PERF-1 0.15.2

PERF-1 0.15.2, a second fix-up of 0.15.0. Install with the web installer: https://deamonslinky.github.io/PERF-1/install/ (Chrome or Edge, the FM-1 on USB). Upgrading from 0.15.1, 0.15.0 or 0.14.0 keeps your pieces, settings and voices.

Gentler basses. No piece starts its bass on Bite, Tine or Clang any more. They are too high and bright for a bass line (disco 3 jumped out at you). Lofi, electro, disco and funk start on Dirty, Sub or Warm instead; the three are still there to pick by hand.

The Pluck steps page tidied. It is laid out like Acid steps now: Step (rest, soft, note, accent), Note (1-12, the chord's notes from low to high; it was called Rung), Octave and Frozen. It also has its place in the page tabs along the bottom.

The manuals in plain words. The manual and the quick manual are rewritten for musicians rather than developers, with the beginner's guide as the manual's first section. All three are PDFs on the manual page.

Full list in docs/CHANGELOG.md.

Known: a store while the music plays can still put a short skip in the audio on some units; it is being looked at.

Note on numbers: this public 0.15.2 is the code of development build 0.15.5.

PERF-1 0.15.1

PERF-1 0.15.1, a fix-up of 0.15.0. Install with the web installer: https://deamonslinky.github.io/PERF-1/install/ (Chrome or Edge, the FM-1 on USB). Upgrading from 0.15.0 or 0.14.0 keeps your pieces, settings and voices.

Breakdowns keep the pad's stabs. The pad's stabs never sounded in a breakdown, so reggae, dub and the pieces whose pad stabs dropped to the pluck alone in a break. Now the stabs go on through it, a little softer.

The Synth look, settled (after the update video): the sun climbs once through a build instead of bobbing, and it has no horns; nothing boxes in the scanner or the imp in the sigil; the level meters are LED segments; the slinky's coils part along the spring's winding when he jumps, in the header and on the DISCO screensaver, where the dancer is now lit in the Synth theme instead of near-black.

A beginner's guide. The manual page now opens with "Start here: your first hour": thirteen steps with pictures, in plain words, from switching on to saving a piece. It is also a PDF, next to the whole manual and the quick manual on eight A4 pages.

Video of 0.15.0: see the README. Full list in docs/CHANGELOG.md.

Known: a store while the music plays can still put a short skip in the audio on some units; it is being looked at.

Note on numbers: the development builds 0.15.1 to 0.15.4 in the git history are this release's steps; this public 0.15.1 is the code of dev build 0.15.4.

PERF-1 0.15.0

PERF-1 0.15.0, the third public release. Install with the web installer: https://deamonslinky.github.io/PERF-1/install/ (Chrome or Edge, the FM-1 on USB). The manual, the browser emulator and the editor are on the same site. Full list in docs/CHANGELOG.md.

Harmony you can hear. Each genre changes chord every so many bars (house, disco, garage, lofi, reggae, synthwave two; dub, DnB, breaks, electro, trap, funk, amapiano, trip-hop four; dubstep eight), so lofi's ii-V-I, house's i-VII-VI-VII and synthwave's i-VI-III-VII are progressions you hear. Minor keys get a real dominant on V, diminished chords are rare and never the cadence, and most genres loop a progression that starts from home. Drift scales the bars; HYPNO keeps its clock in seconds.

A fuller pad. The saw pad sounds run through a resonant four-pole filter per voice that opens with every breath and stab, with a sub an octave down; Strings and the supersaws play four saws. Stabbing pads sit where the genre comps, so every dub piece skanks and garage, house, funk and amapiano gain stab pieces.

The bass line has nine figures by name after Riff (Octaves, Two-step, One-drop, Log drum, Skippy, Funk, Big beat, Dub, Gallop) and plays the fifth where it played the seventh under 9th, Dub and Fourths chords. DnB, breaks and garage pieces start with a line.

The pluck goes out on MIDI channel 2, every note with its note-off, and the new Pluck steps page (ARP x9) freezes deja vu's loop as sixteen steps you write, rung and level, stored with the piece.

The SET page (after USB & MIDI): Rounds a piece gets before the auto-DJ moves on, a tempo Ramp over them, and Intro, the slow progression: from Play the tracks come in one by one over one to eight minutes, pad first, acid last, for mixing in, scratching or sampling over.

The look. The Synth theme is now the Synth Imp: a night sky and a horned sun behind the sigil, a scanner in its centre, the floor running to the horizon on the beat, the imp in neon. Scanlines (USB & MIDI page) for any theme.

Voices. The DY set, human-made DX7 voices from public-domain banks, is the default and shows each voice's own name; DX puts the built-in set back.

Under the hood. The dropouts of 0.14.0's heavy pieces traced to a lost timer interrupt and to swung hits splintering a half into many short chunks; both fixed. The pad's filter runs on the second core.

Known: a store while the music plays (a piece, or a setting's autosave) can still put a short skip in the audio on some units; the write is sliced with the chip's erase-suspend and the status log shows no missed render, so this is being looked at. Upgrading from 0.14.0 keeps your pieces, settings and voices; the Voices setting may read DX once on a unit that had chosen DY (the stored bit changed meaning): set it back once.

PERF-1 0.14.0

The second public release. The firmware is perf1-0.14.0.fwsc (identity FM-1_7001400): install it with the web installer, https://deamonslinky.github.io/PERF-1/install/ . Installing firmware is at your own risk: read section 1 of the manual first, and keep a way to restore the stock firmware to hand.

New pages and ways to play: Steps (ratchets, push, level), Bass line, Deja vu, Feel, Phrase, Acid steps; Flex Beat grows to 27 patterns; backup and restore from the installer; safer buttons.

Music that behaves more like the genre: swing and looseness for every voice, chord habits per genre, sections shaped by genre, six more genres (sixteen in all: Dub replaces Jungle), thirty built-in DX voices.

Under the hood: seamless saves; the dropouts found and fixed (the audio interrupt cleared its flag after rendering, so a render that ran a little long swallowed the next half's interrupt: a 642 s lofi log went from 9 dropouts in 309 s to none); load shedding that steps one level at a time.

Full list: docs/CHANGELOG.md. Please report anything odd, with the version, genre and piece, and for crackles a status log (the installer's Live status or tools/fm1log.py).

PERF-1 0.13.0

First public release of PERF-1, a custom live-performance firmware for the M-VAVE FM-1 (identity FM-1_7001300, SHA-256 572d85002a8886ee239ebfb20b9bca4983dad0818f873277be5de3092be3155a).

Install with the web installer: https://deamonslinky.github.io/PERF-1/install/ (Chrome or Edge, FM-1 over USB), or tools/fm1_install.py. Installing firmware is at your own risk; read section 1 of the manual first.

See docs/CHANGELOG.md for what the development builds added. Comments, ideas and bug reports are welcome: https://github.com/deamonSLINKY/PERF-1/issues/new/choose