All known issues have been fixed, but I'm not going to be so stupid as to say
there are no others :)
Anyway, please do download and have a play with this - especially the new
command line options. It needs a good shake-down to find out what works best.
The obligatory blurb...
One of the main features of this release is improved accessibility. The
effectiveness (and indeed usefulness) of this will help shape future
complimentary interfaces. Also, a number of first-time defaults have been
changed to make this easier.
It has always been possible to run Yoshimi headless, but now real control is
available. In the first place, when starting from the command line, an argument
can be included for a new root path to be defined to point to a set of banks
fetched from elsewhere. This will be given the next free ID.
Once running, almost all dynamic setup (i.e. doesn't require a restart) can now
be done within the terminal window. There is also extensive control of roots,
banks, parts and instruments including the ability to list and set all of
these. You can now do things like:
Path add /home/music/yoshimi/banks
Set part 4 program 130
Additional controls that are frequently taken forgranted in the GUI but
otherwise get forgotten are master key shift and master volume.
Finally, we have the most important parts of vector control exposed to the
command line.
For all of this there is extensive error checking and feedback.
In parallel with this there are more NRPNs so that you can perform some of
these via automation. That arrangment looks positively steam-punk, but is
actually very easy to use, requiring only a utility that can send MIDI CCs.
NRPNs aren't special. They are simply a specific pattern of CCs. Yoshimi's
implementation is very forgiving, doesn't mind if you stop halfway through
(will just get on with other things while it waits) and will report exactly
what it is doing.
Another significant improvement is to the handling of ALSA audio, which is
still very important for some people. Up till now we've been insisting on 2
channel 16 bit format. Tests have shown that virtually all motherboard sound
chipsets will handle this, but many external ones don't. So now we initially
request 32 bit 2 channel and work towards a compromise :) With external sound
modules in mind, endian swaps are also implemented.
Vector control has been extended so that there are four independent 'features'
that each axis can control, One is fixed as volume (if enabled) but the others
can be any valid CC and can also be reversed. The vector 'sweep' CCs are split
out very early in the MIDI chain and the new CCs created are fed back in before
any other processing. The result of this is that once we eventually get
MIDI-learn implimented the control posibilities will expand dramatically -
sorry about the extreme delay :(
When using the GUI, there are additional style improvements and tweaks. Also,
Yoshimi is a bit more informative when there are insurmountable problems,
especially at start-up.
In the 'examples' directory there is now a complete song set, 'OutThere.mid'
and 'OutThere.xmz'. Together these produce a fairly complex 12 part tune that
makes Yoshimi work quite hard.
Finally, as well as document updates and the usual crop of bug-blatting, a
couple of obscure regressions have been fixed.
--
Will J Godfrey
http://www.musically.me.uk
Say you have a poem and I have a tune.
Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.
Yoshimi source code is available from either:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/yoshimi
Or: https://github.com/Yoshimi/yoshimi
Our list archive is at: https://www.freelists.org/archive/yoshimi
To post, email to yoshimi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx