ChipWave Studio 0.2.14.0: Round Robin, key pressure and clip copy and paste

Round Robin, key pressure and clip copy and paste

0.2.14.0 brings Round Robin: loops that sound a little different on each pass or each hit, through step conditions, clip variations, drum pad round robin and follow actions, while every render stays exactly repeatable. Your keyboard's key pressure (aftertouch) can now move any knob and is recorded with your notes, and .mid files import as note clips. On the Timeline you can copy and paste clips, loop a clip with a double-click or the new Loop button, and the pie menus are bigger. Every song saves, plays and renders exactly as before. Help > Check for updates offers this version.

Download

• Windows: ChipWave-0.2.14.0-setup-x64.exe (installer) or the portable ChipWave-0.2.14.0-windows-x64.zip. The installer isn't code-signed, so SmartScreen may warn: click "More info", then "Run anyway".
• macOS (universal, unsigned: Control-click > Open): ChipWave-0.2.14.0-macos-universal.dmg (or the .zip) runs on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs with macOS 11 or later. It isn't notarised, so the first time, Control-click the app and choose Open, or run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/ChipWave.app. See MACOS.md.
• SHA256SUMS.txt lists the checksums of all eight files.

New: Round Robin

Everything comes from the clip's or pad's seed plus the pass or hit number, so seeking, looping and exporting always give the same result. It's all off by default and nothing is saved until you use it. See ROUND_ROBIN.md.

• Step conditions: a note can play every X of Y passes, only the first time, never the first time, only in fills or never in fills, next to its Chance. The piano roll has new Conditions and Chance lanes and a Play this note… popover; conditional notes are striped, and a live Fill toggle turns any pass into a fill.
• Clip variations: up to four takes (A–D) per note clip, one per loop pass: in order, random, random no repeat, ping-pong or every N. A strip shows which take the first 16 passes play.
• Drum pad round robin: up to four sounds per pad take turns, with per-hit drift of pitch, level, tone, decay, timing and pan, a seed and a "Next 8 hits" preview.
• Follow actions and Capture: launcher clips can move on after N loops (X % Next / Again / Other / First / Last / Any / Stop), with a » badge and a "From here" preview. Capture to timeline writes the performance into the arrangement.

New: MIDI key pressure and .mid import

• Key pressure (aftertouch): poly and channel pressure from your keyboard drive a new Pressure modulator, from the quick-mod popover or the Movement list. Hover the toolbar's MIDI light for a live pressure meter. See MIDI.md.
• Recorded pressure: recorded notes keep their pressure curves and play them back exactly. The piano roll's new Pressure lane shows, draws and clears them, and pressed notes get a shaded foot.
• .mid import: MIDI files in the browser become one note clip with their notes, velocities and pressure, on the cursor track or dropped onto a track.

New: clip copy and paste, and looping

• Copy and paste clips: Ctrl+C / Ctrl+X / Ctrl+V on the Timeline (and the Edit menu), snapped to the grid, with a highlight on what was pasted. The clip pie has Copy and Cut, an empty lane's pie has Paste here (an independent or a linked copy), and the track pie has Paste at playhead.
• Loop button: a Loop toggle with two curved arrows sits beside the metronome. It's the same switch as L and the LCD's Loop pill, with the loop's bars in its tooltip.
• Double-click a clip to loop exactly that clip; double-click again turns the loop off. It's one undo step. Alt+double-click or Enter opens the clip.
• Bigger pies: pie menus are 30 % bigger and trimmed to fit the window. Settings > Look > Pie menus sets Small, Normal or Large.

Fixed

• Drum kits: a kit added to a track after StringWave or WaveForge now plays the kit, and a kit loaded onto a default-named track names the track.
• Amiga ⏮: the go-to-start button (and the Loop button when off) is drawn in a dimmed ink that's legible on Amiga's white buttons.
• The piano roll gives the computer keyboard back when you click outside it or it's hidden.

The song format only grows when you use the new features, so songs that don't use them still open in 0.2.13.0.

Before release, these checks were run on the release code (the merge into main has the same files): the automated test suite (1174 tests passed, 18 slow ones skipped, plus 3 more in a second suite), including new tests for step conditions, clip variations, drum pad round robin, follow actions, key pressure, .mid import, clip copy and paste, the Loop button and the double-click loop; the 11 racks acceptance tests, 6 Rack tests and 10 piano-roll copy tests; rustfmt; clippy for the Linux and Windows targets; an icon check; and a render check. The render check confirmed that the demo songs, the older-version fixture songs and the generator presets render bit-identically to the same reference renders 0.2.13.0 matched, and StringWave's Velvet Ensemble preset renders the same as before. The macOS build passed its CI build, launch smoke test and dmg check.

Full details are in the CHANGELOG.

Known limits

• Pressure modulates per instrument, not per voice: live, it follows the hardest-pressed held key of that instrument.
• .mid import ignores tempo changes, controllers and program changes, and puts every track and channel into one clip. SMPTE-timed files are refused.
• Fill is a toggle, not a key you hold. Launcher clips with variations unroll 16 passes before repeating.
• Tracker rows, live keys and previews count drum hits from the start of play, so seeking in the tracker doesn't recall the hit number. Timing drift only moves hits later, and tone drift moves one macro per drum kind.
• Follow actions work on note clips, and Capture always goes after the arrangement's end.
• Testing: the Mac build was tested on CI only, not on a real Mac. This Windows installer was built and checked on Linux, not run on Windows before release. Please report anything odd in an issue.

Credits

• Round Robin, key pressure, .mid import, clip copy and paste, looping and pie work by Del (postmanpat).
• Round Robin ideas only, no code copied: the round-robin and random opcodes of the SFZ format and sfizz, the layered drum instruments of Hydrogen and DrumGizmo, and the per-cycle alternation of Strudel / TidalCycles.
• Still building on egui (Emil Ernerfeldt), cpal, CLAP via clap-sys, the vst3 crate, Symphonia, sfxr by DrPetter, Pink Trombone by Neil Thapen, the Atkinson Hyperlegible fonts by the Braille Institute of America, and all the other Rust crate authors.

The full list is in Help > About, the README and THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.txt.