sonic-pi: v2.8.0 - Karlsruhe

This release, named after Karlsruhe, one of the home cities of live coding, is mainly a maintenance release with a strong focus on both performance, stability and documentation. This is therefore the fastest and most stable release of Sonic Pi ever with a massive 10% performance improvement on the original Raspberry Pi 1. It also ships with new translations in Polish, Japanese and French. Many of these improvements (such as the complete rewrite of the OSC stack) are not documented in this release list but can instead be found in the commit logs over on Github.

However, not to go unnoticed are a number of exciting new features. For example we now have a new Band EQ FX, the ability to use MIDI note names such as :e5 as values for opts such as cutoff:, and new powerful cutoff envelopes on the sampler.

• Shortcuts for switching buffers have changed. They are now M-{ and M-} for switching left and right respectively.
• sync no longer inherits BPM by default. Set the bpm_sync: opt to true to enable BPM inheritance.
• Random seed generation for new threads is now reset on calls to use_random_seed.

• octs - returns a ring of successive octaves.
• assert - for raising an exception if the argument is not true.
• assert_equal - for raising an exception if the two arguments are not equal.
• bt - converts the specified time w.r.t. the current BPM.
• inspect - similar to print but prints the inspected version of the argument.

• New translations for Polish, Japanese and French.
• Improve efficiency of logging panel.
• M-RET is now a duplicate shortcut for running the code.
• Log title bar is now hidden in full-screen mode.
• Log - don't display └ or ├ if the line is blank, instead display │
• Add sample name autocompletion to more fns such as sample_duration.

• New tutorial section on ring chains (chainable functions for modifying rings)
• Tilburg 2 example slightly tweaked for Raspberry Pi 1 compatibility.
• Many minor tweaks and improvements in all areas.

• New FX - Band EQ for attenuating or boosting a specific frequency band.
• New synth - DPulse - a detuned pulse wave.
• Sampler now has a cutoff envelope which can be accessed via new opts which mirror the standard envelope opts but with a cutoff_ prefix (such as cutoff_attack, cutoff_decay_level and friends).
• Sampler now correctly handles samples with different sample rates.
• Bitcrusher FX now has an internal low pass filter modifiable via a new cutoff opt.
• Panslicer now correctly honours min and max pan values.
• New default opt on: for both sample and synth. This acts like if but ensures all the opt vals are evaluated (useful if wanting to keep the consumption of random streams or ticks consistent even when not triggering a synth.
• MIDI opts such as cutoff: can now accept note names such as :c4.
• FX learned the global slide: opt to match synths.

• Massive performance improvements.
• Teach play_pattern_timed to handle rings.
• current_transpose now returns 0 if there is no current transposition.
• BPM scaling is now honoured when controlling synths and FX
• All with_fx* fns now return the result of their block.
• spark now handles rings correctly.
• spark now treats booleans as 1s and 0s so you can now spark rings of bools.
• puts, print and mc_message now handle multiple message arguments

• Ensure with_fx doesn't swallow TL modifications such as transposition, current synth etc.
• Ensure with_fx doesn't affect random seed.
• Improve reliability of boot process on Mac and Windows.
• The FX pre_amp: opt is no longer scaled w.r.t. the current BPM.
• Fixed GUI side of update checking system.