History

Version 2.8 - ‘Karlsruhe’

Friday 20th November, 2015

This release, named after Karlsruhe, one of the home cities of live coding, is mainly a maintenance release with a strong focus on both performance, stability and documentation. This is therefore the fastest and most stable release of Sonic Pi ever with a massive 10% performance improvement on the original Raspberry Pi 1. It also ships with new translations in Polish, Japanese and French. Many of these improvements (such as the complete rewrite of the OSC stack) are not documented in this release list but can instead be found in the commit logs over on Github.

However, not to go unnoticed are a number of exciting new features. For example we now have a new Band EQ FX, the ability to use MIDI note names such as :e5 as values for opts such as cutoff:, and new powerful cutoff envelopes on the sampler.

Breaking Changes

New Fns

GUI

Documentation

Synths & FX

Improvements

Bug Fixes

Version 2.7 - ‘Rerezzed’

Thursday 10th September, 2015

This release brings a substantial change to the random number generator. This has the unfortunate side effect of breaking backwards compatibility. If you have been using rand, choose, shuffle and friends to create predictable patterns for your riffs, your code will produce different results in this release. Please let me apologise and say it’s for a good cause. So what is this good cause? Well, you can now jump backwards and forwards through the random stream giving you way more creative control than before! The random stream is now also unified with the random stream on the synthesis server allowing you to sync behaviour between synths and code. Exciting times.

The sampler has also been super charged. We can now easily change the rate via MIDI note intervals with rpitch: and stretch the sample whilst preserving pitch via pitch_stretch: (although with variable results ;-)).

Finally you can now control the global mixer with set_mixer_control! for those full filter sweeps over the entire sound…

Have fun and happy live coding!

Breaking Changes

New Fns

GUI

Synths & FX

Examples

Improvements

Bug Fixes

Version 2.6 - ‘Algorave’

Thursday 30th July, 2015 (view commits)

The laser beams sliced through the wafts of smoke as the subwoofer pumped bass deep into the bodies of the crowd. The atmosphere was ripe with a heady mix of synths and dancing. However something wasn’t quite right in this nightclub. Projected in bright colours above the DJ booth was futuristic text, moving, dancing, flashing. This wasn’t fancy visuals, it was merely a projection of Sonic Pi running on a Raspberry Pi. The occupant of the DJ booth wasn’t spinning disks or playing MP3s, she was writing, editing and evaluating code. She was live coding and this was an Algorave.

This release is codenamed Algorave to celebrate that Sonic Pi is now ready to be performed within nightclubs as well as still being a fantastic tool for learning how to code creatively. There are many improvements as detailed below. However, let’s just take a brief look at some of the most fun. Firstly we have the new error reporting system to make it easier to find and debug your errors. Syntax errors are now blue and runtime errors pink. We also have a new look and feel including a new dark mode for performing in dark places. We also have some fantastic new synths, FX and have even improved the standard synths. For example, sample now lets you stretch to match the beat with the beat_stretch: opt and change pitch with pitch:. The slicer FX now sports a fantastic deterministic probability: opt for creating and manipulating rhythmic structures with ease. Finally there’s the new thread local tick/look system which will revolutionise the way you work with rings within live_loops. Of course there’s so much more too!

Enjoy this release and happy Algoraving!

Breaking Changes

New Fns

GUI

Synths & FX

Improvements

Bug Fixes

Version 2.5 - ‘Craft’

Monday 13th April, 2015 (view commits)

This release comes with support for Minecraft: Pi Edition installed on the Raspberry Pi. You can now create music with Minecraft visuals or even code up a synth score in Minecraft blocks and read and play the score from Sonic Pi! Another exciting aspect of this release is much improved editor functionality for navigating around and manipulating code via keyboard shortcuts. This means that live coding just got a lot more fun. The keyboard shortcuts are based on the standard shortcuts provided by GNU Emacs - the oldest and most powerful text editor in use by wizard programmers today.

Breaking Changes

New

GUI

Synths & FX

Bug Fixes

Version 2.4 - ‘Defrost’

Wednesday 11th February, 2015 (view commits)

A quick release following v2.3 to address an issue with the GUI freezing on specific CPUs. However, although this release has had a small development cycle, it ships with three fantastic features. Firstly we now have the spread fn which provides an amazing way to create interesting rhythms with very little code. Secondly we can now use cutoff: on any sample massively increasing their timbral range and finally we have three exciting new synths for you to play with. Have fun!

Breaking Changes

New

Synths & FX

Bug Fixes

Version 2.3 - ‘Bitcrush’

Wednesday 28th January, 2015 (view commits)

Breaking Changes

New

Improvements

Synths & FX

New Samples

Bug Fixes

Version 2.2 - ‘Slicer’

Thursday 18th December, 2014 (view commits)

This release brings a number of nice enhancements. However the main feature is the accurate timing for triggering FX. This means you can now reliably use FX for accurate rhythmic purposes such as wobbling, slicing and echoes.

Breaking Changes

API Changes

Synths & FX

GUI

New Samples

Bug fixes

Version 2.1.1

Tuesday 25th November, 2014 (view commits)

Version 2.1 - ‘Core’

Friday 21st November, 2014 (view commits)

The focus of release is very much on technical improvements, efficiency and general polish.

The most obvious and exciting change is the introduction of the live_loop which will change the way you work with Sonic Pi. For more information on live_loop take a look at the new section in the tutorial. Another very exciting development is that v2.1 marks the official support for Windows thanks to the excellent work by Jeremy Weatherford. Finally, this release is also the first release where Sonic Pi has a Core Team of developers. Please give a warm welcome to Xavier Riley, Jeremy Weatherford and Joseph Wilk.

API Changes

GUI Modifications

Bugs/Improvements

Synths, Samples & FX

Version 2.0.1

Tuesday 9th September, 2014 (view commits)

Version 2.0 - ‘Phoenix’

Tuesday 2nd September, 2014 (view commits)