Yoshimi Milestone

For quite some time now development of Yoshimi has been stalled due to a particularly elusive bug, that only appeared on 32 bit builds, and then not on all processors. To make matters worse, Cal, the developer did not have a machine that showed this fault, so had to keep trying things then asking the 'regulars' to test it again. As if that was not enough, the machines that showed the bug would run executables that had been compiled on a 'good' machine without problems.

It took a very experienced programmer from outside the Yoshimi group to find the bug - nicknamed the Heffalump Bug. I think Lars must have been bitten by this himself at some time. He zeroed in on it damn fast!

What happens is that when being compiled, each CPU architecture has a slightly different mathematics core, and this was where the problem was. Cal had included machine build instructions to use the fastest code. In just a few cases this resulted in rounding errors (numbers were rounded up instead of down) that made some notes sound out of key. The cure was simplicity itself (once you knew what to look for) just add an instruction to always round down!

We now have version 0.60.8 out of the door as a highly stable product with a host of detail corrections and improvements, along with the new 'unison' feature in AddSynth, improved left-right panning, more MIDI control and jack session support.

After a bit of a breather work will be continuing on the experimental 0.062 version which (amongst other things) has MIDI controlled glitch-free patch loading while actually playing!