Harmony Navigator 2.1.1 Update

Inversions And Voice Leading Hints

• While surfing palettes, you will be able to select a particular chord inversion by pressing the 1,2,3,4,5 keys on the computer keyboard. HN2 will still attempt to merge successive chords as good as possible (voice leading), however, by forcing a particular inversion you will likely get hefty pitch leaps, depending on the playing ranges of your global Pad instrument. 
• Pressing the 1,2,3,4,5 keys also works in the progression editor and will select the respective chord inversion on all selected contexts. Pressing 0 (zero) will reset the inversion to "automatic".
• When playing a chord twice, it is no longer reset to the root position. Use the ALT key while clicking to reset to the root position.
• By holding down the mouse button on a chord pad for longer than 800 ms, the chord will stop sounding when you release the button. Otherwise a short "trigger" will keep the sound sustained until you select the next chord.
• If the automated voice leading does not render the chords the way  you want it, you will be able to add pitch hints to a harmonic context, asking it to shift the instrument's playing range up (SHIFT + Up Arow) or down (SHIFT + Down Arrow) by one or more semitones. While this is great for quick & dirty fixes, you should be aware that hints only work for a specific progression and instrument (not portable). Use with care. Pressing "9" clears all hints again.

NOTE: Voice leading hints are considered experimental at this stage. Give us some feedback how it works for you. 

Saving a project could mess with instrument assignments
Refactor internal document management (save, load) [AR1137]

This was a hard to find bug that annoyed all of us for quite a while. For dynamically managed sound selections, saving a project while continuing to work on it could mess with the sounds. The issue was that sounds were deallocated before and reallocated after saving the file, which is unnecessary. This bug, among a few others, also held us back from implementing the automatic backup feature, because saving a file while working on it had unwanted side effects.

As the second title implies, we then also reworked the way the entire document structure is managed inside Synfire, so it will now be possible to save a file unattended in the background. This means there is now green light for teh auto-backup feature (next update).

Use Shift+Space to continue, restart from last position by default [AR1117]

This is a major change of the way the transport behaves when pressing the spacebar. Stopping a playback with the spacebar pauses the playhead (not changed). Pressing the spacebar again restarts from the last starting position. Only if holding down the SHIFT key, playback will continue from the currently paused position.

We found that not being able to replay multiple times from the same starting position was not intuitive and user feedback supported this. In a typical composition workflow, the stop/edit/replay sequence is far more often used than the pause/continue sequence.

Do not send reset-all-controllers event by default [AR1131]

Synfire used to send a reset-all-controllers message after selecting a new sound by default. This was problematic, as this caused some soft synths to also reset the just established sound altogether. It possibly might also caused undesired side effects, like sound bursts or pseudo-random selections, depending on the particular plugin used. 

We removed this message. Now that custom CCs can be supplied with an optional reset value, it is no longer needed anyway. There is still the option to export the message to MIDI files, though, if that is desired.

Here are some more details on the changes to come: 

In chords-only mode, you will have the option to add "hints" to a chord that influence the way it is rendered: Pitch range and a voice leading break. The former instructs the renderer to raise or lower the Typical Pitch of the instrument's playing range, which will result in a lower/higher inversion of the chord being played (red color arrows in the picture). In case you feel that voice leading moved too far off your desired pitch range, you can use this option, or alternatively, set a Voice Leading Break (restart VL).

For chords-only mode in the palette, you can select a specific chord inversion by pressing 1,2,3,4,... Although it makes no sense to add these keys to the menu actually, we still did so, because you can lookup the keys there in case you forgot. We chose the Playback menu, because it is present in all windows. The keys however also work in the progression editor directly.

Sending a Reset-All-Controllers message every time a new sound is selected can cause unwanted side effects in some synths and plugins. Therefore this now became on option that you can enable or disable per device.

Final list of changes:

(http://www.cognitone.com/developers/article.stml?o=123)

As it is practically impossible to test all potential side effects of the major refactorings, the download will be labeled "Beta" until next week. If you encounter any problems, please report to us and we will fix them immediately. If no more problems occur, the update will be blessed official.

Please backup your current projects before opening them with the new version. Files saved with 2.1.1 can not be opened with a previous version.

The bad surprise today was our automated build system broke. We'll need to fix it before we can upload. Hopefully tomorrow.

EDIT: The update is now online for download. You will find it in your user account area.