Today further progress has been made with smooth movement of the playhead, so that it is now possible to have it working with a fixed and hard coded latency compensation. Take a look at the following video, where the app is playing on a bluetooth speaker. Compare the playhead in the grid (left) and the playhead on the pattern (right) to the timing of the audio:
This seems like a big improvement over the current version.
As part of implementing latency compensation I thought I’d do something about the erratic movement of the playhead in Sputter. Since the app considers a generated chunk of audio currently playing, there can be more than one sixteenth measures generated in one go. This makes for uneven speed of the playhead, especially on devices with large audio buffers.
Today I have begun rectifying this. In a coming version the playhead will be moving smoothly along at 60 FPS, in contrast to jumping directly from one sixteenth measure to the next.
About a week ago I was horrified to find a one star review on Google Play:
At first I thought it was something wrong with the app, but then it struck me: The user is probably using bluetooth headphones, and there has not been made any effort in the app to compensate for the latency introduced by these.
So, I tried it out on a bluetooth speaker, and sure enough, the latency is not only noticeable but quite annoying:
After a lot of back and forth, Sputter version 1.1.0 is finally released. Compared to the last stable version (1.0.2), this release brings:
Possibility to select multiple notes while adjusting note properties Note velocity and retrigger mode are now visualized on notes Improved contrast on note names in the grid Fixed note velocities not being set when loading songs Fixed faulty graphics after adjusting “Display size” on some devices Some crash and bug fixes In addition, the note velocities are now shown in numbers on the notes themselfes:
Finally I am pleased to announce that Sputter version 1.1.0-beta1 is released to all open beta testers on Google Play. It features the changes to the note properties functionality mentioned several times before. Additionally the color of the note names in the grid are now more visible, something which has been requested from several users.
The reason this is not in production is that there are a few minor additions I would like to make.
The seemingly everlasting work on new note properties functionality has finally made its way into a release. Note velocities and retrigger status is now visible on the notes themselves, which makes it much easier to work with and what they actually do clearer.
This release is only available to alpha testers. Wanna become one? Pop me an email to support@casualcomputing.info and include the gmail address you use on Google Play.
On all modern devices has a device pixel ratio property. It describes how many physical screen pixels corresponds to one logical pixel in the development platform. For example, the first iPhone had a pixel ratio of 1, which corresponds to a 160dpi screen. The iPhone 4 had a pixel ratio of 2 with a screen of 320dpi. This makes it easier for developers to handle different screen resolution with regards to the physical sizes of UI elements.
Finally I had the opportunity to work with the improved note properties functionality previously described. This is what I have achieved so far:
There now is a visual representation of wether or not a note is retriggered, which will hopefully make them easier to use as well as more obvious what they do. Also, the color of the notes will be lighter on notes with lower velocity. These changes will make it unnecessary to open the note properties to inspect the velocity and retrigger status of a note.
So I am proud to present the new subreddit for Sputter! You can visit it here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SputterApp/
Hopefully people will come over there and share ideas, issues, questions or songs with each other. I will certainly keep an eye on it and will also be posting news items from this blog.
Today I have expanded the bug reporting dialog to include links to this blog as well as the new subreddit, which is included in the new release 1.
After four weeks of vacation, I am finally back to my day job and of course working one day a week on Sputter. This year was spent within the borders of Norway (given the current circumstances) and it consisted for the most part of visiting relatives and enjoying the great nature of our country.
During this time I have also thought more about the note properties upgrade, previously mentioned. There is now a complete sketch which will be implemented in the foreseeable future.