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Revision 3370 - (show annotations) (download)
Sat Nov 25 01:19:10 2017 UTC (6 years, 4 months ago) by schoenebeck
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* Preparations for new release (libgig 4.1.0).

1 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 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 Version 3.3.0 (30 Jul 2009)
122
123 Partial support for MIDI rules, the rest are just bug fixes.
124
125 Version 3.2.1 (5 Dec 2007)
126
127 Just some minor performance optimizations.
128
129 Version 3.2.0 (14 Oct 2007)
130
131 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 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 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 Version 3.1.0 (24 Nov 2006)
146
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 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.

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