we know we've been promising you the next wondrous version of bach since more than one year, and keeping you waiting so long has not been fair.
Now we have something for you: bach v0.6.99 alpha, an almost complete prerelease of bach 0.7 beta. We chose to share it with you for a variety of reasons, including the fact that we don't have a proper community of testers and we need people to send us bug reports
The bad things first:
- it is Mac only (the Windows version will come soon)
- some documentation is missing, including help files and tutorials for a couple of new, quite complex objects: bach.shelf (for managing the lifecycle of lllls) and bach.backtrack (for solving constraint satisfaction problems)
- some features might still change, which means that what you do with v0.6.99 might not work under 0.7
- bugs are more than likely, especially with new features.
The good things are basically the fact that this v0.6.99 contains in principle all the features of v0.7, including:
- greatly improved representation of musical rhythm in bach.score, allowing nested tuplets, grace notes and fine control over beaming
- greatly improved import/export of MusicXML files to/from bach.score
- import/export of MIDI files from bach.score and to/from bach.roll
- embarassingly faster behavior of all the system, especially for operations involving a lot of exchange of lllls
- easier installation process - no frameworks and one only extension simply called bach: among the other things, this should solve a lot of version mismatch problems people have encountered, and greatly ease the inclusion of bach in collective and standalones
- many many bug fixes.
As always, for a complete list of the new features please refer to the _History.txt file.
Because of the provisional nature of this release, we chose not to make it available from the download page of our website: the official current version is still v0.6.7. If you wish to receive an installer for v0.6.99, please contact us privately and we'll send it to you. We ask you, though, not to redistribute it - if you meet someone who wish to receive it, please put them in contact with us.
Thank you for your patience, and have fun!
andrea