annotate CHANGELOG @ 394:53d5e31770b4

* Add/update change log; add M4M project to README

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 1.8 since the previous release 1.7.2:

 - Sonic Visualiser now registers as a file type handler on OS/X,
 providing better integration with the desktop generally (Dan Stowell)

 - There is a new function to toggle all Time Rulers at once (key #)

 - Text overlays are now easier to read on dark backgrounds

 - Hidden layers are now ignored when exporting an image (Dan Stowell)

 - A crash when starting a new session or exiting the application
   after loading a session with saved alignment data has been fixed

 - The duplication of right-button menu functions when multiple files
 were loaded has been fixed

 - The layer-add menu functions now have shortcuts (Dan Stowell)

 - The codebase has been reorganised into libraries and a configure
 step added.  It should be easier to build and maintain on OS/X and
 Linux than previously, although it won't make much difference on
 Windows.

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 1.7.2 since the previous release 1.7.1:

 - The time-value layer now has an origin line and an option to
 show derivatives (change from one point to the next) rather than
 raw values

 - A static initialiser race has been fixed, possibly fixing an
 occasional crash on startup in Windows

 - A crash when pressing Play straight after New Session has been
 fixed

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 1.7.1 since the previous release 1.7:

 - The RDF importer does a better job of assigning labels to layers,
 layers to panes, and values to labelled regions

 - Interactive editing in the Text layer benefits from the same
 improvements as made in 1.7 to Note and Region layers

 - The layer data editor window has a text search feature

 - The main window status bar now shows the last label to have passed
 the playback position in the current layer, at the right end of the
 status bar

 - The Russian translation has been updated (thanks Alexandre)

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 1.7 since the previous release 1.6:

 - A new "Insert Item At Selection" function on the Edit menu
 can be used to create Note and Region layer items whose time
 extents correspond to the current selection(s)

 - Interactively editing points in the Note and Region layers
 now works much more smoothly

 - SV can now import MIDI files that use SMPTE timecode for event
 timing (importing MIDI files using with the more common
 timebase-based timing was already supported)

 - Time values throughout the display may optionally be shown in
 seconds and frames at various frame rates
 
 - A crash on exit in Windows has been fixed

 - A very unobtrusive user survey is now included

 - Various other bug fixes.

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 1.6 since the previous release 1.5:

 - The Colour 3D Plot layer now supports logarithmic vertical
 scale and linear interpolation options.

 - A new colour scheme (High Gain) has been added for spectrogram
 and Colour 3D Plot, which improves readability for some data.

 - Further performance improvements have been made to Colour 3D
 Plot.

 - Various other bug fixes.

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 1.5 since the previous version 1.4:

 - You can now insert time instants, time values, and notes using
 a MIDI device during playback.  If a time value or note layer is
 current it will be used for insertion (giving a value equal to
 the pitch class, or the played note, respectively); otherwise an
 existing or new time instants layer will be used just as it is
 when inserting instants using the PC keyboard.  Using a MIDI
 device should give better timing than using the PC keyboard.

 - There is a new Activity Log window with a (purely informative) list
 of events and user interactions that happen while SV is running.

 - The spectrogram has somewhat improved graphical scaling, and
 this is now the default (being much faster than the 4x oversampled
 method).  The previous default is still available as a preference.

 - Visualisation of very dense colour plots (such as spectrograms
 calculated by plugins) is substantially faster in this release.

 - Spectrogram display is now faster in many circumstances.

 - Alignment using the MATCH plugin is faster on OS/X than before.

 - SV will take into account RDF plugin descriptions, if available,
 in order to make somewhat better decisions about display of plugin
 outputs (for example, placing segmentation data into a layer with
 segmentation plot type).

 - You can now switch layers by clicking on the spare area at the left
 end of the pane that is also used for the current pane indicator.

 - The vertical black lines dividing segments in the time value
 layer's segmentation plot style are now optional.

 - Several widget layout bugs on OS/X have been fixed.

 - Several serious crashing, deadlock, and data corruption bugs have
 been fixed.


New features in Sonic Visualiser 1.4 since the previous version 1.3:

 - SV now has a Region layer type, used for display of features with
 durations.  It also supports Vamp v2.0 plugins that provide durations
 for features.

 - Layer data can now be imported from RDF described using the Audio
 Features Ontology, as well as from the existing text file types.  SV
 can also export annotation layer data to RDF/Turtle, although in a
 somewhat simplistic manner at present.

 - You can search for transforms by text in the new "Find a Transform"
 dialog.  This searches both installed plugins, and plugins that have
 not been installed but that have descriptions available on the
 semantic web.

 - You can now zoom and scroll vertically in the time-value, note,
 and colour 3d plot layers.

 - Sonic Visualiser can now load sessions from uncompressed XML files
 as well as its own compressed-XML .sv format.  Files with extension
 .xml that contain suitable session data will be loaded as sessions.
 Note that .xml extension files still do not show up in the default
 file load filter.  This is intentional, as there may be any kind of
 data in them -- if you want to load uncompressed session files from
 XML, you need to know you're doing it.

 - Several crashes and other bugs have been fixed.

Changes in Sonic Visualiser 1.3 since the previous version 1.2:

 - There is a new spreadsheet-style data viewer and editor for
 viewing and editing the data in some types of annotation layer.

 - Alignments are now saved to the session file.

 - The spectrogram layer is usually somewhat faster than it was.

 - You can now hold Shift while dragging to move an item, in order
 to override the initial drag resistance introduced in 1.2.

 - The gross mis-labelling of time lines in the ruler has been fixed.

 - There is a new, somewhat provisional PulseAudio output driver.

 - Several other bug fixes.

New features in Sonic Visualiser 1.2, since the previous version 1.0:

 - SV now supports time-alignment of multiple performances of a work
 loaded at the same time.  This option is enabled when the MATCH Vamp
 plugin is installed.  When alignment is switched on and more than one
 audio file is open, SV will assume that all open files are
 differently timed performances of the same work, and will calculate
 time alignments for them.  Playback will then play only a single file
 at a time, and the playback cursors in other files will track at the
 varying speeds to try to ensure that each is at the same point in the
 underlying score.  This enables effective comparison of several such
 files, as well as a meaningful way to switch from one performance to
 another during playback (ensuring that the switch happens at the
 correct point in the performance being switched to).

 - There is a new Image layer, which can display images from the
 local filesystem or retrieved via HTTP or FTP.

 - A new measurement tool has been added.  With the measurement tool
 selected, dragging in a pane draws a rectangle labelled with the
 scale values for its start and end corners and its size.  You can
 have any number of measurements present at once; they are associated
 with the top layer, their scale values depend on the scale for that
 layer, and they are only shown when that layer is at the top and the
 measurement tool is active.  Measurements are saved and reloaded in
 the session file.  Drawing measurements can be undone and redone, and
 a measurement can be deleted by hitting Del when highlighted.  Note
 that the measurement tool shows the scale values associated with the
 pixel positions of the mouse when dragging, not any values associated
 with actual features present in the audio or its analysis (e.g. the
 values are not rounded to the nearest spectrogram bin).

 - You can double-click using the measurement tool in the spectrogram
 to get an instant measurement rectangle for a feature.  This is a
 purely graphical feature that works by calculating the boundary of a
 contiguous region of pixels "similar to" the one you double-clicked
 on; it does not use audio analysis.  Adjusting the gain and colour
 scheme etc of the spectrogram will (by design) affect the
 measurements obtained this way.

 - The spectrum can now optionally show frequency estimates of peaks
 aligned with a piano keyboard along the horizontal axis (this needs
 some refinement).

 - The harmonic cursor in the spectrogram has moved from the Select
 tool to the Measurement tool.  There is now a similar harmonic cursor
 in the spectrum.  Both of them show more information as text
 alongside the cursor than previously.

 - There is a new Erase tool for erasing individual points from an
 editable layer.

 - Several keyboard shortcuts have changed -- all of the Alt+key
 shortcuts now either use Ctrl or a plain keypress with no modifier,
 to avoid clashes with window manager shortcuts and to make them
 easier to use and remember

 - The playback controls are now in a Playback menu as well as the
 toolbar.

 - There is a new key and mouse control reference under Help (or press
 F2).

 - You can double-click on a pane in navigate mode to jump to a time.

 - All of the single-colour layers (waveform, time values etc) now
 allow you to define your own colours as well as using the built-in
 set.  The colour of a layer is now shown next to its name on the pane.

 - When you add a new single-colour layer it will use a default colour
 that is not yet in use in another layer (if there is one).

 - Single-colour layers can now optionally have black backgrounds (with
 a set of lighter colours in the default colour palette that use black
 backgrounds by default).

 - There's a new Printer colour scheme in the spectrogram with only a
 small number of grey shades.

 - Vertical zoom in a log-scaled spectrogram is much more intuitive;
 it now leaves the point that was in the centre of the visible area in
 the centre after zoom, instead of the point that was in the centre of
 the linear range corresponding to the visible area.

 - You can now turn a colour 3d plot layer upside down by clicking the
 Invert Vertical Scale button.

 - There's a new Layer Summary window which shows the panes and
 layer data in a tree layout.  This is very simplistic at the moment.

 - Each pane now has an [X] button at its top left, which removes that
 pane when clicked.

 - There's a new Solo play mode toggle button; when active, only the
 currently selected pane is played.  This is also the default when
 time alignment is in use.

 - Rewind/ffwd now stay confined to the selection if Play Selection is
 enabled; also, the rewind and ffwd "one step" buttons are now enabled
 even if there is no time instants layer for them to align to (they
 align to the time ruler instead and so jump in steps of a size
 dependent on the zoom level).

 - You can now export note layers to MIDI.

 - MIDI note velocity is partially supported.  Note velocity is
 retained when importing and exporting MIDI and is used in playback,
 but it is not yet shown in the display and cannot yet be edited.

 - You can now drag-and-drop files (of whatever type) onto SV from
 other programs such as file managers or web browsers.

 - mp3 files (and Ogg, but they aren't supported on Windows at the
 moment) are now decoded in a background thread so you can see the
 start of the track without waiting for the rest to decode.

 - Mac builds of SV can now load AAC/mp4 files and anything else
 supported by QuickTime.

 - There is now an option to resample audio files on import if they
 don't match the samplerate of the first file loaded.  By default this
 is switched off, as it affects the visible waveform.  The default
 behaviour is unchanged (play at the wrong rate).  There is still no
 option to handle multiple rates "correctly" (i.e. by resampling
 on playback and showing the waveforms at different resolutions
 according to each one's underlying rate) and there probably never
 will be.

 - SV can now open .m3u playlist files, though it's a hazardous thing
 to do as it simply loads all the files in the playlist at once.

 - SV now has various options for how to number tapped time instants
 (bar/beat, plain counter, time in seconds, tempo etc).

 - The official builds use Qt 4.3, which fixes some nasty
 bugs in the file dialog that the version 1.0 builds suffered from.