What's new in Fontelle

Easier first runs on macOS and Windows, updates that finish by themselves, and a link to these notes after every update.

Updates finish by themselves

After Install update, Fontelle now restarts by itself onto the new version and reopens your song, so the update is never left waiting. It waits instead while there is anything a restart could lose: unsaved changes, playback, recording, an export, a shared song, or a question on screen. Once those are done, it restarts.

From the next update on, the first start menu of a new version says which version it is, with a What's new button that opens these notes.

macOS: a proper app

The macOS download is now Fontelle.app, which opens with a double-click. Fontelle isn't signed with a paid Apple developer account, so macOS asks you to confirm it once. The download includes FIRST-RUN.txt with the steps. After the first open, updates keep it opening without asking again. Move it to your Applications folder first: an app opened from Downloads runs from a temporary copy that can't update itself, and Fontelle tells you so.

Windows: no console window

Fontelle no longer opens a black console window behind the studio, and closing that window no longer closes Fontelle. The programs Fontelle runs in the background, such as the update check, don't flash windows of their own either.

The install count

Fontelle sends one anonymous ping a day so we can count installs. It now goes during your first session, about a minute after the notice that says so, instead of waiting for a second launch.

It now also says how far people get: firsts like a first song saved or a first plugin loaded, and which parts of Fontelle were used that day (the mixer, the piano roll, export and so on). These are fixed words chosen in advance, never names, files, notes or anything from your songs. Settings ▸ Count this install turns all of it off, and the details are at https://fopull.com/privacy#install-ping.

Supporting Fontelle

From your fifth launch, the start menu shows one line about supporting Fontelle, with a link. After an update it can show again, at most once a month.

Clip colours that follow the mixer, soundfonts that are read correctly as instruments or kits, and the snap key working everywhere.

Clips are the colour of their mixer track

A clip is now always the colour of the mixer track it plays into, audio clips included. Before, a clip's own colour or a coloured lane could win, and audio clips stayed the default blue while the mixer outlined them in the track's colour. A clip's own colour still shows when it plays straight into the master. With a strip chosen on the mixer, the clips that don't feed it are dimmed.

Soundfonts: instruments and kits

Fontelle decides whether a soundfont preset is a drum kit or an instrument from the preset's name and its samples' names. Before, one narrow sample made the whole preset a kit, and a kit gets no scale or key, so the scale and key tools left out melodic presets sampled every key or two. In our test collection of 2,106 presets that was 267 of them. They now count as the instruments they are.

The snap key

G changes the grid snap in the arrangement too, not only in the piano roll. It works on whichever of the two you clicked in last, as Delete and S already do.

Everything new since 0.31.0: LV2 plugins on Windows and macOS, clearer panels over see-through themes, and four themes redrawn.

LV2 plugins on Windows and macOS

LV2 plugins now load on Windows and macOS as well as Linux. Fontelle looks for them where their installers put them:

• Windows: C:\Program Files\Common Files\LV2 and %APPDATA%\LV2
• macOS: /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/LV2 and ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/LV2

You can also add your own folders, as for the other formats. A song made on Linux with an LV2 plugin opens on Windows or macOS with that plugin's Windows or Mac version.

A plugin's own window opens when it has one made for that system. Plugins whose window is built with Qt or GTK (drumkv1, Calf and others) get Fontelle's panel of controls instead on Windows and macOS.

Most LV2 plugins are made for Linux first, so expect fewer of them on Windows and macOS than CLAP or VST3. On a Mac, LV2 has only been tried by our automated tests so far.

On Linux, LV2 support is now built into Fontelle, so the download no longer needs lilv installed.

Themes

• Lo-fi Rain is redrawn, Nebula has new colours, and Sunroom and Midnight are touched up.
• With a see-through theme, the panels drawn over the studio let the clips behind show through their words. The share panel, the progress card, questions, the save prompt, track options and DisgustingBeat's menu now have solid backgrounds.

Fixed

• Messages at the bottom of the window sometimes vanished before you could read them. They now stay for a few seconds.
• Changes made in an LV2 plugin's own window now mark the song as unsaved, and in a shared song they reach everyone else. Before, you could close the song without being asked to save them, and the others never heard them.
• The start menu's Recover button had no words on it. It now says what it recovers.

A beta: LV2 plugins on Windows and macOS, and a few fixes. Please tell us what works and what doesn't, especially on a Mac.

LV2 plugins on Windows and macOS

LV2 plugins now load on Windows and macOS as well as Linux. Fontelle looks for them where their installers put them:

• Windows: C:\Program Files\Common Files\LV2 and %APPDATA%\LV2
• macOS: /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/LV2 and ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/LV2

You can also add your own folders, the same as for the other formats. A song made on Linux with an LV2 plugin opens on Windows or macOS with that plugin's Windows or Mac version.

A plugin's own window opens when it has one made for that system. Plugins whose window is built with Qt or GTK (drumkv1, Calf and others) get Fontelle's panel of controls instead on Windows and macOS.

Most LV2 plugins are made for Linux first, so expect fewer of them on Windows and macOS than CLAP or VST3. On a Mac, LV2 has only been tried by our automated tests so far, not on a real Mac with real plugins.

On Linux, LV2 support is now built into Fontelle, so you no longer need lilv installed for the download to run.

Fixed

• Messages at the bottom of the window sometimes vanished before you could read them. They now stay for a few seconds.
• Changes made in an LV2 plugin's own window now mark the song as unsaved, and in a shared song they reach everyone else. Before, you could close the song without being asked to save them, and the others never heard them.

Everything new since 0.30.0: the piano roll's tools, and fixes for what people found trying the beta. Sharing a song needs everyone on this version.

The piano roll's tools

The Tools menu is now in groups: Timing, Pitch, Levels, Length, Shape, Generate and Select, with the MIDI files under their own heading at the end.

New tools:

• Strum spreads each chord like a hand across strings: up, down, alternating or random. It can speed up or slow down as it goes, get harder or softer string by string, and lead into the beat so the last note lands on it.
• Chop cuts notes into repeats. Click the pattern's steps to leave some silent, and set the gate, a falling, rising or accented velocity, and a pitch step for stairs. Ctrl+U chops by the snap.
• Glue (Ctrl+G) joins touching notes on the same key back into one.
• Flip turns a phrase back to front (optionally keeping its rhythm) or upside down (in key, when the song has one).
• Levels adds to, sets, scales, compresses, limits or ramps any note value; a crescendo is a velocity ramp. It replaces Adjust.
• Lengths does legato with a gap, staccato, one length for every note, at least or at most a length, or just trims overlaps.
• Humanize is the randomizer, which can now nudge timing and lengths as well as values. Its seed gets you back a result you liked.
• Flam adds grace notes before each note, or on it.
• Thin out empties every second (or third…) slice of time, for stutters and fills.
• Shuffle keeps the rhythm and shuffles, rotates or mirrors the pitches, or the velocities, or the lengths.
• Speed makes a phrase twice as fast, half speed, and in between.
• Remove doubles, Trim overlaps and Make mono clean up notes on top of each other.
• Mute or unmute (Ctrl+Shift+M in the piano roll): a muted note stays, drawn hollow, and isn't played or exported. Not on vocal tracks yet.
• Select: same key, overlapping, off the beat, some at random, shorter or longer than the snap, invert.
• Quantize gains swing and "leave near misses"; Shift+Q quantizes only the starts. Transpose can count scale steps and keep notes inside a range.

Every tool's dialog now:

• works on the selected notes, or the whole clip when nothing is selected, and its title says which;
• shows the result before you apply it: what will change is dimmed, the result is shown in its place, new values show in the lane at the bottom, and an arrow points at results scrolled out of view;
• has arrows either side of every value, and you can drag across a value to change it quickly;
• has Reset, Hear it and Apply. Enter applies, Escape closes;
• opens beside the notes instead of on top of them, and can be moved by its title. It opens where you left it, and remembers its settings.

One undo takes back any tool. Arpeggiate used to need two, and the first left the clip empty.

Keys: Ctrl+Shift+T runs the last tool again. Alt+A, Alt+U, Alt+L, Alt+Y, Alt+F, Alt+W and Alt+X open Arpeggiate, Chop, Lengths, Flip, Flam, Thin out and Levels. All of them can be changed on the shortcuts page.

Fixed since the beta

• Notes that never stopped. Clicking or dragging notes in the piano roll could leave a note playing for good on a plugin like Dexed, and it came back each time you pressed play. A note now always ends on the instrument it started on. Moving, shortening, deleting or muting a note while the song plays also ends it cleanly.
• Random white noise with plugins. If a plugin is installed twice — its Linux version and a Windows one through yabridge — Fontelle now plays the Linux one. A plugin that fails for a moment is silent instead of repeating its last sound, and nothing that isn't valid audio reaches your speakers.
• Working together: a preset picked, or a knob turned, inside a plugin's own window now reaches everyone in the song a moment after you let go. Before, the others only got it after leaving and joining again.
• drumkv1 and other Qt or GTK plugin windows were black on Wayland desktops. They now draw inside Fontelle's plugin window.
• DrumSynth was switched off with "keeps playing invalid audio". It plays a moment of bad audio on each drum's first hit (a bug in the plugin); Fontelle now keeps that moment silent and lets it play on.
• LV2 on Windows and macOS: LV2 plugins work on Linux only for now. A rescan now says how many LV2 plugins it skipped; use the plugin's CLAP or VST3 version. LV2 support for Windows and macOS is being worked on.

A beta: offered only to machines with Settings > Updates > Beta updates turned on. Everything in 0.30.0, plus the work below, for testing before it comes to everyone.

Sharing a song needs everyone on this version.

The piano roll's tools

The Tools menu is now in groups: Timing, Pitch, Levels, Length, Shape, Generate and Select, with the MIDI files under their own heading at the end.

New tools:

• Strum spreads each chord like a hand across strings: up, down, alternating or random. It can speed up or slow down as it goes, get harder or softer string by string, and lead into the beat so the last note lands on it.
• Chop cuts notes into repeats. Click the pattern's steps to leave some silent, and set the gate, a falling, rising or accented velocity, and a pitch step for stairs. Ctrl+U chops by the snap.
• Glue (Ctrl+G) joins touching notes on the same key back into one.
• Flip turns a phrase back to front (optionally keeping its rhythm) or upside down (in key, when the song has one).
• Levels adds to, sets, scales, compresses, limits or ramps any note value; a crescendo is a velocity ramp. It replaces Adjust.
• Lengths does legato with a gap, staccato, one length for every note, at least or at most a length, or just trims overlaps.
• Humanize is the randomizer, which can now nudge timing and lengths as well as values. Its seed gets you back a result you liked.
• Flam adds grace notes before each note, or on it.
• Thin out empties every second (or third…) slice of time, for stutters and fills.
• Shuffle keeps the rhythm and shuffles, rotates or mirrors the pitches, or the velocities, or the lengths.
• Speed makes a phrase twice as fast, half speed, and in between.
• Remove doubles, Trim overlaps and Make mono clean up notes on top of each other.
• Mute or unmute (Ctrl+Shift+M in the piano roll): a muted note stays, drawn hollow, and isn't played or exported. Not on vocal tracks yet.
• Select: same key, overlapping, off the beat, some at random, shorter or longer than the snap, invert.
• Quantize gains swing and "leave near misses"; Shift+Q quantizes only the starts. Transpose can count scale steps and keep notes inside a range.

Every tool's dialog now:

• works on the selected notes, or the whole clip when nothing is selected, and its title says which;
• shows the result before you apply it: what will change is dimmed, the result is shown in its place, new values show in the lane at the bottom, and an arrow points at results scrolled out of view;
• has arrows either side of every value, and you can drag across a value to change it quickly;
• has Reset, Hear it and Apply. Enter applies, Escape closes;
• opens beside the notes instead of on top of them, and can be moved by its title. It opens where you left it, and remembers its settings.

One undo takes back any tool. Arpeggiate used to need two, and the first left the clip empty.

Keys: Ctrl+Shift+T runs the last tool again. Alt+A, Alt+U, Alt+L, Alt+Y, Alt+F, Alt+W and Alt+X open Arpeggiate, Chop, Lengths, Flip, Flam, Thin out and Levels. All of them can be changed on the shortcuts page.

Everything new since 0.29.0, most of it from people who tried 0.29.0 together. Sharing a song needs everyone on this version.

Typing feels like typing

• Click inside any box you are typing in to put the cursor there: song names, the tempo, both search boxes, and renaming a channel, lane, prefab or mixer track. Drag to select, double-click for a word, click three times for all of it. Clicking somewhere else still finishes, as before.

Piano roll

• Quantize: Tools ▸ Quantize… pulls notes onto the grid, with a strength and an option to move the ends too. Ctrl+Q quantizes the selected notes, or the whole clip when nothing is selected. One undo takes it back.
• The arpeggiator shows the run it will write, right in the roll, and changes it as you change the settings. Hear it plays it first. Quantize and Transpose show theirs too.
• Notes on the same key that overlap get a faint cross-hatch where they overlap, so a hidden second note is easy to spot.
• The smart-chord strip stays where it opened while you click through its settings.

Playing and the timeline

• Dragging the time marker while the song plays pauses it, then plays on from wherever you let go.
• Each time signature change has a small pin on its bar line in the ruler, joined to its flag.
• F11 toggles full screen.

Working together

• Other people's cursors and time markers move smoothly instead of jumping.
• After you leave a shared song, sharing a new one no longer brings back the old "stopped sharing" message.
• When the host stops sharing, everyone in the song is now told right away. Before, the message could be lost on the way.

Counting installs

• Fontelle now sends one anonymous ping a day so we can count how many people use it: a random id made on your computer, the Fontelle version, your operating system and processor type, and whether you get betas. Nothing else, nothing about you or your songs. The start menu says so once before the first ping is sent. Turn it off in Settings ▸ Privacy ▸ Count this install, which also deletes the id, or set FOPULL_NO_PING=1. Details: https://fopull.com/privacy#install-ping

Everything new since 0.28.0. Sharing a song needs everyone on this version: older versions are told so instead of getting stuck on joining.

A new Grand Piano

• The default piano is now the Salamander Grand Piano (a Yamaha C5) as it was recorded: every key it was sampled at, three strengths, in stereo, with the bass ringing for six seconds. The clicks at each note's start and release are gone.
• Two knobs on it: Lid for a darker, felted sound and Release for a longer, half-pedal fade.
• Songs you already made keep the piano they were saved with.

Any time signature

• Any top over any bottom: 7/8, 5/16, 15/16, even 4/3 or 5/7, and groupings like 3+3+2/8. The signature box lists the common ones; "Type a signature…" takes anything else.
• Drag a change's flag along the ruler to move it.
• The metronome follows the bar you are in through every signature and tempo change: loud on the bar, medium on each group, soft on the other beats. The count-in is a bar of the signature where you start.
• Snapping, the beat grid, Ctrl+arrow, duplicate and new clips all follow the signature they are in. Dragged notes and clips land on the grid.
• Plugins are told the real bar and signature; DisgustingBeat's patterns restart on every bar line.
• MIDI files keep their signatures both ways (a bottom MIDI can't store, like /3, is written as /4 with every note in place). Vocal files keep the signature they were written in.

Who can come into a shared song

• Every session is encrypted end to end; the relay can't read the song, the chat or the files.
• Share with a password: it never crosses the internet, and five wrong tries ends that connection.
• Ask first: a card says who wants to join — Let in (Enter), Block, or Turn away (Escape). Lock turns everyone new away.
• Remove now just removes; they can come back with the code. Block keeps them out of this session and later ones, and lives in Settings > Sharing, where Unblock lets them back.

Also new

• Help on the Guide page (?): Report a bug and Request a feature open the issue board with your Fontelle version and system filled in; Support Fontelle opens fopull.com/support. Nothing is sent unless you open a link.
• A theme editor: Edit this theme… on any theme card, worn live as you edit.
• Smart chords in the piano roll (H): click a note and pick a chord built on it; "in key" (K) keeps drawn notes on the scale.
• Find my scale: the scale menu ranks scales by the notes you've written.
• A deleted note is zapped out with a flash of light and fine sparks.
• Ruler zoom, notes that sound when placed (Settings > Editing), Analyze on audio clips, monitor per track, unplugging a cable by pulling it off its jack, and working on several lanes at once.
• On Windows, links now open in your browser whole (they were cut at the first &).

The factory piano's recordings are the Salamander Grand Piano by Alexander Holm, under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0; every sound Fontelle ships and its licence is listed in licenses/SOUNDS.md, which every download carries.

A beta: offered only to machines with Settings > Updates > Beta updates turned on. Everything in 0.28.0, plus the work below, for testing before it comes to everyone.

Sharing a song needs everyone on this version: older versions are told so instead of getting stuck on joining.

Any time signature

• Any top over any bottom: 7/8, 5/16, 15/16, even 4/3 or 5/7, and groupings like 3+3+2/8. The signature box lists the common ones; "Type a signature…" takes anything else. The song's own signature is as flexible as a change.
• Drag a change's flag along the ruler to move it; it snaps to bar lines, and one undo puts it back.
• The metronome follows the bar you are in through every signature and tempo change: loud on the bar, medium on each group, soft on the other beats. The count-in is a bar of the signature where you start.
• Snapping, the beat grid, Ctrl+arrow, duplicate and new clips all follow the signature they are in. Dragged notes and clips land on the grid.
• Plugins are told the real bar and signature; DisgustingBeat's patterns restart on every bar line.
• MIDI files keep their signatures both ways (a bottom that isn't a power of two, which MIDI can't store, is written as /4 with every note in place). Vocal files keep the signature they were written in.

Who can come into a shared song

• Every session is encrypted end to end; the relay can't read the song, the chat or the files.
• Share with a password: it never crosses the internet, and five wrong tries ends that connection.
• Ask first: a card says who wants to join, with Let in (Enter), Block and Turn away (Escape). Lock turns everyone new away.
• Remove now just removes; they can come back with the code. Block keeps them out of this session and later ones, and lives in Settings > Sharing, where Unblock lets them back.

Also new since 0.28.0

• A theme editor: Edit this theme… on any theme card, worn live as you edit.
• Smart chords in the piano roll (H): click a note and pick a chord built on it; "in key" (K) keeps drawn notes on the scale.
• Find my scale: the scale menu ranks scales by the notes you've written.
• A deleted note is zapped out: a flash of light and fine sparks.
• Also: ruler zoom, notes that sound when placed (Settings > Editing), Analyze on audio clips, monitor per track, unplugging a cable by pulling it off its jack, and working on several lanes at once.

Better audio on Windows, tested as 0.28.0-beta.1 and now for everyone, plus middle-click autoscroll, a Notepad that edits like a real editor, and several fixes from user reports.

Audio on Windows

Windows users reported clicky, crackly playback. Settings > Audio output > Backend now offers, besides the shared WASAPI it had before:

• ASIO, through your audio interface's own ASIO driver. It plays by way of fontelle-asio.exe, a separate program that comes in the Windows download. A Driver row opens the driver's own control panel.
• WASAPI (low latency): shared with other programs, at the smallest period the driver allows instead of Windows's usual 10 ms.
• WASAPI (exclusive): Fontelle alone on the device, in its own format.

On every backend, Settings > Audio output now says how many dropouts there were and whose they were (the device's, or a buffer Fontelle was late with), and how busy the audio thread is. The transport bar shows the load and marks a lost buffer until you reset it. If ASIO won't open, Fontelle says why and plays through WASAPI.

If you turned on Beta updates to test this, you are offered this release too, and can turn Beta updates off again.

Middle-click autoscroll

• Press the middle mouse button anywhere that scrolls and move away from where you pressed: the view follows, faster the farther you go. Click once to leave it on until the next click, or hold it and let go to stop. Escape also ends it.
• Works on the arrangement, piano roll, mixer, rack, browser, menus, the settings and help pages, and in the floating windows.

Editing

• With several clips selected, a change on the audio clip panel (track, level, pan, pitch, speed, fades, filter and the rest) goes to every selected audio clip, each keeping its own sound, and undoes in one step. The clip menu's Duplicate, Mute, Loop and Delete act on the whole selection too.
• Cutting a note clip now changes its size, not its notes: drag the end of the first half back out and what was after the cut is still there.
• Every knob's right-click menu has Copy value and Paste value, and a value copied from one knob pastes onto any other.

The Notepad edits like an editor

• Drag to select, double-click a word, triple-click a line, and a right-click menu with Cut, Copy, Paste and Select all.
• Ctrl+L selects a line; copy or cut with nothing selected takes the whole line; pasting keeps line breaks.
• Tab / Shift+Tab to indent, Alt+Up/Down to move lines, Ctrl+D to duplicate, Ctrl+Shift+K to delete a line, Ctrl+Backspace/Delete for a word, and Ctrl+Home/End.

Fixes

• Dragging along the time bar no longer freezes a shared song or makes the audio stutter.

A beta: offered only to machines with Settings > Updates > Beta updates turned on. Everything in 0.27.0, plus better audio on Windows, for testing before it comes to everyone.

Windows users reported clicky, crackly playback. Settings > Audio output > Backend now offers, besides the shared WASAPI it had before:

• ASIO®, through your audio interface's own ASIO driver. It plays by way of fontelle-asio.exe, a separate GPLv3 program that comes in the Windows download (its source is attached to the release).
• WASAPI (low latency): shared with other programs, at the smallest period the driver allows instead of Windows's 10 ms.
• WASAPI (exclusive): Fontelle alone on the device, in its own format.

And on every backend, Settings > Audio output says how many dropouts there were and whose they were (the device's, or a buffer Fontelle was late with), and how busy the audio thread is; the transport bar marks a lost buffer until you reset it.

Testing it: pick a backend, play a busy song, and tell us what Playing through, Dropouts and Processing load said, with your interface and buffer size. If ASIO will not open, Fontelle says why and plays through WASAPI.

(0.27.0 and 0.27.1 were tagged but never published: the checks before release caught problems first, all fixed here. The Linux download runs on Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12, Mint 21 and newer, and singers work there too.)

Fontelle sings. A new vocal track holds notes with words on them, and the Fontelle Singer, built in and free, sings them with classic UTAU voicebanks or community DiffSinger voicebanks (the OpenUtau layout).

• Type lyrics straight onto notes, in English, Japanese, Chinese or Korean (with your input method); a line of words spreads a syllable per note.
• Draw pitch on the grid with the pitch pen, with Smooth, Snap to scale and Reset, and shape breath, voicing, tension and gender on their own lanes.
• Find singers installs voicebanks from inside Fontelle, with each author's terms shown before you install; .zip, .7z and .uar banks all install.
• A singer picker with portraits and search, and a singer panel that says plainly when a bank or its vocoder is missing and how to fix it.
• Singing that sounds sung: natural expression, smooth joins and breaths.
• Finished takes are kept, so a reopened song plays without singing again. Freeze a vocal track, render a selection to a clip, and export as usual.
• Vocal songs go in and out as files, and a shared song sends its singers to collaborators where the bank's terms allow.

Faster: the first phrase of a session is sung in about half a second, a change to a phrase's dynamics is almost instant, and reopening a song with saved takes no longer loads every voice up front.

New: Settings > Updates > Beta updates. Turn it on to be offered test builds before they are released. Off by default; turning it off again never downgrades you.

Collaboration that keeps up. Both of you should update to this version.

Working together

• Working on a song together could feel laggy and fight you: an effect added once appeared twice, a dragged clip landed too far, and a deleted clip kept coming back. One cause was behind all three: when your own edit came back from the host in a slightly different form, Fontelle lost track of it and applied it again. Edits are now matched to their echo first, so nothing is ever put on twice, and an edit that can't apply yet waits for the host instead of being taken back.
• A cut or an import on a friend's computer no longer gives its new notes different identities on the host, so the friend's next edit to them is no longer refused.
• One disagreement between copies used to re-send the whole song at every edit after it; now it is sent once.
• A tempo change under a recorded take no longer makes the copies drift apart.
• Effect edits now follow their own effect wherever it moved, instead of the wrong slot after someone reordered a chain.
• A burst of edits from a friend no longer rebuilds the audio for each one.
• Saving no longer resets a plugin's Slides as MPE switch.

Missing on this computer

• The Share panel now lists the plugins a shared song uses that aren't installed here, with their format, maker and where each is used, and any files that couldn't arrive, and why. A plugin someone adds during the session is listed as soon as it arrives.

Fixes for scaled displays on Windows, a brush that stays on its row, a brush for the arrangement, and clips that select the instrument actually playing in them.

Windows

• Fontelle fills its window and the mouse lands where you point on displays scaled above 100% (most Windows laptops default to 150%). Before, everything was squeezed into the top-left corner and clicks landed beside their target. Plugin and editor windows are fixed the same way.

Painting notes and clips

• The piano roll's brush stays on the key you start on, however the mouse drifts, so hi-hats and other repeated patterns paint straight. Hold Shift to let it follow the mouse across keys.
• The arrangement has a brush too (the Paint button, or B): drag along a lane to lay copies of the clip in hand end to end, kept to that lane unless Shift is held. With nothing in hand it lays blank bars. Pressing on a clip with it picks that clip up, the right button erases, and a whole stroke is one undo.
• Triangle (FL-style slide) notes can no longer be made; slides belong to the newer sliding-note system. Songs that already have them play exactly as before.

Clips and instruments

• Clicking a clip selects the instrument that actually plays in it, not the one it was first drawn with. If several play in it, the one already selected (if it plays there) or the one with the most notes is chosen, and clicking the open clip again steps through them. The clip's name and colour follow the same instrument.
• Deleting an instrument removes its notes but keeps every clip that still holds another instrument's notes. Before, a clip drawn with the deleted instrument went with it, even if it now played something else.

Settings

• A setting written by a newer Fontelle, such as a favourite this version doesn't know, is set aside and kept, instead of the whole settings file being replaced by defaults.

A packaging fix: the download now includes a licenses folder with the notices for the third-party work Fontelle ships, including the basic-pitch model that Analyze Musically uses to find notes (under its Apache-2.0 licence and Spotify's notice). 0.26.0 left it out. Nothing else changes from 0.26.0.

Analyze Musically: a window that listens to a recording and shows it as music, so you can see the notes, repitch them, clean the take up, slice it and comp several takes.

Analyze Musically

• Open it on any audio clip from the clip's menu (or Ctrl+Shift+A), or put it on a mixer track as an effect, where it records what plays through it.
• Notes: the sung or played notes on a piano roll over a picture of the pitch, with the key and scale (and how sure it is), the chords bar by bar, and the tuning. Copy the notes as MIDI, or copy the scale into the piano roll or the pitch corrector.
• Repitch naturally: drag notes up and down or along, snap them to the scale (Q), and set the centre, flatten, vibrato, glides, formant and gain of each note. A handle on top of each note flattens it as you drag, the most common fix. B compares with the original. Render the result back to the clip, or to a new clip below it.
• Clean: noise removal, trim and fades.
• Slice: markers at each hit, which you can move, then send to a sampler as a playable instrument.
• Record: takes into the window, from a track's input or from the effect, and a comp that picks the best of several takes, crossfaded where they meet.
• Its own transport: Space plays and stops the window's audio from its own cursor, round a loop if you drag one out, whether the song is playing or not. The song's transport and the window's never move each other.
• Its shortcuts have their own section on the shortcuts page, so they can be changed.
• Note detection uses Spotify's basic-pitch model (Apache-2.0), run inside Fontelle. Its notice is included with the download.

Presets

• A plugin's window has its own preset drop-down, drawn over the plugin's window, with search, stars and Random.
• The presets that OB-Xf, amsynth, Cardinal and Vital ship with now appear in the preset menu, and choosing a plugin's own preset in the browser loads it (Cardinal's patches no longer fail to load).
• Stars respond everywhere, in preset menus and on mixer tracks, and a starred preset remembers which bank it came from, so two presets with the same name no longer share a star.
• Settings are saved in a new format: an older Fontelle will not read settings saved by this one.

Arrangement

• Shift-dragging the ends of several clips loops each one at its own length, as one undo step.
• An empty arrangement shows the ghost of a first clip to start from.
• A clip's name sits across the top of its block, and clicking it opens the clip's menu: rename, render, Analyze Musically.
• Copy a scale from the piano roll and paste it into the pitch corrector, or the other way round.
• When the graphics driver refuses a plugin's window, Fontelle offers to turn on Compatible plugin graphics and restart.

Sound and look

• Built-in instruments start and stop each note on its exact sample, not at the start of the audio block, so fast notes keep their timing.
• Every menu's section headings are in the secondary text colour.

A plugin's built-in presets are in Fontelle's preset menu, and two plugin windows that could take Fontelle down no longer do.

A plugin's built-in presets

• Many synths keep their factory sounds inside the plugin as a bank of programs rather than as files: Dexed's 32 cartridge voices, Obxd's 128, Yoshimi's banks. They now appear in the preset menu after your own saved presets, grouped under the plugin's bank name, for VST 3 plugins and for LV2 plugins that offer programs.
• Choosing one is a single undo step and is saved with the song, and the arrows step through all of them.
• The preset playing is marked, and the menu opens scrolled to it.
• When a plugin loads a new bank, such as a new Dexed cartridge, the names follow.

Plugin windows that took Fontelle down

• amsynth's editor opens again. amsynth 2.0.0 crashed on desktops that don't publish a display scale (Plasma on Wayland, for one); Fontelle now gives it the scale it looks for first.
• Vital's window no longer crashes Fontelle on NVIDIA graphics under X11. Vital asks the graphics driver for a kind of surface NVIDIA's driver doesn't give it there, and stops the program when refused (in Vital's own standalone app too). Fontelle now checks first, safely, and if the driver can't give Vital its window, says so instead of opening it. Vital's knobs stay in Fontelle's panel.
• Compatible plugin graphics, a new setting (Linux, off by default, applies after a restart), draws plugin windows that use OpenGL through Mesa instead. With it on, Vital's window opens on NVIDIA. Plugins drawn that way are slower; Fontelle's own interface is not affected.
• When a plugin's window crashes Fontelle from one of the plugin's own threads, the crash report now names the plugin, and the next start holds it back once instead of crashing again.

Working on a song together, fixed from a real session, plus audio output settings and a handful of fixes. Sharing a song needs everyone on this version.

Working together

• The host's edits now reach everyone who joined. A soundfont being sent across used to hold every one of them up, while the joiner's edits went straight through. Files now travel in small pieces beside the edits, never in front of them.
• Songs load into a session about three and a half times faster.
• Sessions survive dropped connections. A host whose connection drops comes back under the same code, with everyone still in it, and edits lost in the gap are sent again. Someone who joined and drops rejoins by themselves and gets their place back. A file cut off halfway is fetched again from the start.
• The shared song no longer falls out of step. Two quick edits in a row, or a plugin's settings saved in the background, made the two copies disagree and sent a fresh copy of the whole song, which could undo a knob you had just turned. Both are fixed, and a knob you turned in your own copy survives your copy being refreshed.
• Someone without one of the song's plugins still gets every edit, and is told by name which plugins are not installed.
• Leaving a session now sends your last edit and your goodbye even when the connection is busy.
• When two people have different versions of Fontelle, the message now says who has the older one and needs to update.

Audio output

• Choose the audio system (Automatic, PulseAudio, JACK or ALSA on Linux), the device and the buffer size in Settings, applied while the song plays.
• The default buffer is now 512 frames instead of 128, which stops the crackle some systems had. Pick a smaller one for lower latency.
• A device that won't open falls back to the default and says why, and a dropout counter shows when the sound card couldn't keep up.

Plugins

• A knob turned in a VST 3 plugin's own window could fail to reach its sound, because many plugins ask Fontelle to reread their values straight after a change. It now always arrives, and values a plugin's engine reports back reach its window too.
• To help diagnose a plugin that still misbehaves, start Fontelle with FONTELLE_PARAM_TRACE=1 set, and the log records every knob move and what the plugin heard.
• Space plays and stops from a plugin's window too, when that window has the keyboard and the plugin doesn't use the key itself.

Also

• Adding an instrument selects and opens the one you made, not the last one in the list, and an instrument someone else adds never moves your selection.
• The browser's lists (Import, Sounds, Presets, Projects) have a scroll bar you can drag.
• A selection box dragged past the edge keeps its starting corner on the music as the view scrolls, so it selects everything back to where it began, and keeps scrolling while you hold still at the edge.
• Drawing in the piano roll over an audio take says once that the take holds no notes, instead of refusing every note.

Plugin windows open on macOS, plugin files travel with the song, and more LV2 controls show up.

• Plugin windows on macOS. A plugin's own editor (CLAP or VST 3) now opens in a window of its own with Fontelle's preset bar across the top, as on Linux and Windows, so preset browsers, wavetable editors and anything else built into a plugin are within reach on a Mac.
• Plugin files travel with the song. When a sampler plugin (LSP, sfizz, drumkv1 and other LV2 plugins) has loaded a file from inside the song's folder, the song remembers it relative to the folder, so a song moved to another computer or sent to a friend opens with its samples. Collecting a song's files (as when sharing) copies the plugin's files in too. If a file a plugin needs is missing when the song opens, the status line names it.
• More LV2 knobs. Some LV2 plugins keep their controls in a newer form that Fontelle didn't show; Ultramaster KR-106 kept all 56 of its controls that way and showed none. They are now ordinary knobs: automatable, saved with the song, and they keep their identity when the plugin is reopened. Undoing and then choosing a preset on these plugins also no longer brings the old patch back.
• Tested against real instruments everywhere. Surge XT, Dexed and OB-Xf are now installed and played on Linux, Windows and macOS whenever the plugin code changes, so the checks that found the last releases' problems run on all three systems.

A crash no longer costs your work, and a plugin that crashes or goes wrong is named and held back.

Crash recovery

• A song you have not saved yet is now backed up every minute, like a saved one.
• If Fontelle closes unexpectedly, the start menu offers Recover unsaved work in … next time. It opens the song as it was, unsaved, and Save puts it where it belongs.

Plugins that crash or misbehave

• A crash report now names the plugin that was running.
• The next time you open that song, the crashing plugin is held back once: it stays in the song but isn't started, and the status line says which one and why. Open the song again to give it another try.
• If a plugin starts playing invalid audio, its channel is silenced as before, and now the status line names the plugin and Fontelle reopens it from the song's copy of its settings. If it keeps doing it, it stays silenced and you are told.

Presets stay put

• A preset chosen straight after an undo could be lost with OB-Xf and other plugins that apply a patch a moment later. Fontelle now waits for them.
• LV2 plugins take a new preset or an undo without being reopened, so their window stays open and the sound doesn't drop out.

Timing and renders

• LV2 effects that delay their sound (lookahead limiters, linear-phase EQs) are now lined up with the rest of the mix, as CLAP and VST 3 ones already were.
• CLAP plugins are told when a song is being rendered, so those with a higher-quality offline mode use it.
• Plugin editors on a scaled Linux desktop (150%, 200%) are told the scale.

Windows plugins through yabridge

• Windows plugins on Linux through yabridge were tested for the first time and fixed: saving some of them could stop Fontelle. A bridged plugin that doesn't start now says to check Wine and yabridge.

macOS

• Opening a plugin's window says plainly that plugin windows are not available on macOS yet, and that its parameters are in Fontelle's own panel.

A fix release for plugin instruments: they keep their sound, they are in your exports, and a broken plugin can no longer stop the studio from starting.

Instruments keep their sound

• A plugin instrument no longer slips back to its init patch in a saved project. A preset picked in the plugin's own window, a knob turned there, or a patch chosen while the song plays now stays through undo, adding tracks, saving and reopening.
• Reopened projects play the patch that was saved, at the level it was saved, in CLAP and VST 3 alike.
• Choosing the plugin a channel already has, or duplicating a channel, strip or effect, keeps what it is playing.
• If a plugin refuses a saved patch, the status line says so instead of losing it quietly.
• Built-in instruments and soundfont channels remember which preset they are on, so a reopened song still shows it.
• Choosing a preset for a plugin while the song plays no longer gets refused.

Rendering with plugins

• Export and Render row to audio now include plugin instruments, playing the patch you hear. Before, their channels were silent in the file.
• A row renders even while another channel is soloed, and a selection exported from a song with tempo changes is cut in the right place.
• A plugin that goes wrong and outputs invalid audio is silenced on its own channel instead of silencing the whole export.
• LV2 plugins that load in the background (organs, samplers) are given time to finish before an export plays them, and are told the song's tempo and position.

Finding plugins

• Each plugin is checked in a separate process, so a broken plugin anywhere on your computer is listed as "would not load" and the studio starts anyway. The result is remembered, so later starts are quicker.
• Plugins installed in unusual places are found: LV2 bundles without the .lv2 name, folders of CLAP plugins, and Fedora's lib64 folders.
• Several plugins that could crash the studio on load, on close or at exit no longer do.
• Surge XT's VST 3 lists its presets on the preset bar.

The mixer is quicker to work in, and clips are coloured again.

Mixer

• Right-click a track to Duplicate it (the copy keeps its level, effects and sends and lands beside it), Move left or Move right, or Delete it.
• Drag a strip by its name or body to where it should stand.
• Faders are slim rails and the level meters are wider, so clicking a strip selects it instead of moving its level. Touching a fader or pan knob selects its track too.
• Track colours are quieter, in the default theme's own style. Songs made with the old colours open in the new ones.

Clips and the piano roll

• Clips wear their instrument's colour, so a song whose blocks were all one blue is coloured again.
• The piano roll's onion skin (ghost notes) shows every pass of a looped clip, and its button opens a list to pick which instrument to show, by name.
• Dragging several clips at once is one undo and no longer stalls.
• Ctrl+L (legato) now carries the last note to the end of the clip, or of the loop.

Themes move: animated backgrounds drawn on the graphics card, twelve new built-in looks, and a one-press update for an out-of-date extension.

Moving themes

• A theme's sections can now hold layers of pictures, gradients, solid colours and shaders: moving pictures drawn by your graphics card behind the panels, which can follow the song's beat and how loud the master is.
• Twelve new built-in looks: Still Water, Sunroom, Control Room, Lo-fi Rain, Neon Grid, Phosphor, Bubblegum, Nebula, Aurora, Stage, High Contrast and High Contrast Light. The original five (Dark, Light, Midnight, Ember and Paper) are improved, with easier-to-read text on Dark and Light.
• A theme can carry its own fonts and is still a single .fontelletheme file. Older theme files open as before.
• Pictures can be shown at their natural size, scaled and moved, from the theme file or the settings page, so a picture behind the piano roll no longer has to stretch.
• The arrangement's time bar is see-through.
• Theme writers can find the shader guide in the repository's docs.

Motion settings (Settings > Appearance)

• Effects: Moving, Still or Off, plus how often the background redraws and at what resolution.
• Keep backdrops moving when not focused (on by default), and Hold backdrops still while playing (off by default).
• Backgrounds stop when the window is minimised or covered. If your desktop asks for reduced motion, Fontelle starts with Effects set to Still.

Extensions

• If an installed extension is too old for this version of Fontelle (the VST 2 extension needs 0.2.0 or newer for sliding notes), the start menu says so, and its row in Settings reads Out of date with an Update button that installs the new one in one press.

The guide

• Every clip in the guide was re-recorded to show the current look, and the browser page now says LV2 plugins are supported on Linux only.

Notes that slide where you draw them.

Sliding notes

• While drawing a note, press S to fix a point, and the note follows the pointer from there: along a row it holds, up or down it slides. Do it as many times as you like. Backspace takes the last point back.
• It stays one note, drawn as one continuous line, so a whole melody can come from a single key, and each note of a chord can slide somewhere of its own.
• Afterwards every point is a handle: drag one to move it, grab a note's end and press S to carry on, double-click a note to add a point, and double-click a point to remove it.
• Moving, transposing and cutting a note keep its slide. Fitting notes to a scale fits every point.
• The arrangement shows a slide as a staircase in the clip.

Playing slides

• Built-in instruments, CLAP and VST 3 plugins slide each note on its own.
• LV2 and VST 2 synths can do it through MPE: turn on Slides as MPE in the channel's menu in the rack (off by default, since a synth not set up for MPE would hear the bends wrongly).
• MIDI export writes slides as MPE, and importing an MPE file reads them back as sliding notes.

Keys in the piano roll

• S is now for slides only in the piano roll. G steps through the snap grid, and O shows ghost notes. On the arrangement, S is still Stretch.
• The old FL-style slide button is gone from the toolbar. Old slide notes still play.

The guide

• Two new pages, Sliding notes and Shaping a slide, each with a clip showing it done.

Themes that reach every part of the studio, wires you can pick up in the mixer, and a guide that shows each action being done.

Themes

• Themes are now .fontelletheme files, with a library you can import into and save from. Choose one under Settings > Appearance.
• Five built-in looks: Dark, Light, Midnight (with square corners), Ember and Paper. Changing a built-in saves your own copy, so the original is never lost.
• A theme can put a picture behind the whole window, the transport bar, the channel rack, the browser, the arrangement, the piano roll and the mixer, each covering, fitting, stretching or tiling where the theme places it.
• Panels can be see-through. Set how much with Panel see-through in Settings > Appearance.
• Corner rounding and picture strength are settings too.
• Ember is the showcase: a fire behind see-through panels.

The mixer

• Pick a wire up and drop it on another track to reroute it. Sends keep their level when moved.
• Each send has its own jack, with its knob on it.
• Each wire has an arrow showing which way the sound goes, and the wires give a little shake when you open the mixer.
• Ctrl+wheel makes the strips wider or narrower. The patch bay is always there, and you can drag its top edge to make it taller.

The guide

• The guide and the tour now play short clips of each action being done, beside the words that describe it.

Other changes

• Velocity min/max now scale your playing into that range instead of dropping notes outside it. With max at 50%, your hardest press plays at 50%.
• R starts recording (with the last mode you chose), or stops it.
• The start menu has a gear to open Settings, and its notice line is no longer red.
• Mute and solo icons are smoother.
• The guide now says correctly that dragging a note with the pencil moves it. The tour's song has coloured tracks, its reverb send works, and taking the tour again no longer leaves old exports behind.

Learning Fontelle and routing it your way: a guide, a guided tour, lane-style routing, patch cables in the mixer and a new settings page.

Learning Fontelle

• The guide, behind ? and F1: a page for every part of the studio, plus "Coming from…" pages for people used to Reaper, Logic, Ableton and FL Studio. The keyboard shortcuts are its last section.
• The tour walks a small demo song (drums, bass, chords and a pad, with a drum bus and a reverb send) one step at a time, pointing at each part of the window. Jump between sections from its step list. It sets up your routing mode and VST 2 support as it goes.
• The start menu offers the tour once on first launch (Take the tour or No thanks), and always has a Learn Fontelle button after that.

Routing

• Lane-style routing: a song can now be rack-style (as before) or lane-style, where every lane has its own mixer track and plays through it. An instrument belongs to the first lane its clip lands on; a clip of it on another lane asks whether to put it back, move the instrument there, or duplicate it.
• The first new song asks which style you want, and it becomes your default. Change it per song, or for new songs, in Settings under Project.
• Patch cables in the mixer: a bay along the bottom of the mixer with a cable from every track to where it goes, and one per send with a knob you drag to set how much is sent. A track whose output is off has a loose cable hanging from it. The cables swing and settle when you add or change a route.
• Track colours: every new mixer track gets a colour, and a strip's right-click menu recolours it. A channel's route button shows its track's colour, and the route menus show every destination's colour. Older songs open with their tracks coloured.
• See what is linked: while the mixer is showing, the selected track's channels and clips are outlined in its colour, hovering a route button or an audio clip outlines the track it goes to, and every strip says what feeds it under its name.

Lanes

• Click a lane header to select it. New recordings and imports with no place of their own land on the selected lane, or on a new lane right under it.
• Lane solo: solo a lane to hear only soloed lanes in the song.
• Mute and solo are icons on lanes, mixer strips and the rack.

Settings

• Settings is now a full page: sections down the left, and each setting with a line saying what it does and a control that looks like what it is (a button, a drop-down, a slider or a switch).

Fixes

• Crash reports on Linux now name the file the crash happened in, so a plugin crash can be told apart from a Fontelle one.
• Fixes for plugins that load presets and states in the background: their new settings are no longer overwritten by the old ones, and plugins that ask to be called back are now answered.
• On Windows, reading the settings while they are being saved no longer fails.

A scale tool for the piano roll, plugins' own presets in Fontelle, and a long list of fixes from the first people to use it, many of them on Fedora.

Piano roll: scales

• A root and a scale on the piano roll's toolbar. The scale menu lists 86 scales in ten families, searchable by any of their names.
• Choosing a scale sets the song's key and fits every note in the open clip to it, as one undo. Rows outside the key are dimmed and the root's rows are marked.
• Drawn, painted and dragged notes land on the key. The arrow keys step notes to the next note in the scale, and Alt frees the pitch.
• The key is saved with the song and shared with collaborators.

Plugins

• A plugin's own presets are listed beside Fontelle's: CLAP presets, VST 3 preset files, LV2 presets and FXP patches. Loading one is one undo, and the song keeps it.
• A plugin's own window has Fontelle's preset bar across its top: step through presets, star, save, save as, and click the name to browse that plugin's presets.
• A patch shaped in a plugin's own window is now saved. Before, it could come back at its defaults when the song was reopened. Changing it also marks the song as unsaved.
• Notes no longer get stuck on some plugins across a loop or a stop.
• A preset loaded onto a plugin that is already open loads all of it, and an effect plugin's preset goes to its effect slot.
• When two builds of one plugin are installed (say a CLAP and an LV2), the picker says which is which.
• Plugins installed by Fedora, openSUSE and RHEL packages are now found.

Recording

• A recording is kept however you end it, including with the record button. Before, only Stop kept it.
• A take goes into the open clip only if you played over it. Otherwise it gets a clip of its own, where you played it, on a free row.
• A key held across a loop no longer comes out as a tiny sliver of a note, and takes follow tempo changes.

Getting in and sharing

• Enter on the start menu reopens your last project, and the start menu says which one. Before, it was easy to land in a blank song and think your work was lost.
• New Project, Share and Join ask for a projects folder first if you don't have one.
• Sharing and joining say plainly when the relay can't be reached, and what to check.
• A name prompt that already has a name in it still says what it is asking for, and the name is selected so typing replaces it.

Linux desktops

• On GNOME without zenity, Fontelle uses the desktop's own file dialog. When no dialog is available, it says which package to install.
• File pickers open in your home folder.
• Ctrl+V in a text field pastes from the system clipboard, and copy and cut write to it.
• If the studio can't start (for example, no audio device), it now says why in a message box, not only in a terminal.

Other fixes

• Audio devices that won't take Fontelle's preferred buffer size now work with their own instead of failing to start.
• A second update installed without restarting now goes to the right place.
• Text in Fontelle now uses the same font on every machine, so Flopsynth's window lays out the same everywhere.

Clip edges are easier to grab, and with snap off you can place them exactly.

• Edges reach past the clip. Pressing just past a clip's right edge (or an audio clip's left edge) takes hold of that edge, so even a tiny clip can be sized without zooming in. The resize cursor stays for the whole drag. Right-clicking beside a clip still never erases it.
• Zoom in much further. The arrangement now zooms in until each tick is a visible step, so a drag with snap off can be placed precisely, as in FL Studio.
• A finer grid and ruler. As you zoom in, the grid shows beats, subdivisions and then single ticks, and the ruler numbers beats and then bar.beat.tick.
• Edges meet with snap off. An edge dragged close to another clip's edge lands exactly on it, with a guide line to show it. Hold Alt to place it freely.

Work on a song together, over the internet, with no account and no port forwarding.

Sharing a song

• Press the Share button at the right end of the transport bar and read out the code it shows (there's a Copy button). Your friend chooses Join a shared song… on the start menu and types it in.
• Everybody's edits appear on everybody's screen. Each person's undo is their own. If two people change the same thing at once, the host's copy wins and you are told which edit was taken back.
• Samples and recordings travel with the song. A soundfont you don't have is only fetched after you say yes, with its size and how long it will take. A clip whose file is still arriving shows how far along it is.
• A plugin you don't have keeps its place and settings in the song, and is marked on the mixer.
• The host can make someone view only, or remove them.
• Set the name others see, and the relay to use, in Settings under Sharing.
• Sharing goes through Fopull's relay. Each person plays the song on their own transport.

Joining is safe

• A song you don't have is copied into a Shared folder in your projects folder.
• A song you already have asks whether to update yours (with a backup first), keep both, or cancel, and says which copy changed since you last shared it. Joining never deletes anything.
• You are asked to save unsaved work before joining. Everyone needs the same version of Fontelle, and it says so if not.

Fixed

• Undoing a track preset no longer removes the plugin effects, sidechains and Notepad words that the preset had replaced.
• Choosing a channel, or pressing a key on the piano roll, after previewing a file in the Import tab gives the keyboard back to that channel.
• Drawing a note before any clip exists now tells you to draw a clip on the arrangement first, instead of failing silently.
• A plugin's own editor now shows the first time you open it, instead of a grid of knobs.
• An empty instrument window says what it is waiting for, and the open soundfont no longer lights rows on other tabs.

Fontelle on Windows, properly: plugin editors open, settings are saved, dialogs come up in front, and there is a log you can send when something goes wrong.

Windows

• Plugin editors open on Windows. VST 3, CLAP and VST 2 plugins show their own windows, at your screen's scale, instead of a grid of plain knobs.
• Settings and presets are saved on Windows. Fontelle had nowhere to keep them there, so settings, presets, the soundfont folder and crash reports were all lost. They now live in your AppData folder.
• Folder, open and save dialogs are Windows' own, and they come up in front of the studio. Before, the studio froze for a few seconds and the dialog could open behind it.

Logs and crash reports

• Every session now keeps a log, and the start menu has a Logs folder link so you can find it and send it.
• If the last run crashed, the start menu says so and points to the report.
• A crash inside a plugin now writes a report too, and on Windows it names the file the crash happened in, so you can tell whether it was the plugin or Fontelle.
• A settings button that can't do what you asked now says why, right on the settings page.

Flopsynth

• Click an LFO's picture to start drawing your own shape.
• A knob on a part of the sound you can't hear yet (an oscillator with its level off, or a filter switched off) says so in its tooltip.

Cuts, clip edges, count-ins and automation now do what they look like they do.

Audio clips

• Cutting a looping audio clip keeps the sound where it was. Before, the right-hand part started the recording over from the cut.
• Dragging a cut clip's edge back out no longer plays audio the picture says was cut away, and fades stay where the edge is.
• Audio clips have a left edge you can drag, to trim the start or bring it back, as far as the beginning of the recording.
• Projects saved by earlier versions are fixed up when they open.

Recording

• The count-in is always the same length, and the playhead waits on the marker while it counts.
• Recordings start exactly on the marker. Before, the marker could move back a bar during the count-in, and every later take was a bar off.
• The click plays during the count-in even when the metronome is off, and the count-in no longer turns the metronome on.

Automation

• Automated values are right wherever you start playback. Before, starting partway through a flat part of a curve could play the knob's own value instead (for example 100 where the curve said 0).

Menus

• Right-clicking a mixer fader, a pan knob, an effect's wet/dry in the rack or the EQ now opens that control's menu instead of making an automation clip straight away.

Fontelle no longer freezes while it exports, and it now tells you when your work is unsaved.

• Exports and renders run in the background. Exporting a song or rendering a row to audio no longer freezes the window. A card shows the progress, and a message says when it is done.
• An unsaved project shows a * after its name, in the title bar and the panel header.
• "Saved!" appears at the top of the window when you save, and fades away.
• Fontelle asks before you lose work. Closing the window, opening another project or starting a new one with unsaved changes asks first: Don't Save, Cancel or Save. Saving a project that has no name yet asks for one, then carries on.

DisgustingBeat

A new insert effect: a few seconds of memory with curves drawn over it. Add it from any mixer strip's Add effect menu.

It keeps the last twelve seconds of everything that passes through it. A time curve says, for each point in the bar, how far back in that memory to read; a volume curve says how loud to play it. Everything else falls out of those two lines — a stutter, a freeze, a tape stop, a scratch, a rewind, a trance gate and a groove template are one machine at different settings, and every factory preset is two or three drawn points.

The one idea the window teaches is that the slope of the line is the speed of the sound. A segment falling at one lane-length per lane holds the sound still, half that plays it an octave down, steeper plays it backwards. The grid draws that freeze slope as a guide at every beat, so you can trace it.

• Draw with five tools — points, freehand, straight lines, a hold that lays down the freeze in one drag, and a step tool for gates. Snap from 1/4 down to 1/32, or to triplets, or not at all.
• Bend any segment by its grip, and pick its shape — linear, exponential, logarithmic, S-curve, stepped or hold — from the point's right-click menu. Two points at one place is an instant: silence to full between two samples.
• Twelve scenes per insert, switched by automation or played from an octave of a keyboard, so a whole kit is one instrument.
• Per-lane lengths. A three-beat volume lane under a four-beat time lane is a twelve-beat pattern out of two simple curves. One half-time/double-time knob runs the whole thing against the song.
• Two more lanes, tone and pan, off until you want them.
• Look ahead by a beat or a bar, with the latency compensated, so a curve can read forward of the playhead — which is what lets a groove template push a hit early rather than only drag it late.
• The memory is drawn across the top, with the read head on it and a trail of where that head has been. A freeze burns one column, a stutter saws, a reverse climbs back into the past. You can see what a curve is doing.
• Seventy presets in ten categories: Stutter, Hold, Scratch, Tape, Reverse, Gate, Groove, Fill, Creative, and six twelve-scene kits.

Also in this release

The song's position now reaches the audio thread. Every tempo-synced effect in Fontelle used to be handed only the tempo — how long a beat lasts, not which beat it is — so nothing could start in phase with the bar. Effects now get the song's exact position, carried as a fraction of a tick rather than rounded to one, which matters anywhere a continuous quantity is derived from it.

Files

Four archives and a SHA256SUMS beside them. Verify with:

sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS --ignore-missing

On Linux the archive includes install.sh, a .desktop entry and an icon.

A big one: Flopsynth II, a rebuilt synthesizer with a new window, far deeper modulation and many new sounds, and the Notepad, a mixer effect for writing lyrics. (0.10.0 was never published; everything it held is here.)

Notepad

• A new mixer effect that makes no sound: a simple text editor with pages, for writing down lyrics or notes while you record. Add it from any mixer strip's Add effect menu.
• Move between pages with the arrows, or pick one from the page list, where each page is named by its first line.
• Seven terminal-style themes and three text sizes. The theme you chose last is remembered.
• Typing is undone in sensible chunks. While the pad has the keyboard, Esc gives it back (so Space types a space rather than playing the song).

Flopsynth II: the window

• A new layout on a clean grid, with three knob sizes, a window size you can scale from 75% to 150%, and every page fitting the window it opens at. The window keeps its dark look under the light theme too.
• The top of the window shows the sound: a scope, a spectrum with the filters drawn over it, and a light per voice.
• Knobs: Ctrl for fine moves, Alt to reset, double-click to type a value, and a right-click menu with Modulate from… and Assign to macro…. The menu opens beside the knob, never over it.
• Every modulation source has a badge on a strip along the bottom. Click one to edit it, drag it onto a knob to route it. Each route draws a ring on its knob in the source's colour, with a dot showing where the source is right now.
• The Matrix page lists every route in a table you can sort and edit.
• The Effects page is a rack of up to eight slots, each with an on/off, wet/dry and a level meter, a picture of what the effect is doing, and drag-to-reorder.

Flopsynth II: the sound

• Eight LFOs, six envelopes and eight macros. Draw your own LFO shapes, loop envelopes, and modulate one LFO with another.
• New modulation sources: chaos, random walk, an envelope follower and two step sequencers. Modulation is smoother and faster than before, so quick envelopes and fast LFOs are heard cleanly.
• Velocity curves, velocity crossfades between layers, and glide modes and curves (including portamento on a polyphonic patch).
• Modulate any effect setting inside the synth.
• Oversampling per patch or per oscillator (2x or 4x) for cleaner high notes, sync, FM and driven filters. Off by default.
• A spectral oscillator that analyses a recording and lets you stretch, shift or freeze it.
• Six new wavetable warps, new unison modes and spreads, seven noise colours (including crackle, vinyl and a recording), and a sub oscillator with its own shape, octave and direct output.
• Six new filter models (a 303-style diode ladder, an MS-20-style filter, phaser, vowel, ring and dual), and filter FM from an oscillator.
• Seven new effects inside the synth: phaser, flanger, wavefolder, frequency shifter, a unison effect, a three-band multiband and a stereo width.
• A wavetable editor: draw a frame, set harmonics as bars, type a formula, add and morph frames, and export the table as a WAV other synths can read.
• Load SFZ multi-samples by dropping them onto an oscillator.
• MPE: per-note pressure, bend and slide from an MPE controller.
• Voice stealing modes now steal the voice they say they do.

Flopsynth II: finding sounds

• Every factory preset has tags and a one-line description. Search by tags too, so "bass unison" finds basses with a unison stack.
• Each preset lists the five presets that sound most like it.
• Click a preset to hear it, double-click or Enter to load it. The arrow keys walk the list, playing each as you go.
• A/B two versions of a sound, Init, Randomise and Mutate (gentle variations that keep it the same instrument), all undoable.
• Export and import your own presets as a pack file.
• Twenty-one new presets that show off the new filters, warps, effects, noise and the spectral oscillator. The bank is now 409 presets.
• A new project names its starting preset (Grand Piano) instead of showing "no preset".

Fixes

• Fontelle could close suddenly while playing, because the system stopped the audio thread after a heavy moment. It now slows the thread down instead and picks up again a few seconds later.
• Closing Fontelle on Wayland no longer crashes.
• A MIDI keyboard that seemed dead was being filtered by the MIDI channel or velocity settings. Fontelle now says so when a note is filtered out, and a selected settings row no longer keeps hold of the arrow keys everywhere else.
• After previewing a sound, the keyboard plays the selected channel again.
• An effect window now shows the right effect's name and preset when you switch between effects.
• Every preset drop-down has a Random row.
• The Presets page's shelf list scrolls when it has more shelves than fit.

Audio clips look right and fades feel like FL Studio's, plus smoother scrolling, a better export and a fix for a stuttering drag.

Audio clips

• The waveform now matches what you hear. On long recordings it used to show sound starting before it really did. It is drawn in two tones, the peaks lighter and the loudness solid inside, so a voice reads as syllables.
• Fades like FL Studio's: fade handles appear on the clip under the pointer, the cursor shows what you are grabbing, nothing jumps when you start a drag, and a label shows the fade's length as you drag. Double-click a handle to remove the fade, or a curve's middle point to straighten it.
• Cutting a clip keeps the fade-in on the left part and the fade-out on the right, each squeezed to fit, instead of copying both fades onto both parts.

Editing and moving around

• Ctrl+B splits the selected clips at the blue marker (where play returns to). Duplicate is Ctrl+D.
• Scrolling glides smoothly instead of jumping, and moves by a share of what is on screen, so it no longer races when you are zoomed far in.

Export

• Export now counts audio clips when working out how long the song is. Before, a song made of audio clips could export only a few seconds long.
• Ctrl+E asks first: the whole song or only the time selection, and whether to keep the tail (reverb and echoes ringing out) or cut at the end.

Fixed

• Dragging clips with snap turned off no longer stutters.

Sounds land where you put them, and dragging files in from your file manager works on Wayland.

Dragging and dropping

• Dragging files in from your file manager (such as Dolphin) now works on Wayland desktops like KDE Plasma. Before, the drop never arrived.
• A file dragged from the desktop behaves like one dragged from the browser: the lane, channel or oscillator under the pointer lights up, and the label beside the pointer says what letting go will do. Dropped somewhere else, the file still opens.
• While you drag a sound over the arrangement, the mark shows the exact clip it will become, at the bar under the pointer and as long as the sound, instead of lighting the whole lane.
• Drop onto any lane to land there. Drop below the last lane to make a new one. Several files dropped together land on lanes one under another.

Nothing piles up at the bottom any more

• Recordings, double-clicked imports, MIDI file parts and drops that didn't name a lane used to go on a new lane at the very bottom. They now land on a new lane in the middle of what you can see.

The browser

• The studio opens on the Import tab, showing Audio, and your audio folder is read when Fontelle starts instead of the first time you open the tab.
• The browser tabs and kind filters have icons, with the words beside them when the sidebar is wide enough. Labels that were cut off now fit.

Flopsynth gets more ways to play a recording, two built-in drum kits, 48 new presets, and a pass over the existing presets so they sound as they should.

New ways to play a recording

• A sample oscillator can now play a recording once, in a loop, bouncing back and forth between the loop points with no seam, in reverse, or as grains: a cloud of small pieces that keeps playing where you point it, so a note can hold forever or scan through the sound. Grain and spray knobs set the size and spread. Frozen grains keep the recording's pitch instead of turning into a buzz.
• A zone lock plays one sound from a multi-sample on every key, at the pitch you play, so a single drum hit becomes an instrument.
• Two drum kits are built in beside the piano: every General MIDI hit from the drum machine's Studio and 808 kits, one per key and named in the piano roll.

48 new presets, on four new shelves

• Sampled Keys: the grand piano turned into eleven other keyboards.
• Grains & Clouds.
• Kits & Hits: seven kits and six single hits, including an 808 sub you play by key.
• Growls & Screams: growls and basses where a recording does the modulating, so the sound tears the way the piano decays.

Existing presets fixed

• Twenty-two presets had most of their body filtered out and sounded like mostly air: all four flutes (including the Pan Pipe), Melodica, Sitar, Slap, Ice Field and the whole choir family. They have their fundamental back.
• Oboe and Dusty Rhodes no longer change sharply in tone above middle C.
• Harp, Pizzicato, Pizz Section, Celesta and Electric Grand are rebuilt on the sampled grand piano.

The Grand Piano is now a real recorded piano, Flopsynth can play recordings and model strings, and its window has a new look.

A grand piano that sounds like one

• Flopsynth's Grand Piano plays recordings of a Yamaha C5 (the Salamander Grand Piano, used under CC BY 3.0), with soft and hard recordings blended by how hard you play.
• Around the recordings is the rest of the instrument: low notes on the left and high notes on the right as from the bench, the hammer on a hard strike, the damper when you let go, and the strings ringing on underneath. Only a small, dark room is added, not a big hall.
• The old string-modelled piano stays in the bank as Modelled Piano.

Two new kinds of oscillator in Flopsynth

• String: a modelled stiff string, with knobs for stiffness, damping, strike and ring.
• Sample: any recording, played across the keyboard. Drop in a folder of files and it becomes a multi-sample, each file on its own key. The recording is saved inside your song.
• Put a sound on an oscillator by dropping a file from your desktop, dragging a row from the Import tab, or from the oscillator's right-click menu, which also offers the built-in piano recordings.
• A row dragged out of the studio and let go over the Flopsynth window now stays on the pointer until you click where it goes (Esc lets go), instead of getting stuck in the main window.

The window

• Flopsynth's window is now a ship's bridge, with a sky that moves with the sound you are playing: stars, planets, shooting stars on hits, and the waveform as an aurora. It opens larger than before.

Fixes to the new custom shortcuts.

• Every button that also has a shortcut now shows your own shortcut in its tooltip, including the editor tabs, the mixer's mute and solo, the rack tabs, the browser's search box and Export.
• Shortcuts with Shift and a number or symbol now work the same on every keyboard layout.
• The arrow keys keep their usual jobs and can no longer be taken by a custom shortcut by mistake.
• On the shortcuts page, the row under the pointer lights up, tooltips from the controls behind the page no longer show through, and the page works while an effect window is in front (so F1 opens it from there too).

Every keyboard shortcut can now be changed.

• On the shortcuts page (F1 or ?), click a shortcut, press the keys you want instead, and it is changed. Fontelle waits until you let go, so you can press the modifier keys in any order.
• If the keys you choose are already used by something else, the page tells you and moves them over. Reset to defaults puts everything back.
• Tooltips and the Tools menu show your own shortcuts, not the defaults.
• Your shortcuts are saved with your settings and kept between sessions.
• The defaults follow FL Studio's.

A second round of polish, with a page that lists every keyboard shortcut and a level meter that works.

• Keyboard shortcuts page: every shortcut in Fontelle on one sheet. Open it with F1, or the ? on the start menu or the transport bar.
• Type the tempo: click the tempo box to type a new one and press Enter. Dragging still slides it.
• Time signature list: the signature box opens a list of every signature instead of stepping through them on each click.
• F switches the rack between Instruments and Prefabs.
• Tab swaps which of the arrangement and the editor below it takes up more of the window.
• The level meter on the transport bar now works. It used to go silent after the first channel or effect was added, and it could hang at an old level long after the song went quiet. It now follows the master track and falls when the sound stops.

A polish release that stops ordinary looking around from changing your work by accident.

• The mouse wheel only scrolls. It used to change whatever value was under the pointer in Settings, the tempo and time signature, and every effect window, so scrolling to look around could nudge a knob or a fade. Values now change by dragging, the arrow keys or menus, never the wheel.
• Settings rows are real controls. Numbers are sliders you drag, choices open a drop-down, and the update check is a switch. The arrow keys nudge the selected row for fine changes.
• Undo, or a question first. Removing a plugin folder can be undone from the message that appears. Uninstalling an extension asks before it goes.
• The clip info panel reads like FL Studio: the waveform on top, a grid of labelled knobs for the settings, sliders for the fades and drop-downs for the choices.

The plugin update: VST 3 plugins run in Fontelle, VST 2 is available as a free extension, and you can now save your songs as MIDI files.

Plugins

• VST 3 instruments and effects are supported alongside CLAP and LV2, with their own editor windows, sidechains and their settings saved in the project.
• VST 2 plugins load through the free, optional VST 2 extension. Install or remove it from the Extensions section in Options.
• Plugin folders are listed one per row, and you can remove any of them. The standard VST 3 folders are searched by default.
• Use FL Studio's folders adds the plugin folders FL Studio already knows about, on Windows or from a Wine install on Linux.

Making music

• MIDI export: save the song as a .mid file from the piano roll's Tools menu or with Ctrl+Shift+E. It exports the whole song with its loops written out.
• Limiter is a new built-in effect, with a sidechain and a set of presets. The Ducking preset on a bass, keyed from the kick, pushes the bass down under each hit.

Smaller things

• Flopsynth's preset search box only takes your typing after you click into it, so the studio's shortcuts (like Space to play) keep working while the presets page is open.
• Clicking a file in the Import tab plays a preview instead of importing it. Double-click imports it, and the stop button stops the preview.
• A file dragged from the Import tab onto the arrangement lands on the row under the pointer, snapped to the grid, instead of always on a new row at the bottom.
• When an update downloads, the start menu shows a progress bar and how much has arrived.

A small update with better-sounding organs and a few fixes.

• Most of Flopsynth's organ presets sounded noisy and thin: the key click played the whole time a key was held, and the low end was being filtered away. The organs have their full body back, with a short click only where a real organ would have one, and several presets were re-voiced to sound more like what they are named after.
• The piano roll's cut tool now marks each note where it will actually be cut, as the arrangement's already did.
• Opening a clip that holds one instrument selects that instrument in the rack.
• On Windows, long file paths in the browser's status line are now shortened like any other path instead of running off the end.

The first public release of Fontelle: a free, open-source studio built around SoundFonts, where everything a soundfont sets is only a starting point you can change.

Getting started

• A start menu opens first: your recent projects, New project (which asks for a name), Open a project…, and whether a newer Fontelle is out.
• Fontelle checks for updates when it starts and can install one for you. The download is checked against the release's checksums before anything is replaced. The check can be turned off in Settings.
• On Linux, install.sh puts Fontelle in your home folder with a menu entry and an icon, with no root needed; ./install.sh --uninstall removes it.

Writing music

• An arrangement with lanes and clips for notes, audio and automation, with looping, stretch and cut, fades, a blade tool and prefabs.
• A piano roll with draw, paint, select and delete tools, snap down to 1/32 and triplets, a lane for note properties, ghost notes, an arpeggiator, legato joining, slides and pitch bends.
• Full undo, autosave and backups. Projects reopen with their audio.

Sound

• The SoundFont sampler, with every setting yours to change and automate.
• Flopsynth, the built-in synthesizer, with a bank of over 300 presets.
• A drum machine whose kits are modelled struck drums, not samples.
• Sampler channels from your own audio, live MIDI input (plug devices in while it runs), MIDI recording, and import of MIDI files and FL Studio scores.
• Audio import, recording with monitoring, an audio clip editor, and rendering to WAV.

Mixing

• A mixer with sends, routing and a master bus with a limiter.
• Effect chains on every track, with wet/dry and delay compensation, and track presets.
• Twelve built-in effects: Utility, EQ, Filter, Compressor (with sidechain), Gate, Distortion, Bitcrush, Soften, Chorus, Delay, Reverb and Tune, an autotune. Every one comes with a bank of presets named for the job they do.

Plugins

• CLAP and LV2 instruments and effects, with their own editor windows and their settings saved in the project.

Linux is the main platform. The Windows and macOS builds come from the same code but are less tested, and plugin editor windows and LV2 are Linux-only for now. On Linux, Fontelle needs ALSA, D-Bus and lilv from your distribution (on Debian and Ubuntu, sudo apt install liblilv-0-0); the installer tells you if anything is missing.