ChipWave Studio 0.2.8.0: StringWave, the Violet Look and Pie-Ring Add

StringWave, the violet look and pie-ring Add

0.2.8.0 adds StringWave, a new built-in string instrument with eight presets. It also gives ChipWave's own instruments one violet look, so you can tell them from plugins at a glance, and turns Track pie › Add into rings, so a new drum track is three clicks away. On top of that come a smarter piano roll ruler, fixes for CLAP plugins and a lot of polish. Songs without StringWave save, play and render exactly as before. Help > Check for updates offers this version.

Download

• Windows: ChipWave-0.2.8.0-setup-x64.exe (installer) or the portable ChipWave-0.2.8.0-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-0.2.8.0-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: StringWave

• A string ensemble, built in. It has three layers, each with Octave, Detune, Tone, Level and Pan, plus undertones: a sub and a drone under the chord.
• Shape it: an amp envelope with Swell, a 12 / 24 dB filter with its own envelope, two LFOs and a mod envelope, plus chorus, echo and a big reverb on board.
• Eight presets: Velvet Ensemble, Bowed Cathedral, Harp Shimmer, Undertow Drone, Hollow Body Pad, Echo Strings, Slow Swell Orchestra and Init.
• Play it your way: the mod wheel, expression and sustain pedal work out of the box. It plays from Timeline clips, the piano roll, Tracker blocks, rack layers and live MIDI.
• Its panel has three pages (Layers, Filter & Mod, FX & Master), a full view and a knob pie.
• Find it in Track pie › Add › Instrument or Browser › ChipWave Instruments.

New: the violet look for ChipWave's own instruments

• Every built-in instrument shares one violet tint: its panel, its card in Nested Device Chains and its row in the Browser. Each theme has its own shade.
• Plugins stay neutral, so violet always means "made by ChipWave". The theme's own colour still marks the selection, the playhead and the transport.

New: Add rings in the track pie

• Track pie › Add now opens rings round the pie instead of a panel. Pick Drum pattern › an instrument or Drum Kit › a kit to get a new track with an empty 1-bar pattern, ready to fill.
• Instrument ›, Automation lane › and Browse… work the same way. Esc or ‹ Back steps back a ring, and everything a ring makes is one Ctrl+Z.

Fixed: Drum Kit Kits… and Dice kit

• Loading a kit, or rolling the dice, now brings the kit's name, sounds and pad names together. Before, the old name and pad names stayed behind.
• An empty pattern gets the kit's starter groove, all in one undo step.

New: piano roll ruler

• Click or drag the ruler to set a paste marker. Ctrl+V pastes there and the next paste goes right after it.
• The play marker follows the Timeline, also while playing.
• Bar, beat and grid ticks with beat labels, readable in every theme.
• Box select: drag on empty space to select notes (Shift adds). Alt+drag selects every note the line crosses. A click still draws a note.

Fixed: CLAP plugins

• Knob moves in a plugin's own window are now heard on every track that plays it.
• A plugin's sound is always saved, also when you close its window, even for plugins that never say they changed.
• A new track with the same plugin starts from its current sound.
• Plugin windows use your monitor's real scale.

Also new

• Clip colours show at once on the Timeline, linked copies too.
• Studio knobs in the Slate theme, with the name in caps and the value in orange.
• A steady lower panel: Piano roll, Instrument and Nested Device Chains keep one height, and the height you drag is remembered (Ctrl+6 resets it).
• A calmer Master level history: the last 30 seconds, moving slowly. Right-click to pause or hide it.
• Nested Device Chains opens on Cards, and remembers if you pick Tree.
• Silent plugin previews: Browser thumbnails are made off-screen, without a taskbar flash.
• VST & CLAP: the Browser's Plugins category has a new name, and a plugin with many programs lists just its main instrument (search or Show all programs finds the rest).
• A simpler Browser: tiles, search with a filter, one ••• menu and a preview bar.
• Keys → Notes: the Typing button has a new name and a small keyboard icon.
• Play / Stop is one button (Space still plays and stops).
• Metronome and count-in: a Metronome button that swings with the beat, and a count-in of Off, 1 bar or 2 bars. Record blinks and the position counts down while it counts in.
• Visual fixes: readable lights and labels in Amiga Workbench, knob badges and lock marks that no longer touch long names, a clearer filter picture, and macro names that no longer run into each other on narrow cards.

Songs that use StringWave are saved as reader version 8, which older versions refuse cleanly instead of playing them wrong. Every other song is saved exactly as before.

Before release, these checks were run on the merged code: the automated test suite (1021 tests passed, 18 slow ones skipped, plus 3 more in a second suite), including the 11 racks acceptance tests and 10 piano roll copy and paste 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 0.2.7.0, and pinned StringWave's Velvet Ensemble preset, which renders the same from the Tracker and the Timeline.

Full details are in the CHANGELOG.

Known limits

• StringWave is a ChipWave instrument, not a plugin, so it can't be used in other music programs.
• The Drum pattern ring needs the Timeline: it's greyed out in the Tracker.
• The racks limits from 0.2.7.0 still apply: plugin instruments can't be layers, live MIDI and the note preview only play the first layer, and there are no plugin effects or automation inside a Split.
• The Mac build was tested on CI only (build, smoke test, dmg check), 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

• StringWave by Del (postmanpat), MIT.
• Oceans 11 is a chiptune arrangement of music by Martin Galway, whose Commodore 64 soundtracks for Ocean Software inspired a generation of chiptune musicians. Thank you, Martin.
• Still building on CLAP (free-audio, MIT) via clap-sys, the vst3 crate, Symphonia, egui (Emil Ernerfeldt), cpal, sfxr by DrPetter (Chip FX), Pink Trombone by Neil Thapen, the Inter, Barlow and Geist Mono fonts, and all the other Rust crate authors.

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

▶ Watch the promo: https://youtu.be/ygVueHcGakw · more demos and promos on YouTube

Created by Del (postmanpat). Like it? Buy me a coffee or PayPal.

Early version, so expect rough edges. GPL-3.0.