OVNI v0.3.0 — SUPERNOVA: media session, four new worlds, real LFOs

SUPERNOVA v0.3.0 — audio-reactive visual synth · macOS (Universal, arm64 + Intel) · VST3 · AU · standalone app · free, AGPLv3.

Signed and notarized installer: OVNI-SUPERNOVA-v0.3.0.pkg (SHA-256 in SHA256SUMS.txt). Run it over v0.2.0; your presets and sessions carry over.

What's new

SUPERNOVA becomes a playable instrument. A SUPERNOVA-only release: the MEDIA
session — a strip of photos and video you can cue, reorder, relink and drive from
a MIDI pad — a sequence clock that cuts on the beat, an LFO section that means
what it says, and four kaleidoscope worlds swapped for a photographic family
(still 50 worlds). The seven OVNI audio plugins and ORBIT are unchanged and are
not part of this release. macOS-only, as before.

Added

• MEDIA strip — see your session. A filmstrip of numbered thumbnails between
  the visual and the knobs shows every photo/video in order, the current one with
  a countdown to the next change. Click to cue (← / → too), drag to reorder,
  ✕ to remove, right-click for rotate / move to start / reveal / clear, + to
  add. Number keys 1–9 / 0 cue a tile straight away. Thumbnails are
  decoded in the background with the same orientation the engine uses. ▦ in
  the top bar hides/shows it; drop a folder to load all its photos in name
  order; iPhone HEIC, WebP and TIFF are accepted (macOS). Removing,
  reordering, rotating and clearing the session are all undoable (Cmd+Z).
  The session — a sequence, or a single photo or video with its rotation — is
  saved with the project and with user presets, so reopening brings it back.
  Loading a project always wins: if the host restores one while you are playing,
  the session it carries takes over, and a cue that lands in that same instant is
  applied to the freshly loaded session instead of being written back over it.
• Drop photos between two tiles. The MEDIA strip is now its own drop target: files or a folder
  dropped on it are inserted at that position (an insertion line shows where), instead of always
  landing at the end of the session. The photo on screen keeps playing — only its number changes.
• Missing media is marked, not dropped. If a photo or video has moved, its tile stays in the
  session marked missing (red !, greyed name) instead of silently disappearing when the
  project reopens; the sequence skips it, and right-click offers Relink… for that file or
  Relink folder… to recover every missing item of that folder at once. A file that returns to
  its place heals itself. Nothing cuts to a missing tile — the sequence, ← / →, the number keys
  and the MIDI cues all step over it, and clicking one opens its relink menu instead.
• Canvas format (FORMAT chip). The canvas now has a shape, like a project
  format: AUTO follows the first item (vertical photo → 9:16, square →
  1:1, landscape → 16:9), or pick FREE / 16:9 / 9:16 / 1:1 / 4:5 / 4:3. The
  visual is drawn letterboxed to it in the editor, the app, fullscreen output and
  the Syphon feed; the EXPORT menu lists the matching preset first. FIT / FILL
  chooses letterbox vs. crop-to-fill. Pure layout — the render engine and its
  byte-exact goldens are untouched.
• Sequence clock, order and transition. The sequence can advance by
  Seconds, by Beats of the tempo (host BPM / TAP — cuts on the bar) or on
  every Kick with a minimum gap; Loop or Shuffle (Shuffle is the order
  the clock advances in — stepping by hand with ← / → or notes 88 / 89 always
  walks the strip in order, so next-then-previous puts you back where you were); Cut or
  Burst (the old photo explodes and re-forms as the new one). Persisted with
  the project and presets. In Beats, a cue waits for the next bar (the armed
  tile shows a dashed outline) instead of cutting mid-phrase — the armed photo is
  decoded while it waits, so the cut lands on the beat — and holding Shift
  cuts right now. A cue asked for just before a downbeat lands on that downbeat:
  it carries the beat it was armed at (for MIDI, the beat of the note itself),
  not the beat of the editor tick that picked it up.
• LFO rates: 21 beat divisions plus free-running Hz. Every division from a
  sixteenth to four bars now carries its triplet (·T) and dotted (·D)
  variant, and a FREE / Hz mode (0.05–20 Hz) runs an LFO off the clock instead
  of the tempo — it keeps moving with the transport stopped or with no host.
• Per-LFO polarity, phase and retrigger. BI / UNI picks whether the LFO
  swings both ways around the knob or only adds from it; PHASE (0–360°) offsets
  where the cycle starts; RETRIG restarts the cycle on the current beat without
  disturbing your phase setting. All three persist with the project.
• LFO depth now means what it says. At 100 % an LFO sweeps exactly the target
  parameter's range, and the result is clamped to that range — several LFOs on the
  same target can no longer push a parameter out of bounds.
• LFOs are recalculated on every rendered frame instead of 30 times a second,
  so fast modulation reads as a wave rather than a staircase on a 60/120 Hz display.
• Cue your photos from a MIDI pad. Notes 72–87 cue tiles 1–16 of the media
  session, 88 / 89 step next / previous and 90 jumps to a random photo
  (never the one on screen) — so the session stays playable in immersive or
  fullscreen, where the strip isn't visible. Cues follow the sequence clock (in
  Beats they wait for the bar, like clicking a tile); MIDI cue: now in the
  SEQ menu makes every note cut immediately.
• A photo sequence is exported the way it plays: the clip follows the sequence
  clock (Seconds / Beats / Kick), its order (Loop / Shuffle) and its
  Burst transition, starting from the photo on screen — and the visuals react
  at the speed you saw them, with the muxed audio covering the same stretch.

Changed

• Four worlds swapped for a photographic family. The kaleidoscope presets
  (Kaleidoscope, Hypnosis, Cathedral, Hologram) mirrored your picture into a
  mandala and the material stopped reading. Their slots now hold Parallax,
  Lantern, Meridian and Vantage — built on the same idea as Satellite: the
  image is preserved and reinterpreted with depth, parallax, a slow orbit, a
  subject cut-out or light, with faithful (or subtly graded) color. Still 50
  worlds. The KALEIDO control itself is untouched — turn it on in any world.
• Rotating a photo is instant. The ⟳ button used to re-read the file, decode
  it again and re-run both Vision passes on every quarter turn — hundreds of
  milliseconds with a 12-megapixel photo. The decode is now cached upright and
  rotations are derived from it (a measured 45× on four turns). As a bonus, a
  photo reopened from a project at a given rotation and the same photo rotated by
  hand now produce exactly the same image.

Fixed

• Sessions saved with a comma decimal separator survive. LFO banks, MIDI-learn
  maps and scenes are written and read independently of the process locale, so a
  host that switches the C locale (common in Qt/GTK apps) can no longer destroy a
  saved performance setup.
• Undo restores your LFO bank, MIDI-learn map and scenes. They were captured in
  the undo snapshot but never re-read on undo/redo, so they stayed put.
• A click in the instant a project loads no longer overwrites its settings.
  Toggling the canvas format, FIT/FILL, the MEDIA strip or MIDI cue: now inside
  the 33 ms between the host restoring a project and the editor picking it up
  used to overwrite the setting that had just been restored — and it did not
  correct itself. The host wins, as it already did for the session itself.

Source for this exact build: branch feat/supernova, tag v0.3.0 — https://github.com/ovniaudio/ovni/tree/v0.3.0
ORBIT lives in its own repo: https://github.com/ovniaudio/orbita