v0.7.0 — a dancer, a slicer, and two songs that play themselves

Soba has a dancer now, and two new songs to dance to. The Dancer is a stick figure who dances to your patch: on the Clock's beat, or, with no Clock at all, on the beat it hears in the mix. Canopy is a song in the manner of Bonobo, and Orrery is a song with no score, played by slow orbits. The effects have faces of their own now, and the new Slicer chops anything held into it into a rhythm. You can hear Canopy in the browser.

If you have v0.4.0 or later, Soba offers this update itself: the dot after the version number lights up, and Install puts it in place.

New modules

• Dancer: a stick figure who dances to the patch, harder as the music gets louder. It finds the beat by ear when there's no Clock, keeps it through a breakdown, and cocks its head while it listens.
• Slicer: chops whatever passes through it into a rhythm, like a slicer pedal. Hold a chord into it and out comes a gated sixteenth-note figure.

Two new songs

• Canopy: four minutes of F minor in the manner of Bonobo, from dawn birds to night. Kalimba and bell loops that never quite repeat, a broken beat, vocal chops that answer themselves, and an Arranger that rides the room.
• Orrery: five minutes of E minor with no Arranger. A Day rises and sets, each voice waits for it, and two clock gears meet every 35 bars in an eclipse.
• The Examples menu is now shelved as Recipes and Songs.

Faces for the effects

• Reverb: the room's decay, filled as it rings.
• Delay: the echo train, with each hit walking down it.
• Chorus: the voices braid as they sweep.
• Distortion: the bend, lit where the signal reaches.
• Compressor: the transfer curve, and the last two seconds of gain reduction.
• 3-Band EQ: the response curve over the sound it shapes, with bands you can drag, and a column of knobs to each band.
• Tape: the reels lurch with the wow.
• SVF and Ladder: the signal's spectrum under the response curve, with a trail of the last two seconds.
• Oscillator: a live trace of what Out plays.

Knobs

• Bipolar knobs have a zero mark and read a signed percent.
• Hovering a patched knob picks out the cable carrying it.
• Knobs show CV that arrives through a jack of another name.

Sampler and Chopper

• More formats: MP3, Ogg (Vorbis and Opus) and FLAC as well as WAV.
• Chopper: record a take into it, as the Sampler does, and run a pattern longer than the break (Steps).
• Both draw a take in bars against its beats.
• Sampler: hear a slice from its face. Each take is trimmed and normalized as it's kept.
• Audio Input: right-click → Record into a new Sampler, in whole bars when a Clock runs.
• Drag a file over empty canvas to hear it, with a ghost of its Sampler.
• Takes no patch names are tidied away, and a recovered autosave keeps the crashed session's takes.

Sequencers

• Chord Sequencer: patterns A–D and a Pattern CV, for songs longer than 16 chords. Hear the Strum and Velocity choices as you pick them.
• Step Sequencer: hear a note as it's written or dragged.
• A Follow toggle keeps the grid on the pattern playing.
• Keyboard: the top row of letters is a second octave, tracker style.

Groups

• A group's miniature shows its real modules before it's first opened, and the view zooms through it as you step in and out.
• Opening a group frames everything inside it, as F does.

In the browser

• On a phone: a long press or the toolbar's + adds a module, from a finger-sized menu.
• Takes survive a reload, a take downloads as a file, and a patch downloads with its takes as one zip.
• F1 opens the Keyboard Shortcuts sheet, not the browser's help.
• Right-clicking and the palette no longer crash the page.

Everywhere else

• Zooming keeps every face its size: text no longer makes parts step.
• Cables show faintly through modules and labels.
• Attenuverter: a Range switch, so an LFO can sweep far.
• Drum: a Shaker type, grains that swell in rather than strike.
• LFO and Noise keep time at very slow rates.
• Examples opened while playing start cleanly.
• A cable that would close a loop is skipped, and named.
• Afterglow's accents ring, and From One Sine broadens into its last sine.

Downloads

• Windows: soba-windows-setup.exe (an installer), or soba-windows.zip. For low latency through an ASIO driver, use soba-windows-asio-setup.exe or soba-windows-asio.zip.
• macOS: soba-macos-apple-silicon.dmg or soba-macos-intel.dmg. The app isn't signed by Apple yet: the first time, right-click Soba and choose Open.
• Linux: soba-linux.zip

The Windows downloads aren't code-signed yet either, so SmartScreen may say "Windows protected your PC". Choose More info → Run anyway.

Licence: Soba is MIT. The low-latency (ASIO) Windows builds contain Steinberg's ASIO SDK, which Steinberg offers under the GPLv3, so those builds are distributed under the GPLv3. The licence and a notice are in their zip and installer, and the exact SDK they were built from is attached here as asio-sdk-source.zip.