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CHANGELOG

2.3.0 (2024-06-22)

Improved MIDI channel assignment

Incidental note: This release includes some breaking changes to the Alda OSC API, which is the communication layer between the Alda client and player processes:

  • Added a required channel number argument to a handful of endpoints.

  • Removed /track/{number}/midi/percussion endpoint, which is no longer needed.

  • Removed unused mute/unmute functionality.

These changes will not affect the vast majority of Alda users. The only way that you might run into issues is if you have written software that interfaces with the Alda player process directly, instead of using the Alda client.

The general Alda experience still works exactly the same way as it did before, so the aforementioned changes probably won't affect you.

As of this release, we've re-worked the way that MIDI channels are assigned to parts. This addresses some shortcomings that have have come up in discussions a few times. To summarize, prior to this release:

  • It was not possible to include more than 16 instruments in a score.

  • There was no visible error message when a score exceeded the number of available MIDI channels (16). The player process would log an error and do its best to play the score (leaving out some parts), but the client would just say "Playing..." and it was not obvious that there was a problem.

  • MIDI channel assignment order was non-deterministic. This meant that when you exported scores to MIDI files, the instruments used in each channel were not necessarily in the same order that they appeared in the score.

  • There was no way to control which MIDI channel was used for each part.

As of this release:

  • MIDI channel assignment is now handled on the client side, and is fully deterministic. The order of parts presented in the score maps to the order of channels in exported MIDI files in an intuitive way.

  • The Alda client provides helpful error messages in cases where it is not possible to use the 16 available MIDI channels to play your score.

  • You can now have more than 16 instruments in a score, just as long as there are never more than 15 non-percussion instruments playing at the same time. I wrote a handful of fun, new example scores to show you what's possible:

  • There is a new midi-channel attribute that allows you to explicitly specify which MIDI channel should be used at that point in time for the notes in that part. Most of you will never need to use this attribute, because Alda does a good job of automatically assigning MIDI channels to parts for you. But for those of you who want more control over MIDI channel assignment, this attribute will give you that power.

I hope you enjoy Alda's newfound ability to handle large numbers of instruments in a score. I'm pretty excited about it! As always, please let us know if you notice any bugs or unexplained behavior!

Other misc. changes

  • Fixed a bug in alda doctor where it would hang if there was an error during the "Send and receive OSC messages" step. Now if there's an error during that step, it will print the error message.

  • Client/player communication is now done via 127.0.0.1 by default, instead of localhost. These are effectively the same thing, but it's possible for localhost not to work, depending on your host configuration. 127.0.0.1 is more likely to work.

2.2.7 (2023-09-01)

Added a pid column to the output of alda ps, the value of which is the process ID of each player and REPL server process in the list.

2.2.6 (2023-08-18)

Upgraded Go library dependencies to patch security vulnerabilities.

2.2.5 (2023-05-07)

  • Corrected the casing of the word "MIDI" (it was "Midi" before) in the error message when a MIDI Note is outside of the 0-127 range.

  • The new alda import command can import a MusicXML file and produce a working Alda score. I'm excited about this - big thanks to Scowluga and alan-ma for their hard work on this exciting new feature!

    See this blog post for an overview of what alda import can do and how to use it.

2.2.4 (2022-11-24)

  • Added validation for when a MIDI note is outside of the 0-127 range.

    Thanks to kylewilk567 for the contribution!

2.2.3 (2022-04-24)

  • Added a new :parts command that can be used during an Alda REPL session. It prints information about the parts in the current score.

    (To display more information about the current score, you can also use the existing :score info command.)

    Thanks, n-makim, for the contribution!

2.2.2 (2022-04-17)

This patch release is all about improvements to the way that player processes are managed in an Alda REPL session.

Thanks to elyisgreat for reporting the issue and to ksiyuan for investigating and contributing a fix!

  • Fixed a bug causing :stop to sometimes not work in an Alda REPL session.

  • Fixed spurious "Failed to read player state" warnings that were often happening briefly while a player process is starting.

  • Fixed a potential edge case where, when using the Alda REPL, if a player process unexpectedly shuts down (not common), the Alda REPL session might continue to try to use the same player process.

2.2.1 (2022-04-10)

  • Re-added the pause (i.e. rest) Lisp function that was available prior to Alda 2.0.0, but accidentally omitted during the rewrite.

    Thanks, JustinLocke for the contribution, and UlyssesZh for reporting the issue! 🙌

2.2.0 (2022-01-15)

  • On Mac computers, Alda now requires macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) or later.

  • There is now an experimental WebAssembly build of Alda! You can't do much with it yet, but hopefully in the near future, we'll be able to run Alda in the browser! 😮

    If you're interested in following the discussion (or maybe even contributing!), see this issue.

2.1.0 (2021-12-29)

  • As a step to enable future work on exciting new features like automatic code formatting and importing from other formats like MusicXML, we have done some minor, under-the-hood refactoring of the Alda parser.

    Prior to this release, the Alda parser took a shortcut in that it had a step where it converted a list of tokens directly into a list of "score updates" (notes, chords, etc.). There is an important step that we were missing, which was producing an AST. Whereas the parsing steps used to be:

    characters -> tokens -> score updates

    Now, the steps are:

    characters -> tokens -> AST -> score updates

    Although this is a minor refactor, there is some risk of breakage, so please open an issue if you notice any problems!

  • We've added options for outputting the parsed AST of a score. This can be useful for debugging potential parser errors, as well as for building tooling (e.g. in text editors) that depends on the AST of an Alda source file.

    • alda parse now has --output ast and --output ast-human options.

      ast output is the AST in data form, represented as a single JSON object. Each AST node is an object that includes the keys type and (if the node has other nodes as children) children:

      $ alda parse -c 'piano: c/e/g+' -o ast
{"children":[{"children":[{"children":[{"children":[{"literal":"piano","source-context":{"column":1,"line":1},"type":"PartNameNode"}],"source-context":{"column":1,"line":1},"type":"PartNamesNode"}],"source-context":{"column":1,"line":1},"type":"PartDeclarationNode"},{"children":[{"children":[{"children":[{"children":[{"literal":"c","source-context":{"column":8,"line":1},"type":"NoteLetterNode"}],"source-context":{"column":8,"line":1},"type":"NoteLetterAndAccidentalsNode"}],"source-context":{"column":8,"line":1},"type":"NoteNode"},{"children":[{"children":[{"literal":"e","source-context":{"column":10,"line":1},"type":"NoteLetterNode"}],"source-context":{"column":10,"line":1},"type":"NoteLetterAndAccidentalsNode"}],"source-context":{"column":10,"line":1},"type":"NoteNode"},{"children":[{"children":[{"literal":"g","source-context":{"column":12,"line":1},"type":"NoteLetterNode"},{"children":[{"source-context":{"column":13,"line":1},"type":"SharpNode"}],"source-context":{"column":13,"line":1},"type":"NoteAccidentalsNode"}],"source-context":{"column":12,"line":1},"type":"NoteLetterAndAccidentalsNode"}],"source-context":{"column":12,"line":1},"type":"NoteNode"}],"source-context":{"column":8,"line":1},"type":"ChordNode"}],"source-context":{"column":8,"line":1},"type":"EventSequenceNode"}],"source-context":{"column":1,"line":1},"type":"PartNode"}],"type":"RootNode"}

      ast-human output is the AST in a more compact, human-readable format:

      $ alda parse -c 'piano: c/e/g+' -o ast-human
RootNode
  PartNode [1:1]
    PartDeclarationNode [1:1]
      PartNamesNode [1:1]
        PartNameNode [1:1]: "piano"
    EventSequenceNode [1:8]
      ChordNode [1:8]
        NoteNode [1:8]
          NoteLetterAndAccidentalsNode [1:8]
            NoteLetterNode [1:8]: "c"
        NoteNode [1:10]
          NoteLetterAndAccidentalsNode [1:10]
            NoteLetterNode [1:10]: "e"
        NoteNode [1:12]
          NoteLetterAndAccidentalsNode [1:12]
            NoteLetterNode [1:12]: "g"
            NoteAccidentalsNode [1:13]
              SharpNode [1:13]

    • In the Alda REPL, the :score command now has an ast option, which prints the human-readable version of the AST output:

      alda> bassoon: o2 f
alda> :score ast
RootNode
  PartNode [1:1]
    PartDeclarationNode [1:1]
      PartNamesNode [1:1]
        PartNameNode [1:1]: "bassoon"
    EventSequenceNode [1:10]
      OctaveSetNode [1:10]: 2
      NoteNode [1:13]
        NoteLetterAndAccidentalsNode [1:13]
          NoteLetterNode [1:13]: "f"

2.0.8 (2021-12-20)

  • Security update: upgraded log4j to version 2.17.0 to patch CVEs.

2.0.7 (2021-12-15)

  • Security update: upgraded log4j to version 2.16.0 to patch CVEs.

2.0.6 (2021-10-04)

  • Fixed a bug where a note length of 0 (e.g. c0) was accepted, and the note would play forever. A note length of 0, 0s or 0ms now results in a validation error.

2.0.5 (2021-08-22)

  • Fixed a bug where using an octave change inside a chord inside a cram expression produced unexpected results.

  • Fixed a bug where playback was sometimes ending abruptly before the end of the score.

2.0.4 (2021-08-14)

  • alda shutdown now prints a helpful message letting you know what it is doing (shutting down player processes).

  • If alda stop or alda shutdown fails to send a "stop" or "shutdown" message to a player process, it will now print a warning and continue instead of printing an error and exiting. (This scenario is usually not a critical problem, and it will resolve itself within a couple of minutes.)

  • alda play and alda export are now more resilient against scenarios where old player processes died mysteriously and left around stale state files that suggest they are still reachable.

    In scenarios like those, there will now be a long pause while the Alda client attempts to reach the dead player process, then it will print a warning saying it was unable to do so, and proceed to try another player process. This might happen a few times, but Alda will eventually recover and proceed to play/export your score.

    Note that this should rarely, if ever, happen! If you are seeing this happen a lot, then there is probably something weird going on with your player processes. Please have a look at the player logs (run alda-player info to learn where to find the logs) and let us know if you see any errors or stacktraces. This information will help us make further improvements in the future!

2.0.3 (2021-08-01)

  • Fixed a bug where input like [c1s] (a duration in seconds at the end of an event sequence) was causing a parse error.

  • Fixed a sporadic runtime error where this message would appear:

    panic: runtime error: invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference

  • alda ps output now includes Alda REPL servers in addition to player processes. Example output:

    $ alda ps | column -t -s $'\t'
id   port   state   expiry              type
itv  33659  ready   5 minutes from now  player
lhx  36583  active  5 minutes from now  player
olt  34539  ready   5 minutes from now  player
utj  40235  ready   5 minutes from now  player
yae  35935  ready   7 minutes from now  player
zew  40425  ready   6 minutes from now  player
itp  33643  -       -                   repl-server
jom  34191  -       -                   repl-server

2.0.2 (2021-07-31)

  • Fixed a "stale state" bug where Alda would occasionally attempt to use old player processes that are no longer running. Whereas before, only player processes would clean up stale state files, now the client cleans them up too, to ensure that the information is up to date at the point in time when the client needs it.

    For more information, see issue #369.

  • Related to the above, the alda client and alda-player processes now consider a state file to be "stale" if it hasn't been updated in 2 minutes, instead of 10 minutes.

2.0.1 (2021-07-05)

  • Alda will now attempt to detect if it's running in an environment (e.g. the CMD program that ships with Windows 7) that does not support ANSI escape codes to display colored text. If the environment does not appear to support ANSI escape codes, Alda will not display colored text (which is better in that case because otherwise you would see a bunch of weird-looking characters in places where there should be colored text!).

  • Prior to this release, it wasn't obvious that it's incorrect to enter a command like:

    alda play my-score.alda

    The correct way to specify a score file to read is to use the -f, --file option:

    alda play -f my-score.alda

    Instead of silently ignoring the provided file name, the Alda CLI will now print a useful error message.

2.0.0 (2021-06-30)

Alda 2 is a from-the-ground-up rewrite, optimized for simpler architecture, better performance, and a foundation for future work to enable fun live coding features.

For information about what's new, what's changed, and what to expect, check out the Alda 2 migration guide!

Earlier Versions