v1.3.0 #1490
Danielku15
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v1.3.0
#1490
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Finally a new release of alphaTab. The highlight feature of this release is native Android support allowing you to use alphaTab directly in your Android Views applications as a Kotlin library.
A big "Thank You" to all people contributing to alphaTab through reporting bugs, bringing in feature ideas and contributing code changes to alphaTab!
Due to a merge mistake in the previous releases creating a reliably diff between the previous and this release was a bit cumbersome. I hope I didn't miss any features or changes worth mentioning in these release notes.
New Features 💡
Support for Native Android Apps
This is the highlight feature of this release. We added a "Kotlin for Android" target to our compilation pipeline and ship now a native Android (Views) control to be used in Android apps. the feature range is similar to what we support already in .net WPF with rendering, interactivity, player, playback cursors etc. all built-in.
We rely on your feedback to improve the platform support in terms of stability, features and performance.
Bundler and Frontend Framework Support
With this release we finally achieved compatibility with modern bundlers like WebPack and Vite used in frontend Frameworks like Angular, React and Vue.
For this we created bundler plugins which take care of the right configuration and bundling aspects so that all features like Web Workers and Audio Worklets work quasi out-of-the-box. Look at our guides and samples to learn about how to integrate alphaTab in your frontend app.
System Layout Customization
With this new option you can tell alphaTab to use the layout information which is embedded in the data model and might be read from formats like Guitar Pro. This information might include information like how many bars are in a system (single row with multiple staves) and a relative scaling of these bars within the system. #
See https://alphatab.net/docs/reference/settings/display/systemslayoutmode for more details
Allow justification of last system
With this new option you can choose that the last system is also justified to the page width. Normaly bars are only justified in a system when it is considered full and we have a line wrap. But this option allows you to also justify this last system which might still have space.
See https://next.alphatab.net/docs/reference/settings/display/justifylastsystem#description for more details
alphaSkia as render engine
With alphaSkia we created our own cross platform drawing library to achieve a consistent renedring experience across all platforms of alphaTab. This engine wraps Skia, the popular 2D Graphics library developed by Google, used in many products like Google Chrome, Android and Mozilla Firefox.
This engine is available for:
alphaSkia currently has an alphaTab focus but depending on the interest it might evolve to a full HTML5 canvas alike library for many platforms.
Improvements 🚀
Reworked Midi Tick Lookup
A key improvement and change in this release is the reworked "Midi Tick Lookup". This component is responsible to translate efficiently a given midi tick position during playpack, into the bar and beat being played. This component is key part to place the cursors during playback and highlight any currently played elements.
With this improvement you should not experience any misplaced cursors, skipped items or not highlighted notes anymore.
alphaTex extensions
Special thanks to @jonaro00 who contributed various improvements around alphaTex adding improvements around error reporting and some extension around supported elements.
Improved Grace Note Positioning
We also had to fight again our old rival, the grace notes. With their special needs in positioning and time handling they are a regular cause of problems in the positioning of notes. We tackled again some positioning related problems around grace notes.
MusicXML extensions
Our MusicXML support also got some improvements with new features or adjustments around existing features. Beside the display of chord diagrams there were some improvements on handling ties.
SMF1.0 compliant MIDI file export
alphaTab internally uses a MIDI standard aligned structure to handle the playback of the song. To handle all playbacks correctly we also use some events and structures from Midi 2.0 (per note pitch bends). But unfortunately this caused incompatibility with Standard Midi File Format 1.0. The SMF2.0 file standard was still not ready after many years and there is no real support for these events in the market.
To restore compatibility with applications only supporting SMF 1.0 we added a dedicated export feature for SMF 1.0.
In future if needed, we will also add support for the new Midi 2.0 file formats.
Chord unification
With this improvement we detect now same chords based on their definition and ensure they are only displayed one in the chord diagrams. This should reduce the noise in the chord diagrams where duplicates can happen from the file format design.
Dynamic change of transposition pitches
With this improvement transposition pitch changes are respected. Before this improvement the separately provided pitches were only applied once on score load. This prevented devs to develop features where a user would dynamically change the transposition to their preference. Now with this improvement pitches are handled in a more dynamic fashion when needed.
Others
Bug Fixes 🕷️
Maintenance 👷♂️
Improved GitHub Actions workflows
We made various improvements around our build system and kept it up to date regarding any dependencies and new practices.
Targeting .net 8.0
As .net 6.0 is now out of support we target the new LTS version .net 8.0 for our .net Windows Libraries (WPF/WinForms). The core library still targets .netstandard 2.0.
Other
This discussion was created from the release v1.3.0.
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