The major additions/changes:
* A New Help System
To support Vista and allow a little more robustness with window control, the help system has been moved from WinHelp to HTMLHelp technologies. This involved the gruelling conversion of all the RTF files to HTML and recoding of the index and contents data. Furthermore, to account for HTMLHelp’s impoverished unformatted text-only popups, I had to code my own help popup window and HTML rendering mechanism – thus the full colour, illustrated and formatted effect popups live on.
* Workflow improvements
Answering a few feature requests and adding some innovations of my own, this version a number of minor changes/additions to make working with reViSiT easier and quicker – including auto-extend clipboard operations (e.g. Alt-O*2); a program-wide, lockable Audition Mode (Caps Lock); and an Apply Last Pattern Options shortcut (Ctrl-F2).
* Minor and major bug fixes
After exhausting debugging sessions and conversations with ardent testers, I’ve managed to locate some of the more elusive problems with reViSiT and host interaction to solve problems such as: MIDI stops and resets that don’t trigger Note Offs or send reset messages; pattern highlight edits erasing pattern data; addition to the keyswitching problems in the last release, this update fixes a number of minor memory handling problems and leaks, as well as a couple of teething problems with .1’s channel naming and colouring features.
* [ Professional Edition Update ]
In parallel with this public release, the first Professional Edition is being made available to selected testers for the first round of “quality control”. v0.91 Pro features a full surround sound feature set, adding many effects, settings, shortcuts and widgets to take advantage of - literally - a new dimension of music. As testing proceeds, work continues on the assignable output features, destined to start testing with v0.92.
Tracking is a method for computer music almost as mature and time-honoured as MIDI. Sometimes better, sometimes not so - always different.
Tracking has to date been the remit of dedicated underground [freeware] software called "Trackers", particular examples of which (eg. Fast Tracker, Impulse Tracker) have almost acrued cult-status with multi-million strong user-bases. The integration of the Tracker architecture (notably its User Interface*) in sequencer software, will bring the best of both worlds to the composer.
Sequenced and "tracked" music will be feasible within a single work. Composers can rely on the MIDI support and score facility of sequencers and/or turn to reViSiT for finer control of their music and audio.
The net result of a tracker, like all music applications, is audio. However, depsite the name, trackers should be likened to a software-sampler rather than a multi-track recorder. Inside a sequencer, reViSiT users will have full run of the hosts facilities in this department.
Though "tracked" music has often been combined with video, no freely-available software exists to this end. reViSiT will be able to use any such facilities in the host sequencer.
* The reViSiT interface is based on that of Impulse Tracker II, a development of Scream Tracker III.
VSTrack is the ultimate union of sequencing and tracking. reViSiT
is a VST Instrument (VSTi) plug-in for VST-hosts (such as
sequencers) that provides a tracker interface, based on Impulse
Tracker II, to the user.
Unlike normal VSTi's which simply take MIDI input, reViSiT's
editor window is a tracker interface, which takes on the role of
the 'music sequencer' - synthesizing both music and sound.
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