FluidEQ 0.7.0

New

• The live spectrum can be drawn thirty-six different ways, in two palettes.
  Bars, a ridge, a staircase, floating peak caps, a contour map that shows how
  wide a peak is rather than only how tall, a slope field that draws which way
  the spectrum is turning, stalactites hung from the ceiling, a heart monitor
  that beats once per band, a car riding the loudest frequency along a road made
  of the trace, and a rank of little sprites hanging at their levels. Pick one
  from the searchable list on the legend, or click the graph to walk through
  them while you listen — Space does the same, and Ctrl with either steps
  back.
• Every form moves in its own way. A bar snaps up and hangs, the way a level
  meter does, so a kick lands as a step. A ridge is a landscape and moves like
  one, because a hill that twitches reads as noise. The pulse is nearly
  instant, because a heartbeat that arrives late is not a heartbeat. Choosing a
  drawing changes how the music feels, not just what it looks like.
• Wave only hides the EQ response, the voicing and driver layers and the
  band handles, leaving the live trace alone on the grid.
• Full screen clears the bands out of the way and presents the graph in the
  middle of the workspace. Esc brings them back.
• Ten ways to draw the titlebar meter, cycled by clicking it.
• Smart EQ is its own layer. It used to rewrite your bands, so applying it
  overwrote the tuning you had done by hand and clearing it took your work with
  it. It now sits on top of everything else with its own chip, and survives
  clearing an AutoEQ reference. It also no longer inverts your own bands: the
  target it corrects towards includes them, where before it measured as if they
  were not there.
• An applied reference arrives band by band, in frequency order, instead of
  every slider jumping at once. You can see what it did rather than just what
  it left behind.
• Zoom the whole interface with Ctrl and +, - or 0. Keyboard only,
  deliberately — the mouse wheel belongs to the sliders.
• There is a game hidden in the support panel, for anyone with the
  contribution badge. Tap the creature or press space on the beat of whatever
  you are playing. It reads the real percussion out of your own audio, so it is
  your music you are playing along to.
• Euphoria mode. Thirty-six consecutive perfect taps and the entire
  application goes rainbow with the music: the bands, the response curve, the
  meter, the menus and the release notes. One mistake and it all goes back to
  being an equaliser.
• Share your run. A card is drawn with the creature, your score and the
  mode's own look, ready to post — copy it straight to the clipboard and paste
  it into whatever you are writing.

Changed

• Both waveforms move at the display's rate, not the analyser's. Sound is
  measured about twenty-two times a second, so drawing only when a measurement
  lands meant two frames in three showed the same picture as the one before —
  which the eye reads as stepping. They are drawn between measurements now,
  gliding toward each new one: at the full rate of your screen during euphoria,
  and capped at thirty otherwise, because a meter beside an equaliser does not
  need sixty and the frames are not free.
• The graph keeps time with the music instead of catching up with it. The
  analysis window was twice as long as it needed to be and the smoothing on top
  of it added more, so the picture arrived about ninety milliseconds after the
  sound. It is closer to fifty now, and it is quick to rise and slow to fall
  rather than sluggish in both directions, which is what makes it pump rather
  than sway.
• The graph reaches further across. The axis started at 10Hz but ended at
  25kHz, which on a logarithmic scale left three times as much empty space
  before 20Hz as after 20kHz. Both marks now sit the same distance from their
  edge, and the drawing gets the space back.
• The grid and the supporting curves have stepped back so the response you
  are editing is obviously the subject rather than one line among five.
• The installer opens FluidEQ when it finishes. Updates already did; a
  fresh install left you looking at a closed wizard.
• FluidEQ is called FluidEQ in Task Manager, in development as well as in
  the installed app.
• The language picker is one of the app's own dropdowns, not the operating
  system's, and it opens downwards at a sensible size.
• The titlebar sits almost flush with the page, so the window reads as one
  surface rather than a bar stuck on top of one.
• The delete-band button becomes an icon when the row runs out of room, and
  gets its label back when there is space for it. It is a bin now, not a cross:
  a cross reads as "close", which is the wrong promise.
• The score measures accuracy, not endurance. Only a perfect adds; anything
  else pays a little and gives back a share of the total. Playing longer cannot
  move anyone past their own precision.

Fixed

• FluidEQ was capturing your screen the entire time it was open, and the
  memory that took never came back — several gigabytes and still climbing after
  a few minutes. Windows only offers system audio through the same call that
  offers screen sharing, so a video track arrives whether or not anything wants
  one. It was being switched off in a way that mutes what a track delivers
  while leaving the capture behind it running, so full-resolution frames were
  produced continuously and nothing ever read them. The video is now released
  outright the moment the audio arrives.
• Euphoria mode ate memory without limit — a few hundred megabytes with it
  off, several gigabytes and still climbing with it on. The travelling colour
  was animated on the window itself and inherited by everything inside it, so
  the browser had to recompute every element on the page sixty times a second
  for as long as the mode was running; the interface went sluggish, the graph
  stuttered, and the waste piled up faster than it could be cleared. The colour
  now travels only on the handful of things that actually show it. Two of those
  things also carried an animated glow over a picture that redraws twenty-two
  times a second, which meant re-rendering everything beneath it on every
  frame — that glow sits outside the moving part now. It looks the same.
• A request that timed out leaked its listener, forever. The bridge that
  cleans up after an internal request rebuilt the wrong function and so removed
  nothing at all, silently. Beyond the memory, the abandoned listener stayed
  first in the queue and would answer somebody else's later request with the
  wrong result.
• A band deleted mid-animation stayed in memory until the animation it was
  never going to finish would have ended. One is nothing; an afternoon of
  adding, dragging and deleting bands is not, and none of it is visible while it
  accumulates.
• Clearing an applied reference clears its bands. The notes previously
  claimed the bands stayed, which was wrong in both directions — a reference is
  where your tuning came from, not a label beside it.
• The pet stops reacting to a paused waveform, and stops swaying in a
  silent room. The analyser freezes mid-frame when paused, and it was dancing
  to a reading that had stopped being true.
• The graph could not draw. 0.6.0 shipped a build that dropped d3's
  transition module, so every animated part of the response chart threw
  e.transition is not a function and the window came up broken. The build had
  been told d3 was free of side effects, which is true of almost all of it and
  false of exactly the piece that matters: transitions install themselves onto
  d3's selections when the module is evaluated, and nothing refers to them by
  name, so the bundler quite reasonably concluded they were unused and removed
  them. 0.6.0 and 0.6.1 were both withdrawn; everything they contained is in
  this release.

Faster

• The renderer is 44% smaller. Nothing was being tree-shaken at all — the
  TypeScript build emitted require() calls before webpack ever saw the import
  graph, so every unused corner of every library shipped. d3 alone was dragging
  in geo, force, contour and delaunay to draw an axis.
• The creature stopped re-rendering twenty-two times a second. It sits in
  the titlebar, so that never stopped: not when the window was idle, not when
  nothing was playing.
• The device list stops polling while the window is hidden. Each tick
  enumerates every audio endpoint on the machine.
• The spectrum is drawn as sixty-four columns rather than three hundred and
  twenty. At that density the bars touched, so it read as a filled area with a
  ragged top — a worse picture, built from a path string five times longer,
  rebuilt on every frame.
• The spellchecker is gone. It was downloading a dictionary to check the
  spelling of preset names.