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Sun May 9 11:45:09 2021 UTC (3 years ago) by schoenebeck
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* Preparations for new release (2.2.0).

1 schoenebeck 3880 Version 2.2.0 (9 May 2021)
2    
3     There are a load of changes in this release. Many new features, many fixes,
4     but also new requirements.
5    
6     Starting with this release of LinuxSampler you now need at least a C++14
7     compliant compiler. Originally it was planned to only raise the minimum
8     compiler requirement to C++11 in this release, however during this development
9     cycle some C++14 features came across which helped to reduce code complexity
10     in the LinuxSampler code base tremendously.
11    
12     The NKSP real-time instrument script engine has received tremendous new
13     features and improvements in this release. Instrument script variables of type
14     integer (e.g. $foo) are now all 64-bit internally, which prevents unexpected
15     side effects of script authors due to integer overflows that easily had
16     happened before when integer script variables were just 32-bit wide. On NKSP
17     language level there is now support for floating point variables; both scalar
18     types (e.g. ~foo = 3.93) and floating point arrays
19     (e.g. ?foo[] = ( 1.6, 4.7 ) ). Another huge new NKSP language feature is
20     support for standard measuring units like Hz (Hertz), dB (Decibel),
21     s (seconds), c (cents) in conjuction with arbitrary metric prefixes like kHz,
22     mdB, ms, mc, etc. The newly introduced "final" operator "!" in NKSP allows to
23     force a synthesis parameter like e.g. volume or pitch to a specific value that
24     should not be overridden by any other modulation source (e.g. neither from
25     patch level, nor LFOs, nor from EGs, ...). This is sometimes helpful for being
26     able to e.g. say in a script, "hey, the volume of this voice should be exactly
27     -3dB, period. I mean it!". Furthermore there are 23 new built-in NKSP script
28     functions and 6 new NKSP constants/variables. There also two new event handler
29     types for processing MIDI RPN events ("on rpn ... end on") and for MIDI NRPN
30     events ("on nrpn ... end on") in instrument scripts. And last but not least
31     there are now "patch" variables supported in instrument scripts which allow to
32     expose individual script variables to instrument editors for quick and easy
33     fine tuning of certain instrument script aspects on a per-instrument basis.
34    
35     The Giga format engine adds various format extensions. For instance you now
36     have much more control over LFOs like selecting different LFO waveforms as
37     sine, triangle, saw or square. GigaStudio had this limited to sine only. The
38     default LFO wave form in LinuxSampler's gig engine has also changed to sine
39     for that reason (instead of triangle in previous LinuxSampler versions).
40     Additionally you can now also fine control the start phase of individual LFOs.
41     In the original gig format you were only able to flip the phase. Furthermore
42     there are now new audio filter types available for the Giga engine: new lowpass
43     1/2/4/6-pole, new highpass 1/2/4/6-pole, new bandpass 2-pole, and finally a
44     bandreject 2-pole filter. You might say that some of those filter types
45     existed before, and they still do and will continue to co-exist, but they
46     simply sound differently. Keep in mind that the audio filters for the Giga
47     engine were very carefully designed to accurateley replicate the sounds as if
48     being played with Tascam's GigaStudio, so that made and still makes sense.
49     However you might simply like the sound of some of the new filter types more
50     for certain reasons when creating your own gig instruments from scratch. And
51     as always there are various fixes for the gig engine in this release as well.
52    
53     On SFZ format engine side there are corrections for the SFZ opcodes
54     loccN/hiccN and xfin_hivel.
55    
56     There are various other fixes that apply to all sampler engines, please refer
57     to the ChangeLog for more details.
58    
59     For package maintainers: the unit tests (which were broken before) have been
60     fixed in this release and work now as expected. It is recommend for them to be
61     run automatically to detect and prevent any OS issues that might cause
62     misbehaviours for users. Just keep in mind the test cases also test the LSCP
63     server which will listen on TCP port 8888 during the tests. So make sure this
64     port cannot be accessed from outside for security reasons.
65    
66 schoenebeck 3537 Version 2.1.1 (27 Jul 2019)
67    
68     This is a maintenance release with various fixes. There are only two
69     minor new features in this release:
70    
71     The Giga format engine adds a format extension which allows sound
72     designers to define whether release trigger samples shall be played when
73     the sustain pedal is released. In the previous release this was actually
74     the default behaviour by the sampler, but meanwhile there was a consensus
75     on the mailing list that release samples being triggered by sustain pedal
76     is not the common, expected behaviour. So this is no longer the default
77     behaviour, but you can still opt in to this old behaviour by using this
78     new format extension option (i.e. by using latest release version of
79     libgig and gigedit and enabling the respective checkbox for your
80     gig instrument). If you don't enable this option then release samples are
81     now only triggered by note-off events.
82    
83     The sfz engine adds support for the commonly used built-in sample
84     '*silence' of the sfz format. It does what you think it does; it
85     instructs the sampler to play no sound at all. This is commonly used
86     in sfz files for instance for the lowest velocity switch to not play any
87     sample. With the previous release trying to load sfz files which used this
88     built-in sample caused a file loading error. There are various other
89     commonly used built-in samples in sfz files which you can denote by the
90     leading star character in the sample name, however the '*silence' one is
91     currently the only supported built-in sample by our sfz engine yet. Trying
92     to load sfz files which are using other built-in samples does not prevent
93     your instrument from being loaded by the sampler, however you will get a
94     warning message on the console that the built-in sample is not supported
95     yet and the sampler will simply play silence for that non supported
96     built-in sample.
97    
98 schoenebeck 3372 Version 2.1.0 (25 November 2017)
99    
100     This release adds a large amount of extensions and improvements for the
101     real-time instrument scripting support of LinuxSampler (NKSP).
102     For example 48 new built-in NKSP functions and 21 new built-in NKSP
103     variables have been added. Also the NKSP language itself was extended.
104     Most notably the script engine now has an execution scheduler which is
105     the basis for many of the timing relevant new NKSP features in this
106     release, like programmatically suspending and resuming scripts for an
107     exact amount of time or triggering or killing notes at very precise
108     times. Bitwise operators have been added to NKSP, as well as support for
109     read only built-in variables, "synchronized" code blocks
110     ("synchronized .. end synchronized"), user declared functions and user
111     declared const array variables have been added to the NKSP language,
112     and automatic suspension of RT threatening scripts by the RT script engine
113     has been implemented. Also syntax error messages with NKSP scripts have
114     been improved to output more clear and user friendly error messages, as
115     well as NKSP editor API has been improved which brings handy new features
116     to gigedit's NKSP script editor like automatically graying out code blocks
117     which are disabled by NKSP preprocessor statements.
118    
119     The SFZ engine now supports <global>, <master>, #define and set_ccN
120     statements. And finally the SFZ engine now supports NKSP real-time
121     instrument scripts as well by adding a new "script" opcode.
122    
123     Also the Instruments Database feature has received important maintenance
124     fixes. Before this release the instrument DB feature was barely usable
125     for quite some time. Fundamental instruments DB issues have been fixed in
126     this release to finally consider this feature stable again.
127    
128     And finally this release provides a huge amount of general bug fixes.
129    
130 schoenebeck 2788 Version 2.0.0 (15 July 2015)
131    
132     The sampler's code base has seen substantial changes in the last six years,
133     since the last release of LinuxSampler. The sampler engine code base has
134     been unified to a set of abstract base classes which cleared the way for
135     two new sampler engines: The SFZ2 format engine (.sfz) and the SoundFont 2
136     engine (.sf2). So LinuxSampler is not limited to the GigaStudio/Gigasampler
137     format (.gig) anymore. Another major new feature is support for real-time
138     instrument scripts, which may be bundled with sound files to extend the
139     sampler with custom behavior for individual sounds. You may know such scripts
140     from commercial software samplers. Find out more about instrument scripts
141     on http://doc.linuxsampler.org/Instrument_Scripts/. At the moment this
142     scripting feature is yet limited to the Giga format engine. Also noteworthy
143     is the new command line application "lscp", which is a text based shell for
144     controlling the sampler from the command line, providing colored output,
145     type completion, help text while typing LSCP commands and other convenient
146     features. You may now also load external effects directly into the sampler
147     (only LADSPA plugins yet). The LSCP network protocol (v1.7) has been extended
148     to manage such effects respectively. Also new with latest LSCP version is the
149     ability to trigger MIDI CCs by LSCP commands. You may have heard that the
150     GigaStudio software has seen its last version with GigaStudio 4. Tascam
151     officially discontinued this product, its intellectual property has been sold
152     several times among companies and there is currently no way to buy a new copy
153     of GigaStudio anymore. However the GigaStudio format is still under active
154     development with LinuxSampler. We not only added support for the latest
155     features introduced with GigaStudio 4: iMIDI rules for example which allow to
156     trigger notes by MIDI CC and allow i.e. defining a set of legato samples; for
157     the first time ever we also added our own extensions to the Giga format: one
158     of it is the previously mentioned new instrument scripting feature and a more
159     minor extension is support for various other MIDI CCs which were never
160     supported by GigaStudio before. The sampler's host plugins have also seen
161     some enhancements: the LV2 plugin now stores and restores the sampler's
162     overall state with your DAW application's song, the LV2 and AudioUnit
163     plugin's outputs were increased from 2 audio channels to 16 upon request by
164     some users and the VST plugin now uses the sampler's MIDI instrument mapping
165     system to show a list of available sounds to allow the user to switch among
166     them. And last but not least the VST plugin may also be used on Mac now.
167    
168 persson 1957 Version 1.0.0 (31 July 2009)
169 schoenebeck 1956
170     This is the first release which allows the sampler to be used as audio
171     host plugin, namely supporting the standards VST, AU, DSSI and LV2. The
172     sampler's limits for max. voices & disk streams can now be altered at
173     runtime by frontends, no need to recompile the sampler anymore. The Mac
174     version now also supports CoreAudio as audio driver. The Windows version
175     finally supports the sampler's instruments DB feature as well, however
176     expect it still to be unstable at this point. Along to the already
177     existing JACK audio driver, Jack MIDI support has been added in this
178     release. The sampler allows frontends now basic MIDI control, that is to
179     monitor incoming MIDI data on MIDI input devices and sampler channels and
180     to send note-on and note-off MIDI events to sampler channels, which
181     allows frontends to provide a virtual MIDI keyboard to the user. Besides
182     these major changes there were countless bugfixes and optimizations.
183    
184 schoenebeck 1560 Version 0.5.1 (6 December 2007)
185    
186     This is the first release for the Windows platform, providing a MME MIDI
187     input driver and ASIO audio output driver. Note that the instruments DB
188     feature is not yet available for Windows systems, since the respective
189     code base has yet to be ported. Needless to say that there still might be
190     plenty of issues on MS systems. Beside that support for Windows, this is
191     merely a bugfix release (i.e. fixing one serious crash) with only minor
192     new features.
193    
194 schoenebeck 1424 Version 0.5.0 (15 October 2007)
195    
196     This release comes with a bunch of important new features. We implemented
197     a very powerful and easy MIDI program change mapping, which not only
198     allows you to define which instrument to load on which MIDI program
199     change number (and bank select number), it also allows further parameters
200     like whether the instrument shall be pre-cached or loaded only when needed
201     (and likewise freed when not needed). You can create arbitrary amount of
202     effect sends for each sampler channel, each having an arbitrary MIDI
203     controller for controlling the effect send level in realtime and can
204     flexible be routed to some of the sampler's audio output channel, i.e.
205     to a dedicated one for a certain effect type. The new instruments
206     database allows you to keep track even of largest instrument library
207     collections. You can order them in categories and search by various
208     criteria. The sampler now allows third party applications to offer so
209     called 'instrument editor plugins' which the sampler can use to spawn
210     an appropriate instrument editor application for a selected instrument
211     and for allowing to edit instruments with such an external editor
212     application on-the-fly, that is all modifications made with the editor
213     will immediately be audible with the sampler. No need to reload instrument
214     files anymore. Checkout our brand new instrument editor application called
215     'gigedit' which you can use for this feature. Loading huge instruments may
216     take a long time, that's why the sampler now allows to play an instrument
217     while loading. That way you can i.e. play and hold notes on the keyboard
218     while loading a new instrument on the same sampler channel at the same
219     time. Beside these new features, you can find the common huge list of bug
220     fixes and quality improvements.
221    
222 schoenebeck 937 Version 0.4.0 (24 November 2006)
223    
224     Finally a new release after a long development cycle. The sampler now has
225     a completely revised synthesis core. Note that due to this, most of the
226     assembly code became incompatible and is thus deactivated at compile
227     time. So don't bother trying to activate the assembly option, it won't
228     compile! That's not an issue though, because even without assembly, the
229     new synthesis core is faster than the old one with assembly. The
230     Gigasampler engine now has real support for 24 bit samples, that is they
231     won't be truncated anymore, and finally supports all filter types of the
232     Gigasampler format. A lot of effort has been put into making all filters
233     under all parameters being as accurate as possible, compared to the
234     original Gigasampler ones. Analogue to hardware mixers, sampler channels
235     can now be muted and solo-ed and there is support for GM portamento and
236     GM mono mode (single note per channel) as well as support for sostenuto
237     pedal. Beside LSCP, third-party applications can now also link against
238     liblinuxsampler directly (using the sampler's C++ API). Beside these,
239     there have been of course a huge bunch of fixes and quality improvements.
240    
241 schoenebeck 692 Version 0.3.3 (15 July 2005)
242    
243     Another bug fix release. It solves one usability issue regarding small
244     fragments / high sampling rates of audio drivers, fixes some compile time
245     errors with GCC 4.0 and fixes a minor efficiency bug.
246    
247 schoenebeck 677 Version 0.3.2 (24 June 2005)
248    
249     This is more or less just a bug fix release. Beside a bunch of little
250     fixes it solves a serious crash in conjunction with voice stealing and
251     slightly improves Gigasampler format playback accuracy.

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