Hi there everyone, another major release is here - v1.4.0-RC1 aka “It’s coming right for us!”.
This is a new feature release, with focus on Control Chain.
There’s also some small but nice additions to improve the overall user experience.
As usual, please note that this is a release candidate.
That means it might be stable, but needs more testing first to make sure.
Since this release requires users to receive their devices for proper testing (can’t test control chain without actual Control Chain devices…), this release will have a longer testing period than usual, consisting of 3 weeks.
If no issues are found in 3 weeks we’ll release it as stable, otherwise we’ll do a Release Candidate 2.
So, what’s new?
-
Control Chain
Control Chain is MOD’s custom way of doing external devices.
It is an open standard (including hardware, communication protocol, cables and connectors).
You can do with Control Chain what the MOD Duo’s hardware actuators are doing right now. For example, show the absolute parameter value on a display or use different LED colors to indicate a specific state.
You can read more about Control Chain here. -
Usability changes
Some small but very useful usability changes were made, following user requests.
These include:
- allow to change parameter ranges without having to re-learn a MIDI CC
- allow to use pitchbend for midi learn
- allow to delete the initial/first pedalboard preset
- web interface tweaks (read more about this on the full changelog below)
-
JACK NetworkManager (EXPERIMENTAL)
Following another request by our users, we added an official way to use JACK’s NetManager feature within the MOD Duo.
This is still quite advanced and not something most users will understand but for those that do, you now can: - run
touch /data/enable-netmanagerinside the Duo (reboot required) - run on your PC: (adjust as needed but keep the ‘mod-slave’ name)
jackd -R -P 80 -d net -a 192.168.51.1 -O -C 2 -P 2 -i 1 -o 1 -n mod-slave -s
And voila! Audio and MIDI coming out and going into the Duo, via JACK’s NetManager service.
The web interface will show the additional ports created by the remote jackd instance.
There’s also quite a few more changes and tweaks.
You can read the full changelog below.
Because this release is still under testing, it won’t appear as an update in the web interface just yet.
You’ll have to manually download and apply the update file if you wish to try it out.
(Release testers, also known as ‘group 1’, will receive this update as usual)
Here’s the manual download link:
http://download.moddevices.com/releases/testing/modduo-v1.4.0.370-RC1.tar
The upgrade procedure is explained at the top of our releases page, here:
http://wiki.moddevices.com/wiki/Releases
Here’s the main changelog:
- Control Chain support
- add GNU coreutils and libSDL
- jack-netmanager service (experimental, needs to be manually enabled)
- allow to change parameter ranges without having to re-learn a MIDI CC
- allow to delete the initial pedalboard preset
- allow to use pitchbend for midi learn
- don’t send current and expiration time on webserver requests and force cache-control attribute
(allowing for proper browser caching) - improve timing/jitter of serial MIDI
- send all-notes-off message to midi-out plugin ports when first bypassed
- update jack2 codebase and build with opus custom-modes support
(updated code includes neon-optimized sample conversion functions, leading to less base cpu usage)
And web interface changes:
- add “MOD:” prefix to MOD Duo’s actuators, to differentiate from Control Chain ones
- add (i) icon on top of modguis, shows plugin information when clicked
- add “see online” button to plugin’s information dialog
- add close button to all dialogs, for consistency
- always close addressing and pedalboard presets dialog on esc, independent of focus
- don’t allow to address plugin preset list with only 1 preset
- don’t show ajax loading bar when waiting/checking screenshots
- rework RAM calculation code, now using the same values that ‘htop’ uses
- stop recording countdown when share dialog is closed
- small text changes and other minor miscellaneous tweaks
We hope you’re enjoying your MOD Duo.
Please let us know of any issues!