Freewheeling 0.5pre4 review

FreeWheeling is an audio tool for live looping

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: JP Mercury

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FreeWheeling is an audio tool for live looping. It provides a highly configurable, fluid user interface for instrumentalists to capture loops in real-time. Based on the JACK, ALSA, and SDL libraries, it integrates with FluidSynth, a software synthesizer.

Freewheeling empowers the trance of immediate creativity by bringing us into a circular process. Time is utterly relative, and we are freed from the future-oriented mindset of product sequencing. If inspiration flows, later arranging and editing on a timeline can be done with other tools.

New user interface:

Mouse support
Click on loops triggers them. This can be configured.
See 'loop-clicked' in .fweelin.rc.

Joystick support
Joystick buttons can now trigger events.
For example, I have used FW with a DDR dance mat to trigger loops.
See 'joybutton' in .fweelin.rc.

New 'engage' and 'shot' options in trigger-loop.
'Engage' forces a loop to ON or OFF, overriding the default toggle behavior.
You can use it to create triggers that play short bursts, rather than long loops.

"Shot' to be implemented.

Stability improvements

Better thread safety and design improvements to the real-time memory manager have improved stability.

Significant improvements to loop/scene management and browsing

You can now give loops and scenes your own names
New names are stored within the filename of library files
Expanded browser window shows several items at once
Browser now sorts so that newer loops and scenes are first

Better handling of looppoints

Resolved issue with clicking at the looppoint on reloaded loops.
Resolved sporadic clicks on syncronized loops.

Better handling of loading/saving loops

Adjustable video loop delay

You can now adjust the performance of FreeWheeling by changing the delay between video refreshes. Several people asked for this feature, because FW is processor-heavy on the video side.

The video thread does run at a low priority, and so it should not affect the performance of other realtime audio threads. However, the system may get sluggish, and if this happens, you may want to increase the delay in .fweelin.rc:

< var videodelay="20"/ >

Fixes

Fixed 'pure virtual method called' segfault
Fixed segfault when browsing past end of FluidSynth patch list
Various fixes to reduce CPU hogging
Merged patches from Piem's debian package:
MaxVol, compile fixes for GCC 4.0, and removal of non-free elements
FW can now run without physical JACK inputs or outputs. Thanks to Piem for this patch.