🦋 Cleaner practice - MonoChord, Real Book. Chord Tabs

• improved practice apps: Chord tabs, monochord, real book and tuner(5173533) (by davay)

Bugs fixed:

• better popups and monochord fix(c29f930) (by davay)

🪔 Polished Spectrogram and Monochord and useString synth

New feature:

• documented tuner(e1b2d0a) (by davay)
• jsdoc documentation started(7850759) (by davay)
• playable monochord(c79e1cd) (by davay)
• robust and adjustable spectrogram(23f55c1) (by davay)
• better spectrogram controls(efa6e7e) (by davay)
• sigmoid contrast for spectrogram(3d9e6f7) (by davay)
• better string synth(ba59f03) (by davay)
• monochord strings are getting modular(c9f9a9d) (by davay)
• string for monochord(54cc577) (by davay)

Bugs fixed:

• docs for lib(b11d9a3) (by davay)
• FFT colors(f355adb) (by davay)
• elemSynth fixed(071d91c) (by davay)

🔮 Real Book in the new database package - intervals, chords, scales and more knowledge in the open database

Now we have Real book online! And now it's public along with other music knowledge.

Here's the list of all available data files:

• chords/basic.yaml
• chords/chords.yaml
• chords/intervals.yaml
• chords/modes.yaml
• chords/progressions.yaml
• chords/real-book.yaml
• colors/colors.yaml
• colors/RALcolors.yaml
• rhythm/40-rudiments.yaml
• rhythm/meters.yaml
• rhythm/rhythms.yaml
• scales/list.yaml
• scales/good-scales.yaml
• scales/melakarta.yaml
• scales/scale-names.yaml
• scales/scales.yaml
• tabs/guitar.yaml
• tabs/ukulele.yaml
• countries.yaml
• amy-codes.yaml

🍿 Faster and more stable pages with more room to grow

All internal composables are revisited to be made faster and more stable - less garbage collection and smaller objects to move around.

Now we have an RSS feed and also PURE mode that hides all UI except for the actual web-app on the page. It enables new scenarios of Chromatone use and enables parents to use it with younger children.

Version 2.9.0 is the last step before the release of Chromatone 3.0. It's coming soon, around October 2024. What's coming? New chapter in the system development. 2.0 was all about growth and new apps getting built within the same ecosystem. Almost all other projects got merged to the main app and quite notably expanded. Last step is to optimize the core to handle all these interactions between parts of multiple apps. 2.8 was all about optimizations. 2.9 is about making the whole optimized experience more coherent and streamlined.

It means that getting to 3.0 we'll make Chromatone more easy to read, understand and use for actual music education and research. I means bringing really useful functionality to the front and making it intuitive for users. There is a button to report an issue in the footer, yet I'm not sure if anyone would bother filing a full issue here. May be I will make some more simple feedback forms along with new interactive experiences with users connecting to each other.

Stay tuned!

Full Changelog: v2.8.8...v2.9.0

🐙 Improved sequencer and other performance updates

I'm focused on optimizing current code base so that it's lighter, more readable, faster and has less memory leaks. MIDI interface cleaned up, now the useSequence is quite clean. Tech debt is cleared out before going 2.9 version that we'll use to reorganize the pages of the web-site to be more appealing to different types of users. First let's make use-chromatone polished and then use it for more fun apps.

🦻 Better synthesizer

Now we have sampler synth, new reverb and very powerful synth overall on every page of the site. Instantly playable! Enjoy!

🎩 Better synth architecture and controls

ADSR component to simplify synth controls. Also many small improvements to the code structure. Despite the growth, code is still very readable and easy to navigate. Stay tuned!

🦚 Slick UI and sticky apps

Overall web-site UI is getting more and more slick and unobtrusive. Those apps that fit into single screen are now positioned as sticky elements with descriptions being put into 'info' markdown containers. Easy and fun!

The tuner app got full refreshment along with other full screen apps. Version 3.0 is now much closer! ✌️

🍰 New experiments, improved UI and new default synth

Yes, the day has come and we started switching to the new main synth for the whole web-site. It's based on Elementary synth and is much faster and more robust than the Tone js one. The shift was quite easy as I just needed to swap the synth component in the navigation bar and that's it!

Now all the funny new generative sequencers are powered by this synth as well as the built in keyboard and midi synth. Examples and practice apps still use old synth, but that will be changing soon. Tone will still be used for scheduling things as it has solved most of the issues there. But Elementary can finally take everything - let's see how it goes!

Now we have a separate scale panel with keyboard and guitar/ukulele notes shown. So we have Scale, Tempo, Synth and Audio panels available anywhere on the site. Very enjoyable experience, try it!

🎽 More features and cleaner panels

MIDI Keys web-app are working good, Chroma Touch app is built structurally, but need refinement. Aubio is now loaded from the NPM package - less clutter in the /use/ folder. The lib build is modular and easy to analyse.