Hi Everyone,

Merry Christmas one and all - a festive update (v0.87.4) for you all, to add couple of fixes and refinements to v0.87.3. Here are the important changes:

·      Interface refinements...
A couple of the known issues have been solved with the new interface. Most importantly, the "Always On Top" function is now optional (see the ?lock' icon, top right). Also, when not "Always On Top", and you need to bring the window to the front, you can use the new taskbar "reViSiT Window" button.

·      Pattern saving bug...
The evil bug in v0.87.3, where patterns longer than 64 rows didn't save properly is now fixed. Another minor bug in the loading process has also been patched.

·      Some old friends...
Well, it looks like v0.87.3 was only partly successful on the keyboard front - some hosts appear to be using hooks themselves, so it's necessary for me to bring back to option of the Manual Keyboard mode. MIDI In (pattern entry) also returns to the scene, with the added options of Disabled, Mono and Poly entry. Mono limits all input to a single tracker channel, whereas poly functions in the usual way (for entering chords, etc.).

For a full list of updates, see the release notes or readme.txt. Please report back with any comments, queries or problems you might have.

Enjoy!

All the best,
Chris

Hi Chrisnash,

Hi Anon, Anon, Anon,

Sorry for the delay in replying - I've been under the weather for a while now.

AEB: I can't think of any reViSiT problem that might cause some plugins to respond to Note Off and some not. It sounds very like a problem with either the plugins themselves or the host's act of passing MIDI messages to them. If you find out any more information, though, I'd be interested (e.g. what are the offending plugins and the working plugins; what circumstances in the pattern does the problem occur). 

Anon: The selection of Impulse Tracker's interface wasn't the result of some nostalgic attachment to IT2, Dos or anything "oldskool", but a very calculated move in interface design - see the MPhil thesis written about it - http://www.nashnet.co.uk/english/revisit/documentation.htm. One of the things that made the IT2 interface great was it's 'singleness of purpose'  - i.e. if you're in the pattern editor you edit the pattern; there's nothing else to distract you or slow you down. The bottleneck in other programs (Fast Tracker, Cubase, etc.) is the endless requirement to change the keyboard/mouse focus to the window/panel of the program you are working on (Preece et al., 1994). The workspace must be kept as uncluttered as possible. That's not to say IT2 was a perfect example of this without any shortcomings, and reViSiT aims to address such issues - but keeping the order list seperate isn't a shortcoming, it's a major advantage.

Vince: reViSiT doesn't use DirectDraw (few plugins do), so I'm not sure if there's a conflict there - otherwise other plugins would have similar problems. I will look into the problem when I don't have so much work on my plate, but I hope you can understand that getting a tracker to work in a tracker is not going to be one of my top priorities right now - I've got Instrument Envelopes and NNA's to code! Does the GUI resume to normal operation after the sample has loaded, or does it just hang permanently? Is it with all samples, or just a few? reViSiT has two CPU threads - one to process the audio and one to do everything else (GUI, editing, loading, etc.). So the thread doing the drawing also does the loading, hence, it can't do both at the same time and whilst loading, drawing is paused. The freeze will seem longer for larger samples (with longer loading times).

Thanks for the feedback everyone!

All the best,
Chris

Anon.,

> Fair enough. Singleness of purpose for someone is single mindlessness of purpose for another.

Perhaps "singleness of purpose" wasn't the right expression, though I have no idea what "single mindlessness of purpose" means. IT2 enhances the focus on the job at hand and reduces the confusing and fiddly screen clutter that there was in FT2. It might be true that the more information you can get on screen, the better (as long as it's well laid out) - but this doesn't extend to the more buttons/controls, the better. Then, you just get to a stage where the interface becomes unwieldy.

> FT2 had far more users than IT though.

Where as that might have once been true, this has definitely changed over the years - and was probably never true if you added Scream Tracker users to Impulse Tracker's. Google for "Impulse Tracker" and "Fast Tracker" and look at the hit count. There are also far more .IT files in circulation than .XM files. IT2 was *technically* (sonically) the best tracker for a long time, so it's file format became a standard, and thus made Fast Tracker even more obsolete (since you could load XM in IT, but not vice versa).

In any case, as I said before, reViSiT is not exclusively for fans of IT, but for anyone who wants the most efficient way of writing music. Indeed, I am hoping to involve reViSiT users in an analysis of interface usage for a PhD in the near(ish) future - a project that aims to establish a methodology for evaluating interface ergonomics - so perhaps we can tryout the order list in the pattern editor sometime, and see how it fares!

All the best,
Chris