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ChipWave Studio 0.2.17.0: built-in user manual, digital rain About, exports end cleanly

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@postmanpat-303 postmanpat-303 released this 26 Oct 20:39
· 34 commits to main since this release
v0.2.17.0
b1a00a5

A built-in user manual, a digital rain About page and cleaner exports

0.2.17.0 puts a 38-page user manual inside the app (Help > User Manual, or the new button on the About page), opens the About page with a short burst of digital rain, fixes the About window that used to grow and creep up the screen, and makes WAV and MP3 exports stop exactly at the end of your song. Live playback, looping and the song format are unchanged. Help > Check for updates offers this version.

Download

  • Windows: ChipWave-0.2.17.0-setup-x64.exe (installer) or the portable ChipWave-0.2.17.0-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-0.2.17.0-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: the user manual, built in

  • Help > User Manual (at the top of the Help menu) and a User manual (PDF) button on the About page open the ChipWave Studio user manual in your PDF viewer.
  • 38 pages: installing, your first song in 10 minutes, a tour of the screen, the Timeline, the piano roll and Tracker, instruments and generators, the mixer and effects, automation, MIDI, plugins, exporting, settings, a shortcuts table and troubleshooting.
  • The manual is inside the app, so it works on every install and offline. You can also read it on GitHub.

New: a digital rain About page

  • Help > About now opens with green code falling over the window, revealing the page in about a second and a half.
  • Press any key or click to skip it. Reduce motion in Settings turns it off.
  • Fix: the About window used to open a little too tall and keep growing and creeping up the screen for a few seconds. It now opens at its final size, straight away.

Fix: exports end cleanly

  • When a song reached its end, WAV and MP3 exports (and --render) played the song's first row once more in the tail. They now stop at the end of the song.
  • Live playback and looping are unchanged.

The song format is unchanged, so songs from 0.2.17.0 open in 0.2.16.0.

Before release, these checks were run on the release code (the merge into main has the same files): the automated test suite (1215 tests passed, 18 slow ones skipped, plus 3 more in a second suite); the 11 racks acceptance tests, 6 Rack tests, 10 piano-roll copy tests and 13 display tests; rustfmt; clippy for the Linux and Windows targets; an icon check; and a render check. Because exports now stop at the song's end, the 8 song render fingerprints changed on purpose: old and new renders were compared sample by sample and match exactly up to the end of each song, differing only in the tail where the extra row used to play. The render check confirmed the new reference renders, and all 82 generator preset renders are identical to 0.2.16.0. The macOS build passed its CI build, launch smoke test and dmg check.

Full details are in the CHANGELOG.

Known limits

  • The manual is in English only.
  • 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

  • The user manual, the digital rain About page, the About window fix and the clean export ending by Del (postmanpat).

The full list of the libraries and authors ChipWave builds on is in Help > About, the README and THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.txt.

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