Alda Versions Save

1.3.0 (2019-04-14)

• New CLI command: alda export and REPL command: :export

  This command exports an Alda score to another format. Currently, the only supported format is MIDI. MIDI files are exported at a resolution of 128 pulses per quarter note (PPQ).

  The score is provided in the same way as it is for alda play and alda parse: by specifying either a -f / --file, a string of -c / --code, or piping in the code via STDIN.

  alda export -f my-score.alda -o my-score.alda
  alda export -c 'piano: c8 d e f' -o piano-notes.mid
  echo 'piano: c8 d e f' | alda export -o piano-notes.mid
  

  The :export REPL command takes a single argument, the output filename:

  > :export /path/to/desired-filename.mid
  

• The alda parse JSON output has a couple of new keys: tempo/values and tempo/role. These values are used internally to schedule MIDI notes in a way that is exportable.

1.2.0 (2019-01-19)

• New CLI command: alda instruments and REPL command: :instruments

  This new command lists all available instruments, which is currently the 128 instruments in the General MIDI spec, as well as midi-percussion.

  NB: Alda does have a number of aliases for these instruments, e.g. piano is recognized as midi-acoustic-grand-piano. These aliases are not included in the list.

• Made adjustments to the command that prints for Windows users when running alda update to update the Alda client.

  For details, see issue #35.

1.1.0 (2018-12-01)

New feature alert!

An "alternate ending"-like feature has been added to the Alda language. The syntax looks like this:

piano:
  [ c8 d e f
    [g f e4]'1-3
    [g a b > c4.]'4
  ]*4

This allows you to have repeated phrases that can differ on each iteration. In the example above, each repeat starts with c8 d e f; on times 1 through 3 through the repeated phrase, the phrase ends with g f e4, whereas on the 4th time through, the phrase ends with g a b > c4..

Note that these "adjustments" can occur anywhere within the repeated phrase, not necessarily at the end, making this feature of Alda more flexible than the "alternate endings" notation seen in sheet music. To illustrate this, here is another example where the phrase has what you might describe as an "alternate beginning" and an "alternate middle":

piano:
  [ [c8 d e]'1,3 [e8 d c]'1,3
    f
    [g f e]'1-3 [g a b]'4
    > c <
  ]*4

Thanks to @elyisgreat for the initial idea/discussion and @pzxwang for implementing the feature! :balloon:

1.0.1 (2018-11-24)

Whoops! It turns out that the mechanism we had in place in the Alda client for determining whether or not your version of Alda is up-to-date had a flaw that prevents one from updating from Alda 1.0.0-rcXX to Alda 1.0.0!

That's fixed in this version. Also, your client will be able to update to the latest version now because now the latest version is 1.0.1 instead of 1.0.0. :)

1.0.0 (2018-11-24)

This release is functionally equivalent to the previous release, 1.0.0-rc85. After 3 years of working on a series of 1.0.0 release candidates, the focus has shifted toward re-architecting Alda in a way that will allow us to make some substantial improvements. The result of this restructuring will become a new major version of Alda, version 2.0.0.

The work has only just started on Alda 2.0.0, and it will probably be a long while before the initial release in the 2.0.0 series. We will continue to maintain the 1.0.0 series in the meantime. As such, it feels like now is as good a time as any to release Alda 1.0.0!

1.0.0-rc85 (2018-10-28)

• Made internal improvements to the Alda sound engine. Specifically, the sound engine now uses a Java MIDI Sequencer to schedule and play MIDI notes, whereas before we were using a third party library called JSyn.

  You shouldn't notice any difference in note scheduling, but if you do notice any problems, please file an issue in the alda-sound-engine-clj repo so that we can address them!

• The schedule function has been removed from alda.lisp. Scheduled functions haven't been very useful since we moved to a client/server architecture, and we haven't implemented a way for them to work with the new changes to the sound engine. So, we are removing the feature for now. We may re-implement the scheduled functions feature in the future, in a way that works with both the client/server architecture and the current implementation of the sound engine.

  For more context on this, see alda-core#65.

1.0.0-rc84 (2018-08-25)

• Handled an edge case re: what to display when playing extremely short scores.

• Improved the help text descriptions of the :info and :save REPL commands.

1.0.0-rc83 (2018-08-25)

• Implemented a --no-color CLI option, which suppresses ANSI color codes.

1.0.0-rc82 (2018-07-01)

• Upgraded JLine dependency to 2.14.6 to fix the platform-specific "Failed to construct terminal" part of this issue.

1.0.0-rc81 (2018-03-08)

• Added an :info command to the Alda REPL. It prints some user-readable information about the current score, for example:

  p> :info
  Instruments: piano-sFz6g
  Current instruments: piano-sFz6g
  Events: 6
  Markers: start, one, two, three
  

  Thanks, [TBuc], for implementing this new feature!