Freestyle 1.6 *Public Beta* now available

[newsonicarts]

Freestyle 1.6 is now available in the User Area as a public-beta

* VST3 hosting (beta-feature: use Check For Beta Features in the Setup -> UI)
* Plugin delay compensation: internal automatic compensation at audio merge points (e.g. mixers) and the overall latency is published to VST/AU host (if supported)
* Reworked Rack View with navigation bar, more efficient use of space, adaptive UI sizes for internal plugins and and auto-edit in place
* Reworked plugin scanning, and several VST hosting fixes
* Plugin Browser: Right/cmd click option to Cancel scan
* Duplicate module option (context menu and Alt-D shortcut)
* Improved module Copy and Paste logic
* Improved keyboard cursor keys navigation
* Improved keyboard navigation of menus
* Setup/UI: Option to disable animated transitions
* OpenGL compatibility fixes and rendering optimizations
* Various enhancements and fixes to the browser and tagging
* Various minor improvements and fixes
* OSX: Apple Notarized installer
* Windows: installer now defaults to the 64bit versions

Notes on OSX: In order to pass Apple notarization and achieve Big Sur compatibility we are now building with the latest Apple toolset, which means Freestyle is now 64bit only. Freestyle is also now built for Apple 'hardened runtime' (again for notarization) which may affect the compatibility of some plugins.

Notes on VST3: Plugin parameters are only partially supported so automation is not yet working with all plugins (depending on how they are implemented). Window resizing is also not yet supported. There are known issues with Roland Zenology, U-he Uhbix on OSX, Melodyne.

Notes on PDC: Instrument Freeze does not yet perform delay compensation. Also, in the plugin case, where multiple tracks with different latencies are routed to Freestyles multi-outputs, they are not compensated. This will be added in a future version.

Note also that the Snapshot Morphing beta-feature is no longer available in this build. We appreciate the your testing and feedback on this feature. Some significant challenges remained in order to resolve some issues identified through testing, and having had the chance to fully evaluate the feature in actual usage, have concluded a somewhat different design will make for a better solution to this use-case. It also became clear that VST3 support and PDC were more pressing so efforts were concentrated efforts on those, and in particular VST3 support has been a huge effort. In short, we hope this bring back morphing in a somewhat different form in a future version of Freestyle...

[EvilDragon]

Neat updates!

Freestyle 1.6 automatically rescanned all my plugins on first open, from scratch. Is this intentional? I lost all my custom plugin renames etc...


EDIT: Got this error message when FS tried to scan Halion 6:

[aquilyzer]

Awesome! Time to test this

Edit: Cant activate it on Windows 10:

freestyle_1_6_win.jpg

Cant activate it online nor offline. Tried VST plugin and standalone.

[Echoes in the Attic]

Nice to see progress in these areas. Bummer about snapshot morphing, but snapshots themselves are still there right?

[Skorobagatko]

snapshots themselves are still there right?

Yes

[Echoes in the Attic]

Also - So it hosts VST3 now, but what about the Freestyle plugin itself? Is it VST3 as well? Or is it a VST2 hosting VST3's?

[newsonicarts]

Cant activate it online nor offline. Tried VST plugin and standalone.

This was a server issue. It's working now, but we are performing ongoing server maintenance so services might be a bit hit and miss over the next couple days...

[newsonicarts]

Also - So it hosts VST3 now, but what about the Freestyle plugin itself? Is it VST3 as well? Or is it a VST2 hosting VST3's?

Currently all our plugins are VST2. No plans to change this as a priority. I can understand that VST3 might 'feel' new and shiny, but as we have no immediate plans to support any of the VST3 specific features, there would be no actual benefit to port Freestyle itself to VST3. It would just eat development resources (i.e. less new features) plus make the plugins a bit less efficient (VST3 has a much more complicated architecture than VST2). No doubt we will build for VST3 eventually but like I say at the moment, its really not a priority.

[wvshpr]

So will snapshot morphing come back in a different implementation?

Honestly, that was the distinguishing feature for me and I was waiting for its release to finally take the plunge.

[aquilyzer]

Cant activate it online nor offline. Tried VST plugin and standalone.

This was a server issue. It's working now, but we are performing ongoing server maintenance so services might be a bit hit and miss over the next couple days...

Its working now, thx. VST3 support works great.
Is there a log file? It seems the new version cant detect VST2 CamelPhat3 64bit anymore.

Edit: Also VST2 VPS Avenger 1.5.7 let Freestyle somehow crash, which also kills the DAW (tested Renoise and FL) Could send crash logs, if needed.

Edit 2: Camelphat issue is fixed in 1.6005 beta.

[Echoes in the Attic]

So will snapshot morphing come back in a different implementation?

Honestly, that was the distinguishing feature for me and I was waiting for its release to finally take the plunge.

Yeah I loved the snapshot morphing as well. I'm curious about what the technical issues were or how it was problematic.

[wvshpr]

Yeah I loved the snapshot morphing as well. I'm curious about what the technical issues were or how it was problematic.

Can't be that difficult to interpolate one value to the other. It was also well done in Freestyle already.

There either is a conspiracy against morphing since Kore or nobody cares about this feature. Alchemy is a great example of how parameter morphing is an incredibly useful sound design feature.

Maybe Bitwig are going to finally implement snapshots and morphing. Ideally not only on tracks, but also project-wide.

[aquilyzer]

@newsonicarts Is everything fine? Last beta update is already a while ago.

[Neon Breath]

@newsonicarts Is everything fine? Last beta update is already a while ago.

I hope so. It’s pretty much a no man’s land here since a while. I posted few questions months ago and never got any response from New Sonic Arts. That silence, quite weird...

[newsonicarts]

There will be a new beta next week. Hopefully this will become the final 1.6 release.