Posted: 09-02-18 11:17 pm
SYNTHESIA 10.5.4792
Download from the pink box above.
Big Stuff
Download from the pink box above.
Big Stuff
- A new synth on Windows and Android! It's based on BASS (like VirtualMIDISynth and BASSMIDI). It's lower-latency, higher quality, includes a Reverb setting, and lets you change the SoundFont to whatever you like. Just put your SF2 files in any folder that Synthesia already scans for songs. Then it should show up on the Settings --> Music Devices --> Built-in MIDI Synthesizer screen. This fixes all the problems in one fell swoop.
- The Windows MME and UWP MIDI APIs can now be used concurrently by Synthesia on Windows 10. That means the reliable, 25-year old synth will always be available in the device list, even when you search for and enable Bluetooth MIDI devices. By default the new, (buggy, crashy) UWP stuff is only available when you specifically enable it via the Midi.UseWinRTMidi advanced option. And even then, the only devices reported through the new API are Bluetooth devices. That's to avoid seeing duplicate entries being detected in both MME and UWP.
- Benchmark mode. Change Settings --> Advanced --> Benchmark --> Allow. Then, on the song settings screen, you'll see a tiny stopwatch icon just next to the Continue button. Click that to run the song in a strange, fixed-timestep mode that measures the performance of the app. You'll be presented with a statistics screen after exiting the song. This is 95% an internal tool, but it will be helpful for diagnosing things on rare user hardware.
- Completely revamped Android text handling (from on-screen and hardware keyboards). Hopefully this will solve all of those problems once and for all. Shortcuts now work with virtually every hardware keyboard key combination now instead of like... four keys. This is especially useful now that we officially support Chromebooks, which almost always have hardware keyboards.
- Incorrect accidentals are shown in the sheet music again.
- The "Gameplay.PinMenuDrawerOpen" advanced setting has been promoted to an in-game option under Settings --> Gameplay. The hidden bar now acts much more like typical video players (e.g., YouTube) where any mouse activity at all (except down in the keyboard area) will reveal the bar for a couple seconds.
- You can now prevent the large title bar from appearing at the beginning of a song with the "Gameplay.ShowTitle" advanced setting.
- The "All Songs (grouped by folder)" list now always alphabetizes the folders. This was usually the case before, but now it's always the case.
- There should be a fairly sizable performance improvement across the board for Android devices.
- The sound set included in this preview isn't final. The final version will have higher quality pianos. (Just the new piano samples will be larger than the entire 120+ instrument sound set included in this preview!)
- Android still can't bind shortcuts of the form "Ctrl + printable character" (like Ctrl+S). Plain printable characters are fine (both 'a' and 'A'). And "Ctrl + other stuff" (like Ctrl+Tab) are also fine. So, we went from 3% coverage of hardware keyboards to something like 90%.