ZynewaveThanks for the feedback. Beta3 is up, with more enhancements to the help system.
Dialogs are now linked to the corresponding sections in the guide that describes the dialog
controls. When a dialog is open you can press the F1 key to show/hide the help page.
Since the inline help system is now much more comprehensive, I’ve decided to remove the old system where you could press Shift+F1 to open a specific guide chapter in a web browser. The ‘Help’ buttons that previously were located at the bottom left corner of the dialogs are also removed.
Shift+F1 is now assigned to the ‘lock content’ feature of the help page. This was Alt+F1 in beta2.
To make the inline help system as accessible as possible I also made a change to the function key shortcuts which unfortunately may annoy some users. I’ve frequently regretted that I originally assigned F1-F5 for the panels in the inspector. The F1 key is universally accepted to be the ‘Help’ key in most Windows applications, and since there now is a proper help system in Podium I’ve reassigned F1 to toggle the help page. The previous F1-F7 shortcuts are now moved to the F2-F8 keys. I hope users can adapt to this change 😳
ZynewaveThanks for testing. Beta2 is now uploaded.
I have not yet worked on solving the issues with copying stuff from one project to another open project, so keep in mind there are still unsolved bugs there.
For this beta2 I’ve worked on the other major part of the 3.3 release, which is an update to the inline help system. I posted about this a while back in another topic:
The easiest way to explain what’s changed is to paste the new help text that appears in the help panel:
The project window has an embedded help page that can be opened/closed by clicking the **Help** page tab. Help windows can be opened with the **New Help Window** command in the **Window** menu.
The help page displays context help for the UI element that you point to with the mouse cursor. This offers a quick way to learn about features in the Podium UI, and can also be helpful as a quick lookup of mouse and key shortcuts for the various Podium features.
The displayed help text is taken directly from the Podium guide. The Podium guide is a markdown document that contains hidden markers identifying the sections of the guide. When Podium is starting up it will load the Podium guide and use the hidden markers to find the help text that should be shown for a given UI element. Not only are the help texts taken from the guide, but also all Podium UI texts for titles, labels, menus, dialog boxes, message boxes, and so on. It is thus possible to translate the entire Podium UI and documentation just by translating the single guide document.
The guide that comes with the Podium installer is written in US English but preparations have been made to help the user community to create translations of the guide. Translation instructions are available on the zynewave github page.
Most of the sections in the Podium guide are linked to Podium UI elements and thus can be shown on the help page, but there are some chapters in the guide that are not linked, such as the quick introduction chapter and the control surfaces chapter.
In previous Podium releases the text that was shown in the help page was embedded in the Podium.exe file, and it was mostly just short titles with key shortcut hints. These embedded help texts are now removed. By loading the help text instead from the guide document it is possible to show more comprehensive help.
In the beta2.zip file you will find a podium-guide.md file which eventually will be included in the Podium installer. For the beta2 you will need to place the .md file next to the Podium beta exe, or load the .md file in the Preferences>Appearance page.
Rewriting the old Podium guide html into the new .md format has been a huge task, and I’m not done yet. There are some pages that have a “todo” reminder, and many sections are not yet linked to their corresponding UI element. I’ve had to restructure/rewrite the sections so that each section can be linked to a specific UI element. When the rewrite is done, almost all of the sections in the guide will be viewable in the help page for the UI element they describe.
If you try beta2, let me know what you think about the new help system.
ZynewaveHow much RAM do you have in your PC? Could you please try and open a Windows Task Manager when running Podium and check if there is plenty of available memory when Podium crashes?
I have not made any fixes since 3.2.5 that are specific to your crash issues, but if you have the time, you could try the latest 3.2.7 demo and see if this fixes the problem.
ZynewaveWhich Podium version are you using?
ZynewaveHi Marc. I’m not sure I understand you fully. If you mean the velocity of the notes stored in a Podium sequence, then these cannot be modified before they are sent to the plugin. The plugin will have to support responding to note-on velocity. Can you give an example of a synth plugin that doesn’t respond to velocity?
ZynewaveCan you provide more details on what provokes the crash? For example, does it crash if you just start Podium and do nothing for a couple of minutes, or have you powered on an arrangement with plugins loaded?
ZynewaveHi Marc.
actually im using version 3.626 64 bit
I assume you mean Podium 3.2.6. There is a newer 3.2.7 release which is worth checking out. I made changes to the plugin handling, mainly for the loading of plugins, but other optimizations could have improved plugin stability.
To figure out which plugin is causing the problem, try starting a new project and gradually add plugins to your arrangement until you find the plugin that causes the freezing.
Edit: Another approach could be to take the arrangement that is causing you trouble, bounce all the plugin tracks to make the plugins inactive, and then gradually unbounce the tracks until you find the plugin track that causes the freezing.
ZynewaveIt should not be necessary to buy a second PC. You can have both Podium x64 and x86 installed side by side. It does require that your plugins can also have both x86 and x64 versions installed. I don’t know if the SampleTank installation allows this. At the bottom of the following page I describe one way to have both x86 and x64 versions of plugins installed:
ZynewaveAdded two new sections in the guide for the marker and tempo menus:
https://github.com/zynewave/Podium-public-resources/blob/master/Guide/podium-guide.md#h.marker-menu
ZynewaveIf you right click on the marker or tempo lanes you’ll find a menu with ‘Select All Markers’ and ‘Select All Tempo Events’. Once selected, use the normal copy/paste menus to copy the events into another arrangement. Note that Paste will be applied at the edit cursor position, so you’ll need to place the edit cursor at the position of the first event in the arrangement.
I see that those menus are not described in the guide, so I think I’ll go add them to the new GitHub guide 🙂
ZynewaveHi Andrew,
Thanks for stopping by 🙂 Last year I linked to some of your videos on my YouTube channel, but I see you’ve made more since then. I appreciate your contributions.
Cheers,
Frits
ZynewaveZynewaveHi Tony,
The last time I received an email from you about this issue was November 2016. I sent you an email that I never received a reply to, so I assumed you had found where you could download the installer. I just now checked your account, and it appears that your original purchase of a license had been disconnected from your account. That is why you have been unable to see the download files on your account page. I found your original purchase from October 2006 in the database, and it used a different email address. I ported the old purchase database to the new zynewave.com website a few years ago, so the porting script probably got confused about the different email addresses. I have now relinked the original purchase to your account so your downloads should now be available on your account page. You may need to reactivate your lifetime license first.
Please post here when you have made progress.
Cheers,
Frits
ZynewaveThat would be ideal, but unfortunately my current shopping-cart setup does not enable me to do that. I would have to spend considerable time customizing the website php code. Also, I currently don’t keep older versions of the installer on the server. During an active upgrade period, the download page shows the following message: “The download links are only available during your upgrade period. Please keep a backup copy of the installer file.”
If you have lost the installer, send me an email with your purchase/account details, and I can send you the latest Podium version released in your upgrade period.
Zynewave