MiniHub 0.4.0 — pre-alpha

Still pre-alpha, still unsigned. The same two ways in: the installer, or the portable ZIP you unzip over the old folder. Settings, projects and recordings live outside the application folder, so upgrading over 0.3.0 keeps your work.

A new node: One Ring

One Ring is three things in one node, run by the audio engine on the same clock as the sound: a sequencer of commands, a player of notes, and a writer into the Sequencer.

Sixteen channels, sixty-four steps each. A channel aims at something in your patch — an arpeggiator's rate or mode, a mixer's input level or its master, a morpher's step, the tempo, a parameter of a plugin — and each of its steps carries a value: fixed, a range it draws from, or a list it walks. A step can hold a probability, a condition on another channel, or a lock that keeps mutation off it. Length, rate, repeat, offset, swing and humanise belong to the channel, so sixteen of them drift against each other instead of marching together.

Thirty-two scenes, A1 to D8. Store one, recall it now or at the next bar, with the channels restarted or left where they stand.

One seed. Every random draw comes from it, so the same seed plays the same piece. Mutate one channel or all of them, and each cell says for itself what a mutation is allowed to change.

One Ring plays notes, too

Material. What reaches One Ring's MIDI IN — a Sequencer track aimed at it, or a controller cabled to it — is captured over a window you choose and kept as the node's material; a MIDI clip can be loaded as that material instead. A capture keeps what starts inside its window, and freezing the material puts it out of reach of everything else.

Four voices. A channel aimed at One Ring · Voice N plays a slot of the material, or one of its notes. Each voice has its own root and scale, transpose and octave, spread and chance, velocity and length with their spreads, the order it reads the material in — as played, up, down, shuffled — a density, and its own MIDI channel.

The writer. WRITE takes what the voices played over the last window and puts it into the Sequencer: a new track, a clip replaced, or notes added to one. With FEEDBACK on, each generation also becomes what the voices play next — no sooner than a delay you set, and at most a number of times you set — so the piece feeds on itself. The material it started from is never touched.

A new Home

The first page is rebuilt: four cards, each with its own picture — New, Current Project, Load, Templates — and beside them what MiniHub is, how finished it is, and where the rest of the answer lives: the source, the site, and a Report a bug button that opens an issue with your version, build and Windows release already written in it.

Fixed

• A clip edited while the piece plays no longer silences every instrument. A Sequencer sync used to panic every plugin chain, so a note moved during playback cut the sound of all of them.
• The list a menu opens on a faceplate is dark, and drawn by the page. Electron drew those lists white, over the graphite plate, which is where they were least readable — One Ring's menus and the Arpeggiator's alike.
• The application declares a dark colour scheme, so the scrollbars, carets and selections Chromium paints itself stop coming out white.

Known, and not fixed here

• One Ring's second half — the capture, the four voices and the writer — is days old. It is covered by tests and it runs, but it has not yet been through an evening's work, so that is where the rough edges will be.
• Kilohearts plugins (kHs Gain, kHs Filter, kHs Reverb) still do not load: "setProcessing(true) failed".
• Massive X can still move a parameter by itself for up to half a minute after its window opens, and a Learn armed during that time may take that parameter instead of your knob. Arm it again once the plugin has settled.
• MiniHub.exe still describes itself as Electron in its file properties, so Windows may show that name — in Task Manager, for one.

Checksums

Unsigned, so SmartScreen will ask: More info, then Run anyway. SHA256SUMS.txt is published beside the downloads so you can check them yourself.