ZynewaveBeta4 is up. In this beta I believe I have solved all the problems with copying stuff between two open projects, both when dragging and when using copy/paste. In addition to other minor bug fixes, the start page now remembers if an arrangement is open on the project pages and will reopen those on next startup.
I will now go back to completing the missing parts of the inline help, and then the 3.3.0 release should be ready. If you find any bugs, please let me know.
ZynewaveRebuilding, Updating or Loading Plugin Setup from Template, yields an empty Device List, until you navigate away from the Project Page, and back again.
Fixed in the new beta4. Thanks.
i still have the issue whereby a crash in Podium x64 (Win10 x64) doesn’t release ASIO driver. i have to physically unplug, or power down – then power up my external soundcard (Roland TriCapture). Switching Audio driver in the Setup isn’t sufficient.
What causes the crash?
ZynewaveI have another (slightly off topic) feature suggestion for 3.3. Would it be possible to add an option for colour coding the track markers? i.e. verses are red, choruses are blue (I know I know there’s a song in there somewhere 😉), bridge yellow etc.
This would be immensely helpful when recording at a distance from the computer screen. I think that even if I had a young person’s eyes I would still struggle to read the markers from half way across the room, & it’s probably simple enough to code without taking time away from the main features of the update.
Your feature request is noted. This requires an update to the Podium file format to be able to store a color property for marker events, so I’d like to postpone it for an update with other additions to the Podium file format.
ZynewaveYou mentioned working on copying tracks and such from project to project – have you considered being able to drag and drop the same? As in dragging, say, an object by hovering the object over the target tab which opens it.
Good suggestion, 4mica. The previous Podium versions allowed you to drop objects on the tabs for moving objects into that object folder, but that no longer makes sense with the new single page per project. I’ve changed it so that dragging over a project tab will open that page.
I’m about to start patching the drag-drop and copy-paste code so that it handles moving from one project to another project. There are a lot of tricky situations to take care of, like when you drag a plugin onto a track in another project, it will possibly need to copy over all the device objects that define that plugin if the plugin is not already imported in that project.
ZynewaveYou can’t download older installers after your upgrade period expires, but I can email the 3.2.4 installer to you if you send me an email with some kind of verification of your identity; either the purchase ID from the purchase receipt email or write the approximate date of your original purchase.
ZynewaveI’ve just installed the Synthmaster 2.9.6 demo and I get the crash when I try to open the plugin editor. I noticed that the demo version actually doesn’t open the editor window immediately, but first displays a “When you try our demo version…” message box. This delayed creation of the plugin editor window is the reason the crash occurs. I would guess that the full version does not have this problem.
Edit: I’ve now added a double-check in the Podium code so that the Synthmaster demo doesn’t crash. Fix will be available from Podium 3.3.0 beta4 and onwards.
ZynewaveI noticed in your screenshot that you are running the 3.2.5 beta2. Is that the latest version you had access to? I can’t remember if there were crash issues with this particular beta, but generally I wouldn’t recommend using beta versions for production work. If possible, try to revert to the 3.2.4 release version and let me know if you still get crashes.
ZynewaveHmm, I’ll need to spend some time investigating this. The code for the latency compensation is quite complex, so if you don’t mind I’d like to finish 3.3 first and then look into the problem for a subsequent minor release.
Thanks for reporting the problem.
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.