Blockhead v0.13.0 alpha (Patreon)

Thank you for your patience.

Update Notes:

Linux Version

Is now available. Has been quickly tested on Ubuntu Studio 21.04.

Audio engine changes:

- Design: Lanes now represent a serial signal chain for each track with audio being routed downwards from the top lane to the bottom.

- Feature: Sampler blocks and meta blocks now have a "choke" setting. Turning on "choke" makes the block act as a gate for audio coming from the lanes above. Can be toggled from the block context menu or by hovering over the block and pressing H.

- Feature: Sampler blocks and meta blocks now have a built-in envelope which affects the block's amplitude and also the strength of the gating effect when "choke" is turned on. In meta blocks the envelope is only available when "choke" is turned on. The choke envelope consists of 3 regions: fade-in, level+tilt, and fade-out.

- Hover over the outer edges of the block just above the block footer to reveal the fade-in and fade-out draggers. You can drag these inwards to adjust the size of the fade-in and fade-out regions. Note that it's possible to set these regions to be extremely small so if you want to turn them off completely make sure you drag them all the way back.

- Once a fade-in or fade-out region is expanded, you can click once on the dragger icon to open the curve editor. Alternatively you can begin editing the curve by opening the context menu within the region.

- The central "level/tilt" region can be edited by clicking the icon at the bottom-center of the block or right-clicking in the central region and selecting "Edit Level Curve" from the context menu.

- The curve editor can be closed by pressing ESC or clicking anywhere outside of the editor.

- The left-most and right-most points of the level/tilt curve define the maximum levels of the fade-in and fade-out regions.

- Feature: Added "Smooth transitions" toggle to block context menu which is enabled by default. When enabled the engine automatically generates short de-clicking envelopes in the following situations:

- When a sampler block is triggered somewhere in the middle, a fade-in is generated

- When a sampler block ends before the sample end, a fade-out is generated

- At the start or end of a choke block, a fade-in/fade-out is generated if there is no attack/release period

Disabling "Smooth transitions" disables all of the above behavior and allows you to create sharp/clicky sample edges (may be desirable for certain music styles e.g. chiptune?)

Envelope editor changes:

- Design: Envelopes are now considered "active" if the button is visible in the top-left selector (and the tree item is checked in the (+) drop-down menu. Inactive envelopes have no effect.

- Feature: "Enabled" toggle (bottom right) can be used to enable or disable the envelope. Disabled envelopes have no effect.

- Feature: "Always Visible" toggle (bottom right). When turned on the envelope will always be visible while the mouse cursor is hovering the block. I would like them to be visible even when not hovering but I will need to find a more efficient way of rendering envelopes and also improve their appearance.

- Feature: Envelope points can now be selected by left-clicking them. An x/y editor will appear in the footer to precisely manipulate the selected point. Right-click an empty space to deselect the point.

- Update: Envelopes will now snap to micro-increments (usually 1/10th of the envelope's display unit).

- Update: Envelope values are always displayed in a format relevant to the associated parameter (amplitude is now expressed in dB, etc)

Large internal changes and surface improvements to the block layout manager.

These changes effect block stamping, block drag+drop, block resizing and tempo transformations:

- Feature: Can now resize multiple blocks simultaneously

- Update: Blocks now overflow into other tracks by default, unless:

- the root block (the block under the mouse cursor) is being inserted at the edge of a track

- or the CTRL (macOS: Command) key is held down.

- Update: It is no longer necessary to hold down a modifier key to have cloned blocks stay in their original lanes

- Update: Blocks now alternate searching up/down through lanes for a valid position rather than picking one direction

- Update: Tempo transformations now resize other blocks in the selection by default (instead of just moving them)

- Update: Tweaked the size and positions of the lane insertion edge zones as well as the visual indicators. Accidentally inserting new lanes while dragging should happen less often now

- Update: Various performance and scalability improvements

- Bugfix: Blocks now always perfectly maintain their horizontal positions relative to the root block

- Bugfix: Stamped blocks should now stick to the cursor properly in a way that doesn't break when the zoom level is changed

- Bugfix: Fixed a bug where lanes would be erroneously inserted while cloning adjacent blocks

- Bugfix: Fixed a bug where zooming didn't work while dragging blocks

- Bugfix: Fixed a bug where blocks would snap to the edges of tempo guide blocks instead of just the guide points

- Bugfix: Fixed a bug where block edges could drift away from tempo guide points during tempo transformations

Internal changes to sampler engines:

- "Classic" and "Fudge" sampling modes are now implemented as plugins. An unstable API (blink) now exists for adding new sampling modes.

- Many block parameters are now defined by the plugins. This includes all envelopes, spinbox and checkbox parameters with the exception of "Mute", "Choke" and "Smooth Transitions".

- Sample preprocessing is handled by the sampler plugins. Sample preprocessing is now deferred until the data is required.

Visible changes to sampler engines:

• Sample offsets are now applied before warp transformations. This means warp handles will now always stick to their original position in the sample when shifting the sample offset back and forth.

New block types (extremely not finished)

Two new block types are available from the track context menu. These blocks were added just to check that the underlying systems work and that the conceptual ideas are ok. The design of these blocks will be going through major changes. All these blocks are implemented using the new blink API. The only way to control the parameters currently is through the envelope editor.

- Effect block:

Effects process the audio coming from the lanes above (on the same track). Some of the old effects have not been reimplemented yet.

Note that by design, effects completely reset themselves when the playhead leaves the block. For instance, the reverb tail will be lost as soon as the block stops processing. However looping back to a point in time that falls within the block range does not reset the effect.

- Synth block:

Very simple prototype. This was added mainly just to check that the idea of synth blocks works ok technically and conceptually. The test synth is a basic cross-modulation synth. Two oscillators are frequency-modulating each other but only the output of the first oscillator is audible. The "wave" parameter morphs the first oscillator between sine, triangle, pulse and saw. The second oscillator is always a sine.

Other changes:

- Feature: Block modulator quick-select keyboard shortcuts.

- While hovering over a block you can press numbers 0-9 to select from the currently active modulators.

- Pressing the same number again while that modulator is already open will close the editor.

- You can also cycle backwards and forwards through active modulators with the minus [-] and equal [=] keys (configurable in settings).

- Feature: Added a channel selector for sampler blocks (in the header). For stereo samples, left clicking cycles between Left (mono), Right(mono) and LR (stereo) modes. Right-clicking opens a context menu.

- Feature: Sample information box (available from the channel selector context menu, or sample list context menu).

- Feature: Added ability to add labels to meta blocks (via context menu)

- Feature: Added a noise generator to Classic and Fudge samplers

- Update: It's now possible again to manipulate warp markers while an editor is open.

- Update: Added a dismissible pop-up help widget to Fudge sampler block

- Update: New block gesture added: Hold Shift + ALT and drag an effect/sampler/synth block to alter the amp and tilt of the central part of the choke envelope

- Update: Added "Delete empty lanes" keyboard shortcut (default CTRL+E (macOS: Command+E))

- Update: Block focus operation (hover cursor over block and press F) will now automatically zoom and pan the workspace onto the focused block (will try to improve the behaviour of this in the future as it's quite janky at the moment)

- Update: Added ability to toggle lock for multiple blocks at once

- Update: Added visual indicators for locked blocks

- Update: Added visual indicators to tracks to indicate the currently expanded lane

- Update: Visual tweaks to block selection borders

- Update: Tempo guide controls now stay visible when the guide block is off the left edge of the workspace, as long as nothing is blocking it on the same lane.

- Update: Many block operations such as toggling mute that could previously cause a click during playback will no longer cause a click. Changing a block's current lane will still cause clicking so there is still some work to do here

- Update: Can now hold SHIFT while manipulating spinbox controls to adjust values in finer increments

- Update: Amplitude is now expressed in dB everywhere

- Update: Block header and footer controls now auto-hide in a nicer way when they overflow the block

- Update: Block color will now carry over to more of its controls

- Update: The data offset indicator that would usually appear in the bottom-left of the block was moved to the top-left to make room for the new fade-in dragger control.

- Bugfix: Fixed a bug on macOS which affected all wav export operations where samples could not be written to disk

- Bugfix: Fixed a bug where undoing a color override operation would clear the color override instead

- Bugfix: Fixed a visual bug where track level meters stop decaying when the master level hits silence

- Bugfix: Sample starts are no longer softened when triggering a restart during playback

- Bugfix: Cloning a meta block via the context menu no longer causes a crash

- Bugfix: Fixed exit requests possibly being blocked when there is no active PortAudio stream, causing a hang

- Bugfix: Fixed waveform disappearing when a sample override operation is undone

- Bugfix: Fixed a possible crash while loading a project

- Bugfix: Fixed a visual issue where context menus would be the wrong size after switching font size from big to small

- Bugfix: Sample headers are now loaded in a separate thread so the UI no longer hangs while loading lots of samples at once. (caveat: if the user is very fast they can theoretically now stamp a new sample onto a lane before the header has finished loading. In this case the resulting block will not be auto-resized to match the size of the sample. I think this is still preferable to the UI hang that was happening before)

- Bugfix: Fixed some cases where lanes would jitter their positions back and forth while dragging them

Public issue tracker: https://trello.com/b/MT1A3Zob/blockhead-issues

Planned features: https://trello.com/b/DJsP5eL9/blockhead-planned-features

Discord: https://discord.gg/9ZW2UXM