HourGlass

Preliminary feature to allow envelopes to play at different rates, as a multiplier of the texture length. (ie, if the texture length is 8 seconds, setting an envelope rate of 8 will make that envelope play 8 times during the whole texture.) The dial allows changing the speed to some common multiples of the texture length, the text box can be used to enter a free rate multiplier between 0.001 and 1024. This feature currently conflicts with the looped texture playback. The workaround is to disable the looped playback. (The sounding result will however effectively still be looped for most envelopes.) Also, when offline rendering, longer progressions of multiple playback rates might not evolve as far as desired, as the offline rendering ends at the texture length plus the tail length. The workaround is to use the live output recording feature. I will try to come up with some solutions to these in the future.
Maximum voice count increased from 256 to 512. It will depend on the computer capabilities, the used resampler mode and use of multithreaded voice processing if all the voices can actually play.
While making the above change, I noticed a performance problem with high voice counts, which hopefully is now fixed.
Sound volume to envelope converter window length now has name and value labels in the GUI
The offline chain processing progress indicator would sometimes get stuck over the waveform view, hopefully now fixed

Changes :

Source sound volume can be analyzed and converted into an automation envelope (found under the Ops menu button as “Generate from sound”)
Source sound pitch can be analyzed and converted into an automation envelope.(*) Don’t expect too much out of this, it’s mainly useful to get an envelope that vaguely resembles the pitch curve of the source sound. (found under the Ops menu button as “Generate from pitch analysis”)
Fragment scripts can have 2 different sections that are called at seek time or at fragment generation time (forgot to include an example of this in the script presets…) (**)
When used as an external editor, no longer require a render target folder to have been set
Effect/VST plugin reported latency now taken into account in the offline preprocessing (ie, the assumably silent beginning of the processing is removed in the processed result)
Offline preprocessing resets effect/VST before rendering (should fix for example ReaFIR losing the start of the sound)
Envelope generation function rewritten so that the audio engine mutex lock is held only for a very brief time, even if tons of envelope points are generated
Some other changes/fixes

Added triggable parameter gestures system. While you can operate it from the GUI 8×8 grid by clicking with the mouse (with the middle button, sorry Mac users, I think it doesn’t work there) or by assigning keyboard shortcuts or toolbar buttons to trigger the gestures, it probably works the best via MIDI or OSC remote control. This feature may be rather complicated at first to understand and use and probably warrants a separate Youtube video or blog post to explain it better. If you don’t plan to use HourGlass in a performance oriented way (live or by recording the audio output into a file), this feature likely isn’t going to interest you. (It might be developed later so that it’s possible to trigger the gestures from an editable timeline but at the moment it has no useful purpose when offline rendering the textures.)

MIDI/OSC Remote control system was reworked. The scriptable value mapping system was removed (hopefully nobody misses that) and instead the incoming control values can be mapped using a visual envelope editor.

The source sounds offline processing system can now remember audio peaks for all the intermediate processing steps, so that the envelope editors for the offline processing modules can now show the proper guide audio peaks. Note that when zooming in enough, the peaks or a waveform is not shown as that data is not available. (Because that would require storing the whole audio data for each processing step, which might be a bit too much memory wise for this…)

Source sound buffers handling was improved. If the same audio file is loaded into HourGlass several times, only one real copy is kept around. Offline processing no longer makes a redundant copy of a file if the processing chain has all processing modules bypassed.

Envelopes/parameters lifetime management was improved, hopefully eliminating many bugs (including crashing ones) relating to adding/removing the envelopes.

Envelope editors can be locked to show a particular parameter envelope.

When plugins are scanned, a visual indicator is shown that the scan is going on and if errors were encountered, a log is shown. On Windows the plugin scanner process won’t show the usual Windows crash dialog, to allow the scan to go faster if a plugin crashed. A solution for OS-X seems to also exist to not show the crash report dialog, but it’s more complicated to properly disable that, so it wasn’t yet implemented.

Lots of more minor changes that will be added to this blog post later. Now I just want to get the new version out into the world after so much delay…