort the
     deserialization task with an exception and an error message stating that
     the software versions are incompatible.

  2. This serialization framework supports "partial" deserialization. That
     means it not only allows to restore an entire runtime state, but it also
     allows to only restore an arbitrary desired subset of information
     from the previously serialized data stream, while leaving all other data
     of the running C++ objects untouched. The serialization framework also
     incorporates a reflection API which allows applications to implement
     convenient editors on top of such serialized data, i.e. allowing end users
     to pick or alter specific information within the serialized data.

  The new Serialization framework is already embedded into the gig classes of
  libgig, and it is used as basis for the new powerful macro features in the
  gigedit instrument editor application. Refer to the release notes of
  gigedit 1.1.0 for more information about those new macro features in gigedit.

Version 4.0.0 (14 Jul 2015)

  This major release of libgig adds support for other file formats:
  SoundFont 2 (.sf2), KORG multi sample instruments (.KSF, .KMP) and AKAI
  format sounds. The AKAI classes are a fork of S�bastien M�trot's libakai and
  since it is released under a different license (LGPL) than libgig is (GPL),
  the AKAI classes are built as separate DLL file. All other classes of those
  new file formats are built and bundled with the existing libgig DLL. Thanks
  to Grigor Iliev for his work on the SoundFont 2 classes! Please note that
  there is currently no support for KORG's .PCG file format yet. That's because
  this file format changes a lot and is not only dependent to the precise KORG
  keyboard model, but also to the precise OS version on the same model. And
  since basic conversion can also be done by just accessing the .KSF and .KMP
  files (sample data, loop informations), the current classes should be
  sufficient for many tasks. Adding support for KORG's .PCG files is not
  planned at the moment.

  Various new command line tools have been added as well to dump, extract and
  convert between all those file formats now. Each one of it has a man page,
  so please refer to the respective man page of the individual command line
  tool for details.

  The GigaStudio/Gigasampler classes received a load of fixes during the last
  six years. And support for features introduced with the last official
  GigaStudio 4 software (RIP) were added, for instance support for so called
  "iMIDI Rules". Those rules allow i.e. to trigger notes by MIDI CC and to
  define a sample set for legato playing style. In the meantime it seems as if
  the GigaStudio software has seen its last version with GigaStudio 4, because
  Tascam discontinued this product and the intellectual property of GigaStudio
  had been sold several times between companies. It is currently not possible
  to buy a new copy of GigaStudio anymore and we personally don't expect that
  this situation will ever change.

  Does this also mean the end of new features for libgig? Not really! Actually
  we already started to add new features to the GigaStudio/Gigasampler format
  which never existed with the GigaStudio/Gigasampler software: The most
  noteworthy new feature added by us is support for real-time instrument
  scripts. These are little "programs" which you can bundle with your .gig
  sounds to add a custom behavior to your sounds when playing them with i.e.
  LinuxSampler. Find out more about this new major feature on:

        http://doc.linuxsampler.org/Instrument_Scripts/

  There are also some more minor extensions to the .gig format, for example
  support for far more MIDI CC's than originally allowed by the GigaStudio
  software. Obviously all those custom extensions will not work with any
  version of the official GigaStudio software, those new features will only
  work with a recent version of LinuxSampler and gigedit at the moment.

  Besides those major changes, a load of convenient methods have been added to
  the existing libgig classes to reduce the overall effort working with all
  those file formats with software applications based on libgig.

Version 3.3.0 (30 Jul 2009)

  Partial support for MIDI rules, the rest are just bug fixes.

Version 3.2.1 (5 Dec 2007)

  Just some minor performance optimizations.

Version 3.2.0 (14 Oct 2007)

  This release once again comes with a huge bunch of fixes regarding
  Gigasampler write support. Instrument files created from scratch with
  libgig can finally be loaded into the Gigasampler application as well.

  libgig's home has moved! From now on you can find it on:
  http://www.linuxsampler.org/libgig/
  Please update your links and bookmarks!

Version 3.1.1 (24 Mar 2007)

  This is a bugfix release, fixing one important bug regarding gig v3
  support (custom split points) and a lot of bugs regarding .gig write
  support. And this is the first official release for the Windows platform.

Version 3.1.0 (24 Nov 2006)

  libgig's home has moved (slightly) from
  http://stud.fh-heilbronn.de/~cschoene/projects/libgig/ to
  http://stud.hs-heilbronn.de/~cschoene/projects/libgig/, please update your
  links and bookmarks! This is due to the recent renaming of the University
  of Heilbronn, which kindly hosts this and other projects.

Version 3.0.0 (28 Apr 2006)

  This is the first release which allows to create new and modify existing
  .gig files. Beside that it also includes another bunch of bug fixes and
  Gigasampler v3 support improvements.
1	schoenebeck	3370	Version 4.1.0 (25 Nov 2017)
2
3			This release adds support for files much larger than 2 GB for GigaStudio /
4			Gigasampler (.gig), DLS, as well as for RIFF files in general. This file size
5			limitation existed for a very long time due to the RIFF format's historical,
6			internal 32 bit file offsets. To circumvent this file size limitation the
7			concept of so called "extension files" was added in the past to the
8			GigaStudio format, which means that the GigaStudio instrument editor splitted
9			the respective overall instrument file into a set of files (.gig, .gx01,
10			.gx02, ...), each being max. 2 GB in size, and all of them were expected to be
11			located in the same directory for the sampler to load the entire large
12			instrument successfully. libgig always supported only reading such gig
13			extension files, however libgig never supported to create .gig files with
14			extension files, nor did it support modifying existing ones. In this release
15			it was necessary to finally get rid of this overall file size limitation in
16			libgig. Now when that concept of extension files was introduced years ago, it
17			made sense at that point, because there were still many systems out there
18			which still had no support for large files (on either OS or file system
19			level). However today even on low end mobile devices support for large files
20			is already a broad standard. Accordingly instead of adding write support for
21			extension files in libgig, the problem was addressed at its root by
22			transparently using appropriate, automatic file offset sizes. So when writing
23			.gig/DLS/RIFF files smaller than 2 GB there are still 32 bit file offsets
24			being used by libgig. Accordingly such files are still backward compatible
25			with older software. However if the overall file size to be written is 2 GB or
26			larger, then 64 bit file offsets are automatically used by libgig instead.
27			Note though that due to that circumstance such files >= 2 GB are not backward
28			compatible with older versions of libgig, nor could they be loaded with the
29			original GigaStudio software.
30
31			Another major new feature in this libgig release is the entirely new
32			serialization API (Serialization.h) which provides a powerful and easy way
33			to serialize and deserialize an arbitrary set of native C++ objects into an
34			abstract data stream. Which means you can simply save the entire runtime state
35			of an application to a file or send it as data over "wire" (i.e. over network
36			or to another process) and restore that runtime state from that data there at
37			any time. In contrast to other C++ serialization frameworks out there, this
38			framework provides two major benefits:
39
40			1. This serialization framework is designed to be very robust regarding
41			potential versioning changes of the native C++ classes being
42			(de)serialized. So even if the C++ classes have seen massive software
43			changes between the point where they were serialized and the point where
44			they are to be deserialized; for example if class member variables of
45			serialized C++ objects were renamed in meantime, or if variable offsets, or
46			variables' data types had been changed, then the deserialization algorithm
47			can still cope with such common software changes automatically in many
48			cases, that is as long as the deserialization algorithm can "guess" what
49			the changes were exactly. If the serialization framework is unable to
50			automatically detect the precise software changes, then it will abort the
51			deserialization task with an exception and an error message stating that
52			the software versions are incompatible.
53
54			2. This serialization framework supports "partial" deserialization. That
55			means it not only allows to restore an entire runtime state, but it also
56			allows to only restore an arbitrary desired subset of information
57			from the previously serialized data stream, while leaving all other data
58			of the running C++ objects untouched. The serialization framework also
59			incorporates a reflection API which allows applications to implement
60			convenient editors on top of such serialized data, i.e. allowing end users
61			to pick or alter specific information within the serialized data.
62
63			The new Serialization framework is already embedded into the gig classes of
64			libgig, and it is used as basis for the new powerful macro features in the
65			gigedit instrument editor application. Refer to the release notes of
66			gigedit 1.1.0 for more information about those new macro features in gigedit.
67
68	schoenebeck	2785	Version 4.0.0 (14 Jul 2015)
69
70			This major release of libgig adds support for other file formats:
71			SoundFont 2 (.sf2), KORG multi sample instruments (.KSF, .KMP) and AKAI
72			format sounds. The AKAI classes are a fork of S�bastien M�trot's libakai and
73			since it is released under a different license (LGPL) than libgig is (GPL),
74			the AKAI classes are built as separate DLL file. All other classes of those
75			new file formats are built and bundled with the existing libgig DLL. Thanks
76			to Grigor Iliev for his work on the SoundFont 2 classes! Please note that
77			there is currently no support for KORG's .PCG file format yet. That's because
78			this file format changes a lot and is not only dependent to the precise KORG
79			keyboard model, but also to the precise OS version on the same model. And
80			since basic conversion can also be done by just accessing the .KSF and .KMP
81			files (sample data, loop informations), the current classes should be
82			sufficient for many tasks. Adding support for KORG's .PCG files is not
83			planned at the moment.
84
85			Various new command line tools have been added as well to dump, extract and
86			convert between all those file formats now. Each one of it has a man page,
87			so please refer to the respective man page of the individual command line
88			tool for details.
89
90			The GigaStudio/Gigasampler classes received a load of fixes during the last
91			six years. And support for features introduced with the last official
92			GigaStudio 4 software (RIP) were added, for instance support for so called
93			"iMIDI Rules". Those rules allow i.e. to trigger notes by MIDI CC and to
94			define a sample set for legato playing style. In the meantime it seems as if
95			the GigaStudio software has seen its last version with GigaStudio 4, because
96			Tascam discontinued this product and the intellectual property of GigaStudio
97			had been sold several times between companies. It is currently not possible
98			to buy a new copy of GigaStudio anymore and we personally don't expect that
99			this situation will ever change.
100
101			Does this also mean the end of new features for libgig? Not really! Actually
102			we already started to add new features to the GigaStudio/Gigasampler format
103			which never existed with the GigaStudio/Gigasampler software: The most
104			noteworthy new feature added by us is support for real-time instrument
105			scripts. These are little "programs" which you can bundle with your .gig
106			sounds to add a custom behavior to your sounds when playing them with i.e.
107			LinuxSampler. Find out more about this new major feature on:
108
109			http://doc.linuxsampler.org/Instrument_Scripts/
110
111			There are also some more minor extensions to the .gig format, for example
112			support for far more MIDI CC's than originally allowed by the GigaStudio
113			software. Obviously all those custom extensions will not work with any
114			version of the official GigaStudio software, those new features will only
115			work with a recent version of LinuxSampler and gigedit at the moment.
116
117			Besides those major changes, a load of convenient methods have been added to
118			the existing libgig classes to reduce the overall effort working with all
119			those file formats with software applications based on libgig.
120
121	schoenebeck	1953	Version 3.3.0 (30 Jul 2009)
122
123			Partial support for MIDI rules, the rest are just bug fixes.
124
125	schoenebeck	1549	Version 3.2.1 (5 Dec 2007)
126
127			Just some minor performance optimizations.
128
129	schoenebeck	1416	Version 3.2.0 (14 Oct 2007)
130	schoenebeck	1406
131	schoenebeck	1416	This release once again comes with a huge bunch of fixes regarding
132			Gigasampler write support. Instrument files created from scratch with
133			libgig can finally be loaded into the Gigasampler application as well.
134
135	schoenebeck	1406	libgig's home has moved! From now on you can find it on:
136			http://www.linuxsampler.org/libgig/
137			Please update your links and bookmarks!
138
139	schoenebeck	1116	Version 3.1.1 (24 Mar 2007)
140
141			This is a bugfix release, fixing one important bug regarding gig v3
142			support (custom split points) and a lot of bugs regarding .gig write
143			support. And this is the first official release for the Windows platform.
144
145	schoenebeck	933	Version 3.1.0 (24 Nov 2006)
146	schoenebeck	860
147			libgig's home has moved (slightly) from
148			http://stud.fh-heilbronn.de/~cschoene/projects/libgig/ to
149			http://stud.hs-heilbronn.de/~cschoene/projects/libgig/, please update your
150			links and bookmarks! This is due to the recent renaming of the University
151			of Heilbronn, which kindly hosts this and other projects.
152
153	schoenebeck	854	Version 3.0.0 (28 Apr 2006)
154
155			This is the first release which allows to create new and modify existing
156			.gig files. Beside that it also includes another bunch of bug fixes and
157			Gigasampler v3 support improvements.