Bug fixes
up to December 2003

FTS upload December 21 (UK time)

When you resize one of the windows that lets all its items resize with it then rather than just do it once, it was redoing them all several times with a lot of activity on the screen - fixed.

The new option to suggest a keyboard mapping had a few bugs in it which showed up with some of the scales and arpeggios - fixed now.

The Lissajous 3D screen saver stopped whenever it ran FTS to make its background music. There it was a simple thing - FTS runs minimised rather than hidden and remains visible for a short time after the screen saver stops. This lets you restore it if you want to save its latest randomised tune - that is okay but the minimised icon mustn't be highlighted ("activated" in Windows jargon), which it was also doing, as that stops the screen saver immediately. Fixed.

FTS upload December 18 (UK time)

When you use the pitch bend wheel to retune a chord with many pitches in it all changing in pitch simultaneously and with the notes resounding at different points in the slide and using custom voices, then notes can get stuck on or get out of pitch with each other - fixed.

Some other minor fixes in the GUI - things not updating immediately when you change settings, and a couple of check and radio boxes that didn't appear to do anything when you clicked on them, that kind of thing, can't remember all the details now as I just fixed them immediately as soon as I noticed them.

FTS upload December 11 (UK time)

Some of the new voice menus played patches that were out by one - the ones with voice numbers starting from 1 instead of 0 and with the PatchAt syntax for finding the instrument numbers in the file - fixed.

The retuning midi player may play with an irregular rythm if you have a p.c.keyboard window showing at the same time, possibly also even if it wasn't showing. When it was visible, the problem was that it was repeatedly refreshing the display for the p.c.keyboard window - fixed.

If you play from the PC keyboard at the same time as the retuning midi player simultaneously you can get thread lock - program stops responding. Fixed that.

Then to make sure it doesn't stop responding because of thread block again, it has a thread block tester which will now automatically free the situation after a half second or so, if this type of thread block does recur (had it already but it wasn't working in all possible situations before). Hopefully won't occur again anyway and I have set the threadblock tester to pop up alerts in the debug build so if it happens there I will find out and fix it.

Thread block can happen if you have several asynchronous things going on (playing tune, and working with GUI to play another tune from PC keyboard say) and the program needs to make sure that the various events from the different threads don't get in each other's way - you can sometimes find yourself in a situation where two parts of the program are each waiting for the other to move, or even where part of the program is waiting for itself, and so gets blocked. It then waits for ever and so stops responding. That is what was happening here.

FTS upload December 4 (UK time)

If you play the chord progression plaer and simultaneously play from PC keyboard then FTS seizes up and stops responding. This was because of thread lock - fixed.

File | Save As brings up your newly saved file in an unaddressed e-mail. That is because it was doing Save As And E-mail by mistake, sorry.

Chord progression player wasn't responding to F11 to stop all play. Also it wasn't resonding to Alt + P to play the tune from the main window (played a fractal tune instead).

If you set the Arpeggio to not show 0s in one of the other views, then in the chord progression player view it doesn't play the chords properly - fixed.

Bs | Scales Options | Mean Tone Scale - doesn't explain well what the octave stretch is. One might well assume that it stretches all the notes, but that isn't how it works here. Rather it increases the size of the "octave" interval of repetition that the scale gets reduced into. So you need to adjust the comma as well as the octave shift if you want a stretched scale. Improved exposition of this.

The section on roman numerals for the chord progression player was very poorly expressed I felt - hopefully a bit better now. Other small improvements in the GUI.

4th December

In the roman numerals notation, vii and VII should have diminished fifths (tritones) and were playing perfect fifths instead - fixed.

The Cj and Ck7s were identical and both had a 9/10 for teh seventh instead of 16/9 and 9/5 respectively - fixed

The u for undecimal notation had no effect.. Anyway now it is used for undertones, and to get undecimal you now need to use ud as in Cud7.

If you go to File | Open and browse to the FTS Extra Shortcuts folder then choose to show all the files there to find out what is in it, and choose to open one of those files, nothing happens, which may seem puzzling. The reason is because it is a .lnk shortcut, a file type which was not recogised by FTS for opening. So now it will start up the shortcut if you open it in that way. E.g.if you open the chord progression player shortcut via that route from within FTS, it will start up another copy of FTS as a chord progression player. Actually if you open any shortcut from File | Open in FTS, it will now start up whatever app that shortcut points too, and with the arguments specified in the shortcut.

29th November

This bug shows up in the chord progression player, when you choose Retune scale to chord roots with a scale with more notes in some semitones than others. Example: start with conventional just intonation and then add in many shades of third such as 7/6, 9/7, 11/9 etc so that part of the scale has two or more notes per semitone. Then the chord plays in tune but gets rotated around to unexpected positions, maybe the E will be a 4/3 or some such. It happened because the way it worked out how many scale degrees are needed to rotate the scale to the desired position assumed the notes were more or less evenly distributed - fixed.

Before there was a limit on how small you could make the scale steps for equal tempered scales for the chord progression player of 0.01 cents. Now you can use an equal tempered scale with the steps pretty much as small as you like, e.g. 0.00001 cents - fixed

The File | Unlock entry was shown as File | User Info for users who haven't bought the program yet - fixed.

24th November

The musical e-cards weren't showing the desired fonts - fixed.

14th November

Out | Notes In Play | Refresh for Note Offs - even when unselected still refreshes the window when the notes get switched off for the chord progression player and chord / arpeggio / scale playing - fixed.

The just intonatiion retuning with diesis shifts sometimes causes unnecessary diesis shifts. It happens because sometimes it finds an interval of a 6/5 say with a previous chord when it could have found an octave or unison - fixed.

This only deals with some of the diesis shifits. The reason is that it can't look ahead of course, and that may be needed on occasion. Nor is it very good at looking back as it only looks back two chords and a note four chords back may be just a quarter note or so away and the diesis shift from those notes may be very noticeable too. I may later be able to do something about the look back, so it can look back a bit further. But look forward is of course only possible with leisure time retuning.

Incidentally the order in which the notes in a chord are played is important for the diesis shifts as the first note played sets the pitch for the entire chord. So if you want to ensure that a particular note in the next chord gets tuned with the previous chord, then if possible make sure it is played first, e.g. by adding a very short tied grace note before it so that it gets played say a millisecond or so before the other ones in the chord. But sometimes there will be no way one can ensure that is played at the best pitch except by rewriting the piece.

Example:

Previous chord
C D tuned as 1/1 9/8

Next chord:
D A

If the A is played first it will tune it as 10/9 5/3 perhaps, so the D then will be diesis shifted. Might even be a broken chord with the D delayed for a beat or two.

Here is a recording of this comma shift as adaptively retuned in FTS:

real_time_adap_ji_comma_shift

If on the other hand, the D is first in the new chord, it will tune the A as 27/16 which is surely what one would desire.  

Only leisure time retuning can ever hope to get the best solution available for this one too.

Could also have larger shifts than this too.

E.g. C Eb then Eb F#. Then play A C. If played as a slightly broken chord in that order it will play the A a minor third above the F#, and the C of course at a pure minor third above the A, so it will get shifted in pitch by a major diesis from the original C which is a really noticeable shift.

Here we go - real_time_adap_ji_diesis_shift

The two loud notes are both supposed to be the same note, C. But the strict just intonation adaptive tuning more or less forces a diesis shift of nearly a quarter tone between them - unless one could look ahead in which case one would know that the second one is on its way and be able to plan in advance for it with the pitch of the preceding A. There is just no way , looking at the progression up to that point. to know where it will go next. Maybe the F# is the important note and no C will be heard again for many seconds.

Once again it is clear the final solution has to be leisure time retuning to get the best possible results. As observed before, with comma pumps and the stacked major or minor chords, some diesis shifts and comma shifts are inevitable in strict adaptive j.i. But leisure time retuning could minimize the number and sometimes eliminate them entirely or shift them around in the piece to make them less obvious.

11th November

Out | Just Intonation Retuning | JI Pitch drift and chords | Log to text

This logs the text to a file. It could already do that but I forgot to put the button here, so I suppose this would count as a bug fix.

If you run the installer when FTS is already running you get an Abort Retry Ignore type message. Fixed - now option pops up to close FTS so that the install can continue. Was doing this before but had got disabled somehow.

If you enter a scale as e.g. 0.5 for 0.5 cents then it gets recorded as the unison scale 1/1 1/1 - fixed. (the last number in the 0.5 was getting ignored in this situation).

Preset rhythm for the chord progression player is missing its first beat - fixed.

10th November

Sorry, the Out | Retune to j.i. harmony had got disabled in a recent upload, only worked if you set it to play on several midi out devices at once - fixed.

Some of the links in the help contents list (left hand pane in the help window) open up in the contents pane rather than in the help pane - fixed.

8th November

Various bugs to do with data entry for the rhythm for the chord progression player and how it treated bar lines and punctuation. - all fixed

Also if you enter 0 (zero) for the rhythm instead of O (capital O) it interprets it as a note of zero length. Since the two are visually identical then this is confusing. So it now treats both as a quarter note. If perchance you do want a note of zero length, then add a decimal point 0.0 (perhaps not so likely anyone will but who knows...). - fixed.  

Also if you have it set to pause before note ons after patch changes from Out | Options | Midi Out / Save Timings then this pause gets applied at the start of the progression and shortens the first note played in the progression - fixed  

6th November

The Extra Chord Symbols window was buggy and not working as expected - fixed.

The cycle endlessly check box for the chord progression player doesn't register anything when you check it (actually it did switch on / off but there was no indication of that except to play the progression and see what happened) - fixed.

The Save Extra Chord Symbols check box didn't register anything and didn't do anything in the player window - fixed.

Timing of the first note in the progression was a bit temperamental. May be fixed now but if not try selecting Out | Open Now before you play the progression for the first time, play, wait a bit, then try again.

Also if you had nothing at all in the Rhythm field, and Set rhythm selected, then it didn't play a regular beat - fixed.

3rd November

When you show the current scale in SCALA it changes the current directory for FTS to the SCALA one too so that if you then go to File | Open you will find that you are browsing the files in the SCALA folder - fixed.

2nd November

This fixes a bug with the just intonation retuning - if you use it to retune from a keyboard with the pitch bend wheel adjusted away from concert pitch it doesn't work correctly - fixed.

31st October evening.

Quite a few of the chords still not right - sorry. Should be okay now - fixed.

Here is a clip of some of the ones it can play, with others possible following the same patterns:

chord_player_chords.mid

Plays:

C, Cm, Csus2, Csus4, Cadd2, Cadd9, Cadd4, Cmadd2, Cmadd9, Cmadd4, Cadd2add4, Cmadd2add4, Caug, Cdim, Cdim7, C5, C6, Cm6, C6/9, Cm6/9, C6/7, Cm6/7, Cmaj6/7, C7, Cm7, Cmaj7, C7sus4, C7sus2, C7add4, Cm7add4, C9, Cm9, Cmaj9, C9sus4, C11, Cm11, Cmaj11, C13, Cm13, Cmaj13, C13sus4, Cmmaj7, CmM7, Cmmaj9, CmM9, C7#9, C7b9, C7#5, C7b5, Cm7#5, Cm7b5, Cmaj7#5, Cmaj7b5, C9#5, C9b5, C7aug9, C7dim9, C7aug5, C7dim5, Cm7aug5, Cm7dim5, Cmaj7aug5, Cmaj7dim5, C9aug5, C9dim5. (some are repetitions of the same chord spelt differently).

Be sure to let me know if you have any symbols to add - or if you happen to notice anything not right in the list indeed.

If you start a midi file recording before playing any notes in th session, then you get the resets at the head of the file such as setting the midi pitch bend range done twice - once when the recording starts, then again when Midi Out is opened - fixed.

When you remake all the Scala related files, some of the lists of modes don't get given links to the lists of modes for presets scales - fixed.

31st October

The notes for the polyrhythm metronome were getting panned back and forth as they played. This was caused by the controller messages getting out of order because of some code to make sure all the notes for each beat get played crisply together at the same moment of time - fixed

- Well it depends on your midi device. Some set the pan value for a note to whatever value it was when the note was played and if it does that then should work fine to have several notes in the non melodic percussion channel simultaneously with different pan values. Otherwise you may need to switch off the panning of thenotes for the metronome, and there is nothing one can do about that if it is the situation. Alternatively - use melodic instruments as they can be played on any channel apart from the non melodic percussion one so the problem of having simultaneous notes differeing in the pan controller value in the same channel doesn't arise.

When you show the polyrhythm metronome player you may get a message that a file is missing - until you edit the drop list. Anyway it is fixed now. Also a visible square blob in the window above the volume bar was removed.

30th October

Various bug fixes for the chord progression player chord translation - particularly for the roman numerals notation, some of the chord symbols were ignored or treated as identical to other ones - fixed.

Theremin - if pitch of 1/1 is shifted from concert pitch and you choose to show lines for the scale note positions, it doesn't show them in the correct positino on the window - fixed.

Lambdoma view | Show Freq not showing the check mark when you select it - fixed

Bs | Tempo and Volume for Tune | Vary timing by seed Pos - the Vary To field wasn't doing anything - the amount it got speeded up or slowed down was instead set to be the same as the Vary most at field. Fixed.

24th October

If you play FTS along with Lissajous 3D running and set so that the shape changes in response to FTS chords, and then just play from the PC keyboard without playing a fractal tune, the shape changes don't happen. (FTS wasn't checking to see if LJ 3D was present or not in that situation so didin't send it any information about the chords you play - this bug got introduced with the speed optimisations in FTS a few weeks ago) - fixed

22nd October

Was ignoring notes relayed from the non melodic percussion channel - fixed.

21st October

When you change the scale selection in the midi relaying views, with Sync Arp selected, the selection of arpeggio should reset to the appropriate Major scale or Diatonic mode in the list of arpeggios, so that it will be suitably tuned when playing the arpeggio from the white keys - but wasn't doing that - fixed.

When you change the scale selection, with Sync Arp selected, may get an access violation on rare occasions - fixed.

17th October 2003

Some midi clips with key signatures in them may not play correctly in the retuning midi player, also the hex dump for them from FTS may not display correctly. What it is is that I hadn't realised that you can have just the number of sharps or flats and leave out the field which says whether it is a minor or major key, so the event can be shorter than expected. The meta event includes the length of the meta event as its first field, but I had just ignored that thinking the length wouldn't vary. Similarly with all meta events now the length gets read, just in case - fixed.

Various bug fixes with the new adaptive just intonation option. Mainly, they were preventing it from tuning very well when the pitch drifted far from its original position.

Fixed a bug that could cause notes to get clipped short when there are in fact channels in play for them to play in - only affects midi clips with much changing of pitch bends as they continue, so showed up with the new just intonation adaptive tuning, particulary when I tried it with a really challenging midi clip, fast with many notes and pitch changes - fixed.

15th October 2003

All sound offs abruptly clipping the end of some of the notes in the flute part in the CPE Bach retuned piece - could have had similar things in other pieces - result of not using the channels for the pitch bends as efficiently as it could so that it was needing to change the pitch bend immediately in a channel that had just played a flute note, rather than use one of the channels with no notes in play - fixed.

10th October 2003

Oops - last upload I switched off the sound for the PC keyboard by mistake - fixed.

6th October 2003

 When you relay from another program (not likely to happen with midi keyboard), if it sends two identical note ons at once in the same midi in channel then FTS plays them both, but can only switch one of them off, and so you get a stuck note. Fixed - well - now FTS doesn't attempt to play both in this situation, so at least you can hear the music without stuck notes.

In some of the fractal tunes - such as Ascending above the clouds - if a sustained note in the accompaniment is for the same pitch as the melody line then it may get cut off - fixed.

3rd October 2003

View | Player | Theremin Opts | Full screen window - the theremin plays fine but doesn't show anything in the window - fixed.

View | Midi Keyboard Retuning | Scale Retuning - things to do with the interface needed attention (see What's new ) - and I think there were some bugs too - at any rate, didn't work too well in practice. - fixed.

1st October 2003

If you show an Arpeggio window (or Seed or Scale window), after playing a note in it, then you may find that from then on until you change the scale or arpeggio or otherwise change the pitches to be played, all notes may get played without pitch bends, i.e. in twelve equal, even though they are shown as pitch bent appropriately in the Notes in Play window. Could happen in other situations too. Didn't affect midi files saved as you play.

Why it happened: The pitch bends were getting sent as desired, but then they all would get anulled by a reset routine which was called when the notes get switched off when you change the keyboard focus away from the Arpeggio window. Then later notes would get played without pitch bends on assumption that they were okay. Fixed.

Retune to Just Intonation chords (comma shifts) - was retuning to a small interval like 9/8 when you play it ascending second but not when descending - Fixed.

Same option - not retuning when you play from PC keyboard - Fixed.

Also with the new the Retune to Just Intonation - after you switch it on, if you switch it off again you find it is still retuning to 5 limit j.i.! - Fixed.

File | Number Options | Ratios - when you use the option to show approximate ratios with a tolerance of so many cents, the ^ notation to set a maximum power wasn't working as it should. E.g. 2^6 3^4 should show 400.0 as 81/64, while any smaller value for either exponent should show it as 400.0. Fixed.

If you show the Note Played window before any notes have been played, then you get a handled exception. Fixed.

29th September 2003 - just a few minutes later

This is a very minor bug fix. Probably no need to redownload if you have just got the last update of a few minutes ago.  

Symptom: If you select one of the Just Intonation type options again when it is already selected, then it changes the check state for Retune to Just Intonation chords (comma shifts) even though you aren't selecting it yourself - selects or unselects it as a side effect. Fixed.

The confusion arose because originally the Just Intonation types were all toggle on / off options, so they got switched off if you selected them a second time, but I think this approach is clearer.

So - the way it works now is that when Retune to Just Intonation chords (comma shifts) is selected then it retunes to just intonation (preset to 5 limit normally), then the type of just intonation is set using the Just Intonation type menu. Then the type you have chosen remains selected there when you switch off the just intonation retuning - so you can switch it on / off and it remembers your preferred type from last time you did it, which I htink perhaps is the approach most useful to the user.

Incidentally later I will probably make a proper window for this option where you can if you wish set all the individual intervals that you would like to have justly tuned (to within octave equivalence). It may also get integrated wtih the chords in some way; not sure how yet.

29th September 2003

Symptom: Midi files saved from FTS may cause midi players to crash when played.

This happens when Files | Midi File Options | More Options | Microseconds per beat somehow gets set to 0. The midi file gets saved with a tempo indication of 0, and this causes the players to crash with a divide error - probably because of a divide by 0. This bug also causes all the times in the midi file to be saved at a value of 0 because with tempo 0 there is no time increment to use to record the times. So any midi files saved with this setting are unrecoverable - sorry about that!

Fixed - now whenever a value of 0 is found for the tempo then it resets to the standard values. 250 is normal for the ticks per beat, and 500000 for the microseconds per beat, so you have a beat every half second (metronome mark 120) and 250 midi ticks time resolution for each beat, i.e. 500 midi ticks per second. If one wants to vary that then it is done in the More Options window.

Symptom This window also was missng the box for the metronome mark field - Fixed.

Symptom: When you play the chord progression using the play button in Bs | Seed Options | Arpeggios as Chord Progr. then the last chord gets left out. Also if you have it set to play chords then other chords in the progression may have missing notes - Fixed.

Symptom: In Bs | Seed Options | Arpeggios as Chord Progr, if you have it set to play chords (from the double quaver play button) rather than sequences or broken chords, then some of the chords in the progression may have missing notes - Fixed.

Symptom Also in this window - when you choose the option to retune the tonic to the chord root, this works when the progression is played in the main window fractal tune but when the chord progression is played using the play button in this dialog it doesn't retune the tonic - Fixed.

Symptom: A couple of the help files just showed garbage when you opened them in your browser. The reason was that the html source code had somehow got saved in rich text format instead of plain text, which of course the browser wouldn't expect - Fixed.

25th September 2003

Parts | Shift by arpeggio degree wasn't functioning as it should. It should shift all the notes up a particular number of degrees in the arpeggio.

Instead it was functioning more like Parts | Shift by arpeggio degree as modulation - but with a bug in it too so really it wasn't retuning to anything particularly.

Normally on discovering something like this which will affect the way the tunes play, I would add it in as a new option and get FTS to auto-update previously saved files that use it. Here, I'm assuming those who tried it out found it buggy and so no-one has used it. Be sure to let me know if you do need it for a tune you have saved or something and I'll re-instate this bug as a feature so that you can continue to play your files. I'd normally do that anyway but haven't here as it seemed quite possible that no-one might have used it at all.

Fixed.

23rd September 2003

The new I, V, IV , ii etc notation of the last upload wasn't working as it should - read everything as I! Sorry about that - fixed now.

20th September 2003

This time a major bug fix for the MFX plug in - it was only retuning notes well if monophonic in each channel, and was frequently cutting off extra notes in chords in longer passages of music. Now works fine.

For those curious about the details: the problem was caused by note offs from the Mfx Plug in getting relayed to FTS somewhat out of sequence - because they use twodifferent models - MFX uses a note + duration method and FTS uses note on and off as they happen and in the conversion from one to another the note offs that FTS needed to keep track of the notes were getting out of sequence and some getting lost. As a result it was stopping notes from sounding as a result of the option to make sure you don't play the same note twice at the same time in the same channel (the two Out | Options | More Options | Same note polyph. options). There was another bug as well, can't remember what it was now, but it was much esier to fix, fixed that one first.

Though this fixes a fair number of the issues with the MFX plug in, I wouldn't like to say that I'm sure I have fixed everything yet. The interaction between FTS, the MFX plug in and Sonar is quite complex to debug unfortunately with two simultaneous apps running multimedia so that millisecond timing of events count - and they use different conventions for sending the notes too! I'll be doing more investigating and welcome bug reports.

Another bug: the options under Out | Options | Controller Options | Auto forget for various controllers wasn't always working as it should. In some particular circumstances you could start FTS up and find that it still has the reset all controller in play from the end of the previous session (depending on where in the start up sequence the midi devices get opened) - and this can anull the effect of the pitch bends - result being that the tuning auto resets to twelve equal :-(. Fixed!.

Also a number of other less major fixes. Sometimes if you change the voice while keeping Midi open then you will find that some of the notes still get played using the preivious instrument (clears on close / re-open Midi Out). This is fixed. Sometimes if you have a varying pitch bend wheel position that continues to vary as you play new notes then you find that as you play a new note with an old one still held down then the new note gets cut off when you release the old note - fixed.

I think those are the main ones though I fixed quite a few and didn't keep a record of everything I fixed.

5th September 2003

When you show a dialog then the hourglass flutters for a while - this happens when tool tips get added to the window because it was getting the text for the tool tip from a hidden rich edit window and the operation to find the text was slow enough to show up an hourglass briefly for each tool tip (so a lot of flutters if many to add to the dialog). Fixed by using a much faster method to find the tool tip text which also doesn't show an hourglass at all.

Lambdoma keyboard option to show the otonality and utonality information in the Notes Played window - not working - fixed.

The drop list of devices for recording and playing back the recording to temporary memory had no effect - whichever one you chose it would use the Microsoft Sound Mapper to choose the one you have set as your preset audio device - fixed.

The next bug applies to the parts window - where you enter a partial name of an instrument in the field below the list of voices, e.g. Ob for oboe, and it gets auto completed

This only worked for the melodic Midi voices. Now will also work for non melodic percussion and also for any custom voices you may have on the menus. Fixed.

In Windows 98 with Internet Explorer 5, if you start FTS straight away before you see any tool tips in any other program or on the task bar, then show a tool tip in FTS, and if you then close it and hover the mouse over the task bar then you get the illegal operation message at the moment that the tool tip text should appear. Same thing happens if you show a tool tip in any other program after FTS. Only solution then is to reboot. Sorry! - fixed.

I think this was only an issue for IE5 + Win 98 because there is a related bug that only happens if you are debugging a program in Win 98 + IE 5 - if you show a tool tip in the debugged program before you show it in any other program then when you exit the program then other programs crash as soon as they are about to show a tool tip. Normally it only affects developers running programs in a debugger but for some reason has affected the release for FTS too - or maybe a related bug. Anyway fixed now.

10th August 2003

Bs | Scales to make & Opts | SCALA scales | Make all the SCALA related files - when it makes the modes list for nine equal, makes the "Pelog" one as a mode that ascends one way and descends another way - that is because the quote there was treated by FTS as a signal to do a separate descending mode - fixed.

When you show the current scale using Bs | Scale and then put it into play mode then when midi relaying you just hear a low rumble (lowest possible midi note or somewhere thereabouts I think). Fixed.

22nd June

Important bug fix!

Note. There has been an important bug fix for Lissajous 3D. It can cause out of memory errors in other programs that you have running at the same time if you run one of its animations for a long period of time, or a shorter period on a fast computer - fixed.

For details see: http://tunesmithy.co.uk/Lissajous_3D/index.htm#whats_new.

If you are using Lissajous 3D with Fractal Tune Smithy or indeed on its own, you should re-download it.

The rest of these bugs mainly affect players who explore the Lambdoma scale, and product and rectangular scales using the Lambdoma keyboard picture. One of them also may affect you if you make a circulating arpeggio : a 0 1 2 3 4 0 type thing - to ensure that you can only play notes within a particular small compass of pitches whatever key you press. This is a technique you can use, e.g. for bagpipe scales or scales which used measured pitches of marimbas and other small range ethnic instruments - such as the 1/1 7/4 1/1 ... type bagpipe scales mentioned in the previous announcement..

View | Lambdoma

- if you show the dots to place above the music keyboard and then change between the quadrants or make the entire 16 by 16 Lambdoma then the dots may get squashed into one side of the picture or be out of view in it. Okay when you close the dots and music keyboard pictures and reshow them - fixed.

When you play the Lambdoma notes by moving the mouse around in the dots window then nothing shows up in the Notes Played window even when you have it set to show mouse notes (this would also affect the small range bagpipe and ethnic type scale arpeggios). - fixed.

If you make a product scale or lattice and have a different instrument for each part in the parts window you would expect the instruments to play each row of the keyboard - since these options are done by making a shifted version of the scale for each part, then each row of the keyboard plays one of the parts. However instead all the notes play on the intrument for the highlighted part in the Parts window - fixed.

20th June

Bs | Arpeggio and Scale Play button options | Asc Desc | Endlessly ascending works fine, but Endlessly descending doesn't play correctly. What it was is that the endlessly descending scale used the volume envelope for the corresponding position in the endlessly ascending scale, e.g. the volume envelope for degree 1 instead of the second last note, and so on - fixed.

p.c. keyboard - the standard setting here is to play the highlighted part in the Parts window (or the one that gets highlighted if you show it).

If the part to play is octave shifted, it plays the pitch correctly, and normally shows it correctly, but while the key is pressed down, changes the displayed ratio to the non octave shifted version of it - fixed.

Various bug fixes for Out | Options | Midi out / save Timing | Midi Relaying Speed Check. Main one - if the relaying app changes the channel then the test wouldn't find the note again after it got relayed around - fixed.

Bs | Scale | Synth Wav, or Bs | Arpeggio | Synth Wave - shows "Halt" there until you press the button rather than the other way round - fixed.

Scale drop list | More Scales drop lists | Bagpipes scales - quite a few start 1/1 7/4 (or whatever it is) 1/1 then up the scale - and for these, you need another modes (arpeggios) list, to take account of the extra note. Supplied it.

Also the bagpipe drone preset for Bs | Scales Options | Drones didn't have a correct modes lists for Highland Bagpipe with 7o4 and detuned octave.- fixed. Also updated the scales drop list Bagpipe scales.lsc accordingly to use the new modes list.

Note when I update a file already in FTS I advance the original date by just a few minutes or hours - so that though it is new it will still be dated perhaps to some date in 2002 or whatever. This makes sure that if you have edited it yourself then the installer won't replace your version because it is set to replace files if newer. If you still see the old version here maybe you have edited it at some point - using the Ed button, even if perhaps you didn't chagne it at all - if so delete bagpipe scales.lsc and run the installer again. or install into a new folder.

10th June

The pause key shortcut to turn the PC keyboard around in the lambdoma switches off the next note played - fixed (was because pause key is used also as shortcut to pause fractal tunes).

Changed the preset position for the rotation to a three quarters turn - quarter turn turns the keyboard upside down so is confusing.

Midi relaying standard settings were setting the range for midi notes to play to 10 to 110 as for the fractal tunes (prevents them going too low or high in long fractal tunes) - should be 0 to 127 so that you have no restriction on the notes you can play - fixed.

9th June

The music keyboard and dots windows have the menu options for a lockable window in their system menu - but they have no effect - fixed.

When you switch on the debug log in order to help locate a bug it almost immediately switches itself off again - fixed  

7th June

Not remembering window positions or which wndows to show at the start of each session, or which view to show from one session to the next. Sorry about that - a missed out line of code which meant it was no longer saving all that info at the end of the session - fixed.

Lambdoma keyboard - if you use it with com port 2 then the notes played get displaced eight units to the right in the display area. This is because of the new multiquadrant option - should only do the displacement when that option is selected- fixed.

A bit more work on the auto harmony shortcut keys for the lambdoma view - the O and U ones with the pure auto harmony option didn't switch off the dependence on the direction of melodic moveemnt- fixed..

If the first two notes of a randomised seed are identical and you get a randomised fibonacci rhythm, resulting tune may consist of repeating notes only - fixed by setting them to different values from each other if this happens.

Help | Overview | Musical Note Intervals | Newbie Notes | Find all the best ratios for a scale in cents - was only searching to the next denumerator above or below the optimal one - but as it is searching for a prime limit ratio should go as far as the tolerance set, unless user chooses to reduce the search range to speed up the calculation - fixed.

N.B. FTS uses a similar method for File | Number Options | Ratios options | Tolerance in cents for approximate ratios in the case where the numbers involved are small and the number of primes used is large - but that didn't have this bug, it was only in the javascript.

3rd June

When using FTS on older machines you may notice the hourglass flutter for a while before a new window appears - with a fast machine this happens so quickly as to be barely noticeable. Fixed - well got it down to one flutter or so. It is caused by FTS adding tool tips to the window.

If you play the theremin and at the same time play the Lambdoma auto harmony chords with the chords set to play a new part for each note of the chord, and if you also have it set so that each part plays its notes on the same numbered midi out channel, then the theremin resets to a range of +- two semitones - this happened because they share the same channel - the auto harmony chords needed to take account of the theremin and leave it's channel (s) free - fixed.

May 26th evening

Out | Options | More Options | Skip voice selections - when you select it, seems to have no effect, doesn't change to show aas selected (but does in the main wndow) - fixed.

This was a bit of old code from the time when FTS could only have one midi out device open at a time.   Now it is a three state check box - when you select it, it skips midi out patches for all the devices, and when you unselect it, doesn't skip any for any of the devices. If it has been previously set to skip them for some then it is shown as indeterminate.   So now its shown the same way as the one in Out | Multiple Midi Out Devices - selected parts - except that clicking on that one selects / unselects it for the highlighted part(s) while here it does it for them all. 

Lambdoma drone and auto harmony notes not getting switched off when used with Out | Play on several devices at once - fixed.

May 26th 

Out | Options | Out Channs - not saving the settings for the next session - fixed.

Still getting some randomised tunes that are only a few seconds long repeated - fixed.

The new Synth Wave button for View | Analyse Midi Voice works fine, but for the New Arpeggios and Scale windows - not making the correct pitches at all - fixed.

Installer making incorrect entry in Registry for the program icon for the tune smithy file association - was

"C:\Program Files\Fractal Tune Smithy\Fractal Tune Smithy.exe.0"

Should be a comma at the end:

"C:\Program Files\Fractal Tune Smithy\Fractal Tune Smithy.exe,0"

This meant it couldn't find the icon so the association just uses the windows default icon.

Now, you will see the Tune smithy red snowflake icon opposite the .ts files in folder listings.

If you show the Parts window, close it and then reshow it, it loses its menu - fixed

Meaning of the dots window in the main window isn't clear - tool tip explained, but not very well - idea is that you place it above the keyboard picture to show where the arpeggio notes are - new tool tip to explain it better - fixed.

May 25th

View | Lambdoma | Auto Harmony | Auto harmony chords with each note - the accompanying chords remain on and don't switch off - not even with F12 - new bug for this option introduced with a recent upload - fixed.

Also - the F12 all sound off now switches off all the notes in FTS as before, but as an extra step, also calls the midi routine to switch off any outstanding ones - this shouldn't be needed as FTS keeps recod of them all - except in the case of an FTS bug such as the previous one..

Another bug fix for the com ports input for multi-quadrant Lambdoma. Also purges the com port now whenever you close or open it in case it gets closed in the middle of a read operation.

Finally - Lambdoma users only - if the midi out device selected on the out menu is already open in another app when you start FTS then you may get two or more messages to say the device is already open - once for Midi In if you also use FTS for midi keyboard work - and once for each com port you have open - fixed.

May 22nd

When FTS starts you get several separate icons shown in the task bar - one for each window you have in use, and one more for the program as a whole - instead of just a single icon as before - fixed.

Some work on making it better for the screen saver - maybe you will need to re-download FTS for the screen saver when it is ready.

The randomised tune with randomised seed may occasionally still make a very short tune of a few notes that get repeated - fixed.

A bit more bug fixing of Com input for the Lambdoma multi-quadrant option - fixed

May 21st Evening

- somehow left out the Scales for parts check box which should be at top left of the Scales for Parts window - fixed.

May 21st

When you midi relay a clip with pan values in it, sometimes they may get ignored. Here this is caused by the option Out | Options | Pan | Auto Pan. The standard setting here is selected, however, combined with Auto pan for fractal tune only. This should mean that FTS will auto pan the fractal tunes if one is playing at the time, but receive pan from midi in if a fractal tune isn't playing (algo comp users who set a value for the pan for their tunes will find that this switches off auto pan). However it was ignoring the pan values from midi in in this situation instead - unintended - fixed.

Very occasionally, when you save a tune smithy file and then re-open it later you may find it has got the scale values wrong, usually extremely high. What happened is that it gets saved using the Scala convention that decimal point = cents - but then got read again by old code that didn't use that convention - fixed

Any .ts files you saved in the past which may have been affected by this will be read correctly now.

May 19 later in day:

 If you install the update of FST posted earlier today in Windows XP / NT / 2K you may get an error messsage: The procedure entry point ThunkConnect32 could not be located in the dynamic link library Kernel32.dll

It's because I included a copy of one of the Windows 98 dlls so that FTS can call it to detect low resources in Windows 95 / 98 / ME - this is the dll that gets installed with the Resource Meter, and I did it so that FTS can detect them in Windows 95 / 98 / ME even if the resource meter hasn't been installed yet.

I placed it in the FTS folder rather than the System folder, and the name of the dll is changed too, so thought that would cause no problems for other operating systems. What I hadn't realised is that this dll can't be loaded in Windows XP, so FTS should only load it if it is in windows 95 / 98 / ME. So that is what it does now. Otherwise, it will delete it - fixed. Sorry about this.

May 19:

Pan bug - fixed a bug that would occasionally cause the melody line for one part to pan over to the pan position of another part for a note or two. If you have made fractal tunes with this bug and liek the effect and want to re-enable it you can do so from Out | Options | More Options | Enable Bugs

Tool tips - when you hover the mouse over a tool you may see an hourglass appear briefly before the tool tip appears - fixed.

Arpeggios that ascend / descend - not always played correctly from the PC keyboard - e.g. if you have the pc. keyboard set up to play accidentals as well - fixed.

When you set the PC keyboard to play non melodic percussion from Bs | PC keyboard notes to play... (and this got left out of the midi relaying menus too - fixed) then the PC keyboard layout shows the ratos or cents values of the scale rather than the names of the non melodic percussion instruments which one might expect to see at that point - fixed.

View | Lambdoma | Auto harmony.... (as it now is) | Broken chords - the timing of these broken chords was irregular and erratic - fixed.

Most recent modes list doesn't get remmebered for next session - fixed.

If you have your configuration settings file for FTS gets larger than 10 K, later settings don't get read from it though saved to it okay - fixed.

In | Options | Scale for Parts Presets | CPs sets - selections from the CPS sets not getting reduced to the octave - fixed.

View | Analyse Midi Voice | Freq. Analysis | Recording (temp).. - Though the waveform displays accurately when you zoom right in, when you zoom out the waveform is often a bit irregular and not as expected - fixed. (this didn't affect the frequency analysis which naturally uses the highest resolution view on the waveform of course).

Help | Overview | User Guide 2 | Wave format non melodic percussion - isn't switching off the notes. Mainly you notice it when the tune ends, or if there is a gap between notes long enough so that it can stop sounding in which case it doesn't get sounded again - fixed.

April 25

When you click for the help for a window, then click on a link in the contents list for the help that shows up, it gets shown in a new window rather than in the frame on the same page - fixed

April 23

Newly introduced bug:

Under some conditions, you may get an exception message in FTS while the tune plays - the Exception handler pops up. Alternatively, a message may pop up saying "Couldn't read from ..." with random characters for the file name there - this is because of a bit of code activating that was meant to only happen if FTS gets started up from another program which passes the path to a list of midi clips for retuning via shared memory - and because nothing had been put into that shared memory for it to read, you get this nonsense file name message or an exception instead. The code got activated because of a bit of programming I had done in preparation for the tool tips. - fixed..

April 18

A few of the window links to the help don't link to the correct place in the help - fixed (some dont' have any help yet - that's another matter and I'll do that soon). Also incorrect url for the link to Midi Yoke - fixed..

Bs | Arpeggio & Scale Playback | Stop playback of ... at

- not working properly for scales with arpepggio set to follow scale - gets set to first scale degree instead - fixed.

When you resize Bs | Tune (or Notes Played) the text for the Options button may get cut - fixed.

April 17

Bs | Seed Options | Undo Changes - wasn't working any more - fixed.

Voices | Custom Voices | Edit Custom melod. voice | Edit Instr - if you use Select Voice or Non melodic percussion - it always pops up the Voice menu - reasonable - but if you actually want to add non melodic percussion and, say, go to main window and choose to show Non Melod. perc., you may find it gets selected into the highlighted part in the Parts window instead of the instrument for that custom voice. Now has two buttons there for Voice and for Non Melod percussion, and it's fixed.

Bs | Seed | Apply (as it is now called) - if you select "With timings" here, then they don't get applied to the main window - the times get copied into the main window as desired, but then they get treated as an alphanumeric seed rather than timings - that's because the semicolon that starts the timing info in the all in one field main window seed got treated as punctuation actually and was ignored - anyway it's fixed.

April 16

Bs | Notes Played | Options | Intervals - not showing all the lambdoma intervals there - fixed.

Bs | Find Seed from recording | Re-find or find marked notes - not working - fixed.

When you show the waveform of your recording to temporary memory - it shows non existent half waves in some of the silent parts of the recording at times - fixed.

A few more minor bugs fixed - one of them - in the File | Midi File Options | Make web page of fractal tunes - not showing the two note images on that window. Also similarly for the time out screen that pops up at the end of 10 minutes session in freeware mode - no dancing notes show there any more - fixed.

April 12

Bs | Notes Played (or Tunes) - this is a bit erratic when used in the midi relaying views. or indeed when playing from PC keyboard. That's because it uses the notion of a Seed to decide how to space out the notes, which only really makes good sense when displaying a fractal tune. Now it has an option to show the width in Secs or Seeds, with Secs more appropriate for the Midi relaying views - fixed.

Contents page when opened without frames opens all links to other parts of the same page in a new window - fixed.

View | Lambdoma | Options - now can switch off the log. Also now can show the timings in the log. This is all to help with any debugging in future should it be needed.

View | Analyse Midi Voice | Show partials as text file... - for the option to Add harmonic series analysis, it used the standard deviation when it should have used the formula for the standard devieaatin of the mean (you divide by the square root of the number of values). So the error margin there was far too large.

Help for this view didn't mention the significance of the How much to analyse (secs) field - this is important because only the amount of time set there gets analysed even if you make a bigger clip. Anyway it is now explained clearly I hope.

A few links in the help pointed to bookmarks that don't exist any more or are on other pages - fixed (all the ones I know about so far). I'll run a complete link test of the help again before next upload.

If you have Lissajous Options | Always show this number of cycles... set, e.g. to 6 (which is the preset), and then make a Lissajous figure with less than 6 cycles, it won't fade all the way to red - e.g. the 1/1 : 1/1 circle was mostly blue - fixed.

April 10

When you pitch bend a sustained note, then if you have released the keys, the notes don't bend in pitch. There were also a few bugs in the pitch bending of chords. Fixed all the bugs so it will now pitch bend all chords and sustained notes fine, and turned the original bug into a new feature Out | Options | Pitch bend held notes only as you'll see in What's new

Main window button to play an arpeggio doesn't work if you choose to play it descending and choose one like the melodic minor that ascends one way and descends another way - fixed.

Bs | Notes Played | Options | Notes As | Intervals - not working as intended - fixed.

April 5

Broken link for help for Parts window - fixed.

FTS wasn't receiving Com port data from the Lambdoma Keyboard in XP - now fixed.

If you show the Lambdoma keyboard picture in FTS and use the new Set Duration option, notes get highlighted for as long as you hold them down rather than staying highlighted until they switch off at the end of the duration as one would expect - fixed.

April 4.

This is a bug that only surfaces if you save a really huge midi file - one that takes some time for FTS to generate and save. E.g. save one of the faster fractal tunes as a midi file to play for hours or days, - this may take a few minutes for FTS to make it on a slower machine (making a file maybe hundreds of Kb or megabytes in size - huge for midi!). Perhaps the most likely reason to do this is to find out how long the tune will play for if it goes through all its layers, as explained in the help for Bs | Seeds Options | Fibonacci rhythm.

You will find that FTS stops responding until the midi file save is complete, e.g. you can't move it around on the screen. Nor can you stop it by pressing on the Stop button or by pressing F11 as one usually can - fixed - now you can do all those things.

April 3

Views | Analys Midi Voice - when you click the play button to start the recording, you get an error message and nothing happens. Same thing if you try the oscilloscope. This is because recently when I re-organised the code to solve the dissappearing captions problem, some initialisation code for the waveform got skipped and a value that should have been set to 1 to indicate ordinary PCM waveform audio remained at 0. Sorry - Fixed.

March 31.

Bs | Lissajou Options | Minimum time to show each image - doesn't pause for the desired time - fixed.

Bs | Lissajou Options | Save As... - if you save while a fractal tune is still playing, the lissajou figure may change between when you see it and when you complete the save. Fixed - by switching off the Lissajou update until the save is done, so you always save the picture you see, rather than the next one it makes or the one it is in the middle of making when you do the save (if it is in the middle of making another one at the time, it gets discarded before you see it).

Title bar text sometimes vanishes again in the main window and Parts window etc - fixed

The Lissajou figure sometimes shows an extra line not part of the figure so far, or a triangle joining it to an earlier point - fixed.

Lissajou figure which continues rather than joining up sometimes doesn't fade out, or not completely, for the option to draw it slowly as it is made - fixed.

March 29

The new custom list boxes are for unsorted lists only - these won't work properly with sorted lists - but got used for them, particularly the Organise (F2) | Overview windows - fixed.

Some code to optimise the new custom lists so that they will refesh more quickly in fast fractal tunes bypassed - works now - fixed.

Bs | Record to File Options - if you record as say an mp3, the text at the bottom of the window shows the file size of the .WAV file as the recording progresses - because it records it as a .WAV file then converts it. That wasn't clearly expressed. Now clearly indicates that it is the size of the .WAV file, and then (new feature) shows the file size of e.g. the .mp3 once Lame has finished encoding it.

March 28

When you close a window in FTS sometimes you end up with no window active (caption highlighted). This can confuse those who use FTS with a screen reader as it no longer is set to read an FTS window, and you need to Alt + tab to get back to FTS again - fixed..

If you do a multi-selection of a voice into several consecutive channels in the Parts window, including the non melodic percussion part (which is mainly intended for relaying non melodic percussion from Midi In from e.g. a notation software program using non melodic percussion), the non melodic percussion gets set to the medley of percussion, rather than just being ignored as would be more apprporiate - fixed.

March  25

Bs | Scales Drop List (and Arpeggios Drop List) - the Add Link button there wasn't working exactly as intended - fixed. Also the message it shows now explains better how it works. Also, you can now link to a list of scales file you have already made by entering the file name in the definition box and the description you want to show for the link into the description box.

Fixed a few bugs in View | Colours with some of the fields there not synchronising properly. Also made some of the text and messages clearer.

If you have a drop list of scales showing in the main window which isn't in the FTS folder - e.g. the Scala Scales drop list - and if you have another drop list of scales of the same name in the FTS folder, then when you exit and start FTS again you will now see the one in the FTS folder instead of the one you had at the end of the last session - fixed

Search / sort of scales - slowed down tremendously by a bug which meant FTS would scan all the way to the end of a scale every time it reads one of the entries in the scale, rather than just reading each one as it comes - fixed. Reading of the .ini files also slowed down by similar bug - fixed.

The text on the PC keyboard layout picture and Lambdoma keyboard rathre too low and wide, if you resize the window to be wide and low - fixed.

March 22

Colour box section for custom colours - layout and the way this worked was a bit unclear - fixed.

Slower start up for FTS than it used to have - fixed.

Fractal tunes often play rather slower than they used to, and can be sluggish at responding when you click on buttons etc. - this was because of a bug - fixed.

Also changed "caption" to "title bar" where it occurs (a few places in the help), because caption is a programmer's term for title bar - I hadn't realised it was a technical term.

Similarly: "defaults" to "standard settings", or "presets" - again default is a computing technical term, which I hadn't realised.

Found a few slightly out of date sections of the help and brought them up to date.

March 18

Views | Lambdoma - now when you make one of the quadrants - calls the scale "First Quadrant", Second, etc. - as is most helpful for users of the Lambdoma keyboard. Also titles the main window with the scale description.

P.c. keyboard layout window - Goes blank on change scale or notation - fixed.

P.c. keyboard layout window - adds the word cents or Hz for those notations which need them - which makes the font very small to fit the available space - fixed

March 13

Bug fixes: 

Fixed a number of broken links in the help pages. Views | Retuning midi player | Standard Settings button not setting a few things that can affect it after playing fractal tunes - fixed by resetting the fractal tune too when this button is pressed. Same for the Midi Relaying | Standard Settings. Browse button for retuning midi player not refreshing the drop list of midi files - and the Open dialog it brings up defaults to files of type tune smithy files sometimes instead of midi files - fixed  

March 11 2003

MFX plug in - if you are a freebie user, then it immediately pops up the message to say that your session has timed out - fixed.

Drone - if you have it set to switch off the drone after a time delay, sometimes the drone note doesn't get switched off - fixed.

Lambdoma view - if you edit the pitch in the From field for this view, then the Pitch window and the keyboard picture (if set to show integer frequencies) don't show the change straight away - fixed.

Also if you edit the pitch in the From field, from then on the lambdoma keyboard plays transposed too high in pitch - what was happening here is that as you enter, say, 256 as the new pitch, you first type 2 so momentarily it gets set to 2 Hz, which is too low in pitch for a midi note - so FTS compensated by setting the lambdoma ratio to an appropriate number so you get the pitch of midi note 0 as the 1/1 of the Lambdoma - but didn't update the ratio field at that point. Result is that the lambdoma got transposed higher than you wished it to be from that point onwards. Fixed.

FTS may stop responding for a while when you click to record a midi clip, if it is set to start the recording at the first note - fixed

Musical e-cards browse button doesn't work - fixed

A couple of broken links for the ? icons that bring up the help for a window - fixed

Seeds for layers window help link incorrect - fixed

Tempo Map - when you edit the name for the region, only affects first name, and also only after you highlight another region.

Bs | Seed Options | Seed Symmetries - it shows the note numbers as e.g. 2 - 6 but you have to enter them as 2 3 4 5 6 if you want to edit it - fixed

Views | Play fractal Tune | Musical E-cards | Picture and Tune | Browse (for picture) - the gif file name in the window doesn't update when you click Ok after you open the file - fixed.

When you play notes on the lambdoma keyboard they don't show up in the tune window - fixed.

Ctrl + Alt + X Shortcut to show the rectangular scale / lambdoma keyboard window has no effect - fixed

December 19, 4 AM

When you play a really fast tune with hundreds of notes per second, like virtuoso_violin_with_flute, now you have no timing glitches, but it may be very hard to click on the stop button to stop it.

Reason it happens is that the tune is far higher priority than the mouse click, and so to fix it, I found a way of detecting the mouse click from within the tune so that you can still stop it instantly with a click even in ultra fast tunes. (Technical details - it checks to see if the mouse key is pressed down using this Windows routine: if(GetAsyncKeyState(VK_LBUTTON)<0), and if it is, then checks to see if it is within the rectangle defining the stop or pause buttons. If it is, switches off all notes and pauses until the button is released. Pauses for up to two seconds after that to give the main window procedure time to stop the tune if needed - can take that long because the tune is so high priority) 

Fixed.

December 19

When you play a very fast tune, e.g. a polyrhythm, then you get occasional time glitches - brief pauses in the tune of about a sixteenth of a second or so. This was caused because FTS detects that it has been unable to refresh the time so far for the tune field in the main window, so pauses briefly to give it time to update. Completely unecessary to do it that way and it is now done another way that still lets that field update as soon as there is any time available to do it, and doesn't pause the tune to do it. The thing is that the tunne at real time is ultra high priority. Possibly if the tune is very fast with many successive notes, this field may not update so frequently as it normally does -but better that than timing glitches!

If the tune is really really fast incidentally, like thousands of notes per second, FTS starts skipping notes to let them get played, and keeps doing so until it gets up to date with the current position in the tune again.

NB. one can use the F11 short cut to stop the tune instantly if it is ultra fast and FTS gets a little sluggish to respond to a click on the stop button.

Fixed.

December 18

Yesterday's upload with the new code to play MTS sysexes on several devices at once generates a stack fault if you use MTS sysexes on one Midi Out device plus ordinary pitch bend retuning simultaneously on another, and then in addition add a drone. The exception handler won't be able to recover from this type of a situation, and FTS will just close- sorry - fixed.

December 16

In | Options | Play Arp From - this was confusing to use because if e.g. you choose one of the Follow Scale options then you can no longer choose the Arpeggio options - because the Arpeggio has got set to Follow Scale. Similarly if you choose one of the Diatonic options. This was fixed by keeping track of the most recent arpeggio in use every time you make a selection for Follow Scale or Diatonic, and then resetting the arpeggio back to it if one chooses one of the Arpeggio options - goes to a default arpeggio of alternate notes if one hasn't had any others before that point in the session - fixed.

When you use Out | Use MTS Tuning Programs in combination with Out | Play on several devices at once, it doesn't work - only one of the devices gets retuned - fixed - and now you can use MTS Tuning programs on some devices and the "instant pitch bends" way of retuning on other ones, with all of them playing simultaneously. This is something one may often want to do as for instance the FM7 is mono timbral so if you want several instruments playing at once on the FM7, you need to relay to it from several different Midi Yoke Junction midi out devices. Here is an example mp3.com.au/HarmonicFlyght - played on two copies of the FM7 simultaneously, and using tuning programs.

File | Reset Check Boxes etc for the lambdoma and FTS views brings up the message to ask if you want to reset to the defaults for those views - better to skip the message there - fixed.

Removed Bs | Scales Options | Add Ed buttons for M.w. drop list, - because those buttons are always shown now - fixed.

If you have a device selected for output, and it is also selected in the list of devices when you have several open at once, and you play on it first as a single device, thenn select Out | Play on several devices at once you get an error message that the device is already in use and can't be opened - fixed.

December 14

Bs | Record to File | Start recording just before tune starts - shows on for off and vice versa. Also defaults to on when it should default to off.

When it is set to "on" then the recording starts either at start of tune or at first note. When recording in audio format, with this option, the first note is a cue note which doesn't sound. - idea is you add an extra non sounding note just before the start of the piece to cue the recording on.

That's fine, all explained in the help, and the icons show that the program is waiting for the next note to play. However, this option should not be the default. Also, the user will maybe want to switch the option off, find they can't because of that check box that looks as if it is off when it is on, and get confused. Since a fair number of users do use FTS to record in audio formats this is a significant bug fix, so updated the version number to 2.21.

Highlight for Out | Multiple Midi Out Devices - Selected Parts - if the number of devices is more than the height of the list, list contents jump after you highlight the last item - fixed.

Space bar as a sustain pedal - when used to sustain repeated notes all played from the same midi in or PC keyboard key then when you release the space bar then only the last of those gets switched off - fixed by letting it only play one note at a time - fixed.

Note, this implementation of a space bar sustain isn't quite the same as use of a normal sustain pedal (which you can also use with FTS of course), as that may let one cummulatively play the same note many times with all those notes sustained to make a chorus type effect. If you try that with the space bar sustain option as currently implemented in FTS, you will find only the first note sounds.

Bs | Scales Options | SCALA Scales | Make SCALA scales and modes drop lists - Also, select SCALA .cmd file to use | Make drop lists of modes (LMD files) from SCALA list of modes - error message pops up when the list is complete - happens when the entry to it gets added to Bs | Scales | More Scales drop list because it tried to add it before the original file got closed so that it couldn't re-open it to add the extra link back to the More Scales drop list - fixed.

December 08

When you play tunes like the arabic_17_tone_maqam_Iraq.ts with exceedingly short notes, many notes don't get played at all - not just the very short ones, but long ones too. Fixed.

When using in freeware mode, you get the time out message while playing the example tunes from the drop lists - these are supposed to be free in freeware mode - fixed.

December 07

Forgot to add a reset to pitch bend of 0 (8192 in miid pitch bend units) if no pitch bend messages have been received yet for the option to retune for the next note only - fixed.

December 06

Fixed some bugs in Bs | Scales drop lists - the window you use for editing a drop list of scales.

Exception occurs (though handled by the FTS exception handler so that you can continue normally) if you click the icon to show the help on a computer with no file association for html files - fixed.

Bs | Scales Options | Sort Scales or Arpeggios list | Sort Now has no effect - fixed.

December 04

The new Quicktime option gives notes that glide to pitch instead of being on pitch straight away. Fixed with a message to alert user that with QT one may need to apply a delay before pitch bends.

Also had some bugs in the option to set pitch bends in advance for all the notes of the arpeggio meaning that it didn't set all the channels to the desired pitches, just some of them. This option was also off by default - now set to on by default. It is a way of making sure that in most situations the pitch bends are all already as desired before the tune even starts or you start playing. Only if you need more than 15 notes in the arpeggio or if you need special effects - then you may need the pitch bends in the middle of the tune - or for things liek the Fibonacci tone scape - fixed as best it can.

When you play a non octave scale using the play button next to the Scale box in the main window, the playback may stop at the last note before the octave - fixed.

Bs | Arpeggio | -> Scale button to copy the arpeggio as a scale into the main window doesn't set the main window arpeggio to 0 1, just sets the arpeggio description to Follow scale - fixed.

Set the maximum number of Quicktime devices to two for the scroll bar in Out | Midi Out Devices - Parts to Play | How many "Quicktime's to show". That's because QT works fine with up to 31 independent channels for the pitch bends, equivalent to two devices + non melodic percussion, but doesn't seem to work after that so well - possibly something to do with the way it is done, so more to be researched on that.

December 02

Out | Play on several devices at once - no sound - fixed.

Ctrl + C shortcut saves a file instead of Ctrl + S - fixed.

Custom voices with two instruments playing the same note at the same time (E.g. Voices | Custom voices | Flute + Oboe) often play just one of the notes - fixed.

November 27

When you make the SCALA drop list of scales from Bs | Scales Options | SCALA Scales | Make all the SCALA related files, it starts with a link to Scales | More Scales... - this is intended - but then that becomes the default selection when you open the list, when the default selection should be one of the scales. Fixed - and now whenever you open a list with the default set to a link to another list, FTS will move the default selection down to the next scale in the list, fi any, so it is also fixed for any scales drop lists you may have already made before.

Automated dating of the upload announcement e-mail template, download page, and What's new in this upload page to match the date shown in Help | About in FTS - to prevent recurrence of recent glitches when I forgot to set all those dates to match each other - should be fixed from now on....

Had Ctrl + C as the shortcut to save a file instead of Ctrl + S - fixed.

26th November

When you enter a scale in cents by hand, if the first note in the scale after the 1/1 is less than 0.1 cents, it gets read as a scale in the harmonic series notation rather than a normal scale. I.e. a scale such as 1/1 0.05 cents ... would be read instead as an additive harmonic series like scale with 0.05 cents as the first term - fixed.

The buttons in the Make musical e-card window say Make card, Make card with border, etc, rather than Send card - fixed.

24th November

Bs | Scale... and Freq. analysis | Options | Frequency spectrum Layout both have the same shortcut (as shown using Help | Add shortcuts to window captions) of Alt + Shift + S. Fixed by making the shortcut for Frequency spectrum Layout Alt + Shift + Z.

Various bug fixes in the relative cents options in File | Number Options

Also bug fix in the drop list of scales for the Bs | Scales window - not showing them properly when selected (was treating them as harmonic series notation).

21st November - evening

Several windows are called Config in the Help which are now called Options in the program itself - also some of the messages in FTS refer to "Config" where it should say "Options" - fixed.

21st November

When you choose File | New - already shows it with an * in the title - should only do that once you change it - fixed.

When you type Test into the Seed box, changes the seed - that's because it was reading it as "Tes" before you type in the final "t" - and that was interpreted as unambiguously alphanumeric, so read as an alphanumeric seed even without that option selected.- fixed - now you are recommended to type #test, and the # ends the seed for the alphanumeric seeds.

19th November

When you remake the audio clips for a web page or musical geometry model and choose to convert the previously recoreded .Wav files into the new format, no error messages if the old versions of the files can't be deleted because they are in use by another application - fixed. Also when you replace old versions of the files, sometimes conversion of mp3s results in files of zero length - seems that you need to leave a small amount of time after deleting the file before remaking it in Lame - fixed.

When you enter the bit rate into Bs | Record to file options | Mp3 bit-rate - doesn't change it (only the scroll bar changes it) - fixed.

Fractal tunes that have seeds with notes that are extremely short, or of zero length getting notes stuck on - fixed.

Sometimes FTS tries to find a new channel for pitch bends when there is one already free, and not finding another one free, does an unnecessary all sound off. More generally, often spreads the notes over more channels than are needed - fixed.

18th November a bit later:

Bug fix for last upload in option to make audio clips for file names in a web page - wasn't converting the first two characters of the file names into characters suitable for urls, sorry - fixed.

18th November

When you play monomode but not legato from the PC keyboard, with the option to retune to the previous note in play when you release second note of a trill, not doing the pitch bends properly - fixed.

16th November

Various bug fixes for the MFX plug in which wasn't behaving quite as expected. Still work in progress but the main things are now fixed I think.

If you have Out | Options | Midi Output Channels set to a single channel and the polyphony there set to 1 for monophonic playing and then play two notes which are both near to the same 12 equal note and let them overlap, when you play the second note the first note gets switched off automatically as desired, but when you raise the key for the old note the new note then gets cut off too (both use the same note number in this situation) - fixed.

Parts | Mod Trem, Portamento / Legato etc. - if you click on the header for the column to show one of the controllers and then show another one, and you don't have the controllers overview window showing, it just sets the focus to the old one, instead of showing a new window for the new controller. E.g. if you show Legato controller and then click for Monomode it will just highlight the Legato window unless you close that window first - fixed.

If you play monophonic triple or more note trills in a tuning requring a cluster of close together notes with some of the notes in twelve equal - e.g. in 24-et - then one of the notes may sound a major third too low (with a pitch bend of -200 cents instead of + 200 cents) - fixed.

11th November

Buttons | Arpeggio / Scale playback | Make a list of arpeggios, broken chords or chords into audio files...

With the /MAKE_CLIPS_FOR_AND_REPLACE <web page file name> instruction in the list of files to make, when it changes e.g. "1 3/7 1/7 5/7.mid" to 1_3o7_1o7_5o7.mid to make it into a file name suitable for use in urls, it wasn't replacing the spaces by underlines - fixed.

When making e.g. mp3s, would save as 1_3o7_1o7_5o7.mp3.wav and convert to 1_3o7_1o7_5o7.mp3, - should save as 1_3o7_1o7_5o7.wav so that you can make all the types of audio clip from the same original .wav files. Fixed.

More blank captions fixed in the same way as for 10th November - reducing size of callbacks, also sometimes other procs called by them too - fixed.

10th November later in day

Bs | Scales Options | MOS - the Repeat generating intervals at field defaulted to 2/1 - should be 3/2.

10th November

Sometimes the main window caption and the menus show blank when FTS first runs - then show up when you touch them. Solution - reduced the size of the main window callback function to 1200 lines of code - with the rest of it in another routine. Don't know why this method works, but it does; maybe there is some limitation on the maximum size of a callback function in Windows - fixed.

9th November

Pitch | Note To Track - the edit field to the right thtat shows the pitch, midi note etc as the tune plays shouldn't be editable - you enter the freq. for the 1/1/ of the scale in the lower right of this window instead - fixed.

In | Options | Kbd Regions window - some things here unclearly expressed - fixed.

Reduced the maximum size of a module in the .exe file to help deal with a problem of menus and captions that disappear.

8th Nov later in day

In | Options | More Options | Start tune when a note is played from midi in (a "cue" note), and skip that note - only waits for one second for the next note after the cue note, which is rather short - increased that to ten seconds.

8th Nov

If you go to Views | Analyse Recording or Midi Voice and then click on the menu you may get repeatedly asked if you want to set to the defaults for this view, until you use Ctrl + Yes to say you don't want to see that message again in the session - fixed.

6th November

Some bug fixes in the option to make midi clips for all the chords in a list of files - fixed

If you use Ctrl + Yes to the Yes / No type messages to say you always want to answer yes to them, it stops showing the message as expected, but it makes yor default answer no (sorry!) - fixed.

Out | Options | Midi out / save timing | Add pause at start of midi file - unselecting has no effect - fixed

3rd Nov. evening

Bs | Record Control doesn't show the Sound Volume control on some systems - should now find it no matter where you have it installed, because it checks the registry entry for it and looks in the location specified in the command string, and if not pops up a message suggesting where to place it so FTS can find it (e.g. in Windows or System folder).

Bs | Recording to Temporary Memory | Options | Find Region to trim

- layout not clearly expressed - changed it to read Trim Margin Left [ ... ] ^ v Right [ ... ] ^ v - to set the amount of the margin for the trim.

2nd Nov. evening

When you change the bank for a part from Parts | Bank while the tune is playing, it doesn't take effect immedeaitley, only when you change to another voice and back again. Fixed.

If you click on Out | Options | More Options | Send patch before every note, you get a message asking if you want to use Tuning programs - fixed.

2nd November

Bs | Recording to Temporary Memory | Options | Find Region to trim - wasn't working properly with sixteen bit data - fixed. Also now works for stereo recordings

When saving in waveform audio format, file name loses the ".wav" extension sometimes - gets the "wav" included as part of the file name- fixed.

Bs | Recording to Temporary Memory | Options | Recording & Playback - always resets to Microsoft Sound Mapper at the start of the session - fixed.

1st November later in day

Bs | Record To File | Bit rate - not shown for the Ogg Vorbis file format - fixed.

1st November

When saving in the Ogg Vorbis formats .ogg and .vorbis the method using SOX and .dlls didn't work - so used new method - FTS calls the command line encoders and decoders for those formats now - fixed

Seed | Options | What to show on keyboard picture | Show untransposed keys - when untransposing, not untransposed to the correct position - fixed.

29th October

Bs | Seed Options | Seeds for Layers - only shows the first couple or so notes of each seed here - fixed.

flute_recorder_bell_partials.ts - not using the correct values for the bell partials for the recorder custom voice playing partials of the bell - fixed. Also added the ref to the original partials to the Tune Info

File | Save As Midi to save fractal tunes directly into midi format not working - fixed.

Some duplicate and similar entries in the fractal tunes drop lists - fixed

28th October

Seeds times beginning "0.xxx" read as 0 from saved fractal tunes (including the example fractal tunes in the drop lists) - only affects the last upload (upload for 26th Oct is okay). Sorry! - fixed.

27th October

Bs | Arpeggio window - if you expand the arpeggio to wider than the text field available you can no longer edit it there to add new notes (no auto h-scroll as one has with most of the other drop list edit fields in FTS) - fixed.

Bs | Record to file Config | Start midi recording on 1st note not working any more- fixed.

Bug in save to midi if you record while playing the seed (midi file gets saved in incorrect format and won't play) - fixed.

bird calls with Afro Carribean percussion fractal tune - sound stops after a few notes are played. - fixed.

If you edit the seed in the Seed as Text window and reduce the number of notes, the number of notes in the seed in the main window or the seed as text window until you play the tune or hide / show the window. Changed this so that the arpeggio pos. field is the one that changes the number of notes in the main window. The volumes and times fields change those values, but not the number of seed notes - volumes or times beyond the end of the seed just get ignored.

Also not converting the characters to numbers when you have Bs | Seed Options | Alphabet Seeds | Alphabet / digit seeds selected, without Show literal translation for this seed

Here the problem is that if you don't have it set to show the literal translation, then the seed needs to be treated as the numbers instead - because you have to be able to read the field in the way it gets shown in case user edits it. However, if you paste a seed in with no spaces between the characters, and starting with a letter of the alphabet or '0' then this means it can't be a number, has to be an alphanumeric seed - adn then it is okay to convert the characters to numbers. So, fixed perhaps as well as is possible.

26th October

File | Number Options | Calculator. If you enter a formula with spaces into the calculator, only calculates it as far as the first space (unless you put it in brackets). This is as intended for the scales as each entry ends at the next space - but for the calculator white space should be allowed anywhere as it is only a single value that needs to be calculated - fixed.

A couple of the fractal tunes are far too fast, and too high - ones affected are

1.082a | flute3_with_accompaniment.ts

1.082a | jazz_scale.ts

This happened because the seed starts with a 1 - and when you do that, the number of levels affects the way the melody sounds (usually one starts the seed with a 0). I had set all the layers to 50 to give more flexibility for the option to randomise the fractal tunes, but should have left these at their original value of 11 to avoid changing the sound of the fractal tunes. Fixed.

If you use the F11 shortcut to stop a tune, then go to Bs | Record to file Config and use the x button there to make a hex dump of a midi file, then the hex dump comes up blank (shows 0 bytes instead of the true file size) - fixed.

25th October

Button to play the seed, either in main window or Seed window always plays it full volume, and ignores the volume set for the highlighted part in the Parts window, or for the main window - fixed.

When you use keyboard methods to move the cursor for the mouse theremin, as an alternative to using the mouse (see tip of the day 8) then this sometimes changes pitch of the note in short abrupt fluctuations - unless the theremin window happens to be neatly aligned with the top left of the screen - fixed.

Added extra sustain to three of the fractal tunes - arabic_17_tone_maqam_Iraq.ts, arabic_17_tone_maqam_ussaq.ts and virtuoso_violin_with_flute.ts - that's because I did them originally on the SB LIve! S/W synth which does them with extra resonances after the note off. This sort of thing can be quite variable from one synth to another. On the Roland Sound Canvas the notes for these tunes may be so short on a fast machine that you don't hear them at all because they get cut off before even the beginning of the attack - fixed.

24th October

Organise windows (O) button | Tune Smithy Overview | Go to non default - always shows the scales and arpeggios drop lists as changed, as well as the scale / arp as text as changed when the scale or arpeggio is anything different from the default - fixed.

All the fractal tunes now have a drone on the first note! (inadvertent result of the drone bug fix on 22nd :-( ) - fixed.

22nd October

Bs | Seed Options | Drone Doesn't always start the drone if you haven't yet played a note - fixed.

Bs | Seed Options | Alphabet seeds | Alphabet volumes has no effect except to hide / show the minimum and maximum volumes. Changed it to a label rather than a check box - and whether to use volumes or not is now set in the Seed as Text window. Ditto for the Alphabet times - fixed.

When you adjust the alphabet volumes range, and ditto for the times, seed doesn't change in response until you edit it in the Seed as Text window - fixed.

When you select With timings, or With Volumes from Bs | Seeds, doesn't show / hide the Volumes and Timings windows immediately, as intended - fixed.

18th October

Some html tag errors in the help - fixed, and checked in an html validator.

When you record fractal tune changes as you play, then play it back complete with pauses, you get breaks in the tune with the notes switched off between each section of the tune and the next - fixed, with much smoother transition now.

Some fields not being updated as soon as they should - e.g. when you record fractal tune changes as the tune progresses and then stop the tune, the last time in the tempo map window isn't updated then, only when you replay the tune - fixed.

New tab key shortcut to change the scale as you play from PC keyboard has no effect - fixed.

When you look at detailed view of audio recording, zoomed out quite a way and at the end rather than beginning of the recording, not showing it correctly - fixed.

Check boxes to apply with times, volumes and pauses not synchronised for all the New Seed windows - fixed.

14th October

View | Analyse Midi Voice: Time in main window keeps running after you click the stop button if the note length is high, say 60 secs - until the time for the note runs out - fixed.

11th October afternoon

Occasional memory allocation error can occur when editing the scales drop list - shows up as an error message in the debugger - not sure if anything would happen in the release and if so, the exception handler would probably handle it - anyway it's fixed.

11th October

Error occurs when you open the Scales | More Scales | Canright's exs from Superparticular Pentatonics - was result of a newly introduced bug in an option used in this drop list to add a 2/1 at the end of every scale in the file - fixed.

View | Analyse Midi Voice | Freq Analysis | Config | Freq spectrum Config | Show as bar chart - when you unselect this, it makes the frequency spectrum graph by joining together the top left corners of each bar in the bar chart. Should join together the middle points. Result is that though it finds the partials centred correctly for clear partials, they look slightly off centre in the default non bar chart view - the partials themselves were already correct, but this way of showing the spectrum is misleading if you position the partials yourself by eye in the non bar charts view - fixed.

Parts | More | Portamento and Legato - if you select Portamento and Monomode without Legato (ok with legato) - then it remaps notes to new channels as the note changes which isn't desirable as then the portamento slide comes from the wrong previous note each time. You need to make sure that each new note for a part gets played in the same channel as the previous note for that part when playing portamento just as you do for legato - fixed.

9th October

In Windows 95 the icon (with white squares) which you click to bring up the PC Keyboard layout window gets shown as rrom PC keyb with clipped text, instead of the icon. Actually this is text that is supposed to be heard by blind users who navigate using a screen reader and is supposed to read Play from PC keyboard (the screen reader programs read the entire text whether clipped or not). All the icon buttons have extra text for blind users. Anyway, I'd forgotten to select a check box for this button to say that it is an icon based button. Shows okay in Wni 98 anyway which is why it wasn't spotted earlier - fixed.

6th October

Help | Contents | Test My Midi Player - broken links for the midi clips to play - fixed.

21st September

When you make a fractal tune consisting of a single chord - e.g. using Bs | Arpeggio / Scale Playback | Make chord / broken chord / arpeggio into seed the chord sometimes has a ragged start with the notes not starting crisply in time - fixed.

18th September

File | Midi File Options | Midi Out / Save timing | Add pause at start of midi file - not working with the option to make a list of midi clips from the file names - fixed.

14th September

Buttons | Scales Options | Scala Scales | Make all the SCALA related files - error messages, and the files not made - fixed.

When you use Buttons | Scales Options | Scala Scales | Show current scale in SCALA also makes or shows the notes for the current window in .doc format (= the f8 shortcut to add notes to a window) - fixed.

12th September

No help icon for the new Buttons | Seed Options | Alphabet Seeds window - fixed.

Buttons | Arpeggio / Scale playback | Figuration Not playing correctly. Turned out that it was skipping the first note of the figuration, which put everything out of sync - fixed.

FTS used to let one use , and . interchangeably to input values, because it is easy to type on instead of the other - but this is confusing if you paste a comma separated list of numbers with no spaces between them, as it then treats the commas as decimal points, so reverted to the original method of treating commas and periods separately - fixed.

Astonishment.ts example tune - plays very low in pitch. This is because I increased the number of layers to 50, as a result of increasing the maximum number of layers - but for this fractal tune the melody you get is affected by the number of layers because the seed doesn't start at 0. So reset it to th