HourGlass 0.9.4 release

It took too long for this one, but let’s try it. Hopefully things are not messed up. If immediate problems arise, 0.9.5 will happen in a quicker schedule.

Changes (incomplete list) :

-Sound sources can have source position parameters/envelopes independent of the main parameters source position parameter. This feature can be accessed from the right-click menu in the sound file name in the sources list. This feature is mainly useful if you have several sound sources loaded, so that you can “scan” through them in independent trajectories, to make the source position capture the positions most appropriate for each sound.

-Audio file writing support was rewritten to allow using all of the formats libsndfile supports, as well as add support for more formats in the future. Most of the new available formats won’t be that useful for real use, but maybe FLAC and Ogg Vorbis might be useful for long live output recording “sessions”. The default format for both render and live output recording is now 32-bit floating wav, so if you want something else, visit the render/live options dialog to change it. (The old settings are no longer because that would have complicated the code needlessly just to avoid a visit from the user to the dialog.)

-More discreet indication for live output recording active state. A new button for that was added to the transport/render panel and the useless “seek forward” button was removed.

-Envelope editor time selection snaps to the grid if snap to grid is enabled. This probably needs some improvements etc, will be looked into later.

-Horizontal custom scrollzoombars were changed so that they don’t cause an immediate update to happen in the widgets they are controlling. This hopefully allows more responsive operation while scrolling and zooming in the sound viewer and the envelope editor when there are complex envelope shapes etc in the envelope.

-The sound sources panel has a new column that shows a small waveform overview of the sound. If you don’t want that, you can right-click the sources panel column names to get a menu where you can hide/show the columns.

-Bug fixed (hopefully) when removing sound sources from the sources list while playback is on. This went unnoticed as it wasn’t certain to always crash HourGlass and I often don’t myself remove sound sources from the list, but rather replace them, which hasn’t shown symptoms of problems.

The “Sound” menu has a non-functioning entry “Offline render and play/stop”. I forgot to remove that before uploading this build. The feature may or may not be implemented in the future. (It is meant as a last resort option to audition a texture if there’s no way to play it with realtime audio due to extreme CPU usage.)

Download link :

http://www.vesanorilo.com/xenakios/HourGlass_0.9.4.zip