Thanks for the update Kenneth.
What has changed in this build is very nice, and memory usage has indeed dropped by about half. However this release did bring along a lot of deal-breaking bugs too in which I have found very easily.
I actually didn't end up transferring my SynthFont licence information into this secondary laptop yet and the trial expired when I had the chance to test version R. I have found another situation where the "Error" occurs again; when I have the "Trial expired" message and I go to input licence information, I close the window to "cancel" and just as it closes, I see the "Error - Send error report" window pop up for half a second then closes along with synthfont itself. You need to implement a way to prevent that error window from closing on it's own so the user has a chance to intervene and send hit "Send error report" and the report makes it to you. I have since activated my licence on this laptop so I can use and test version R out.
Anyway, here's my list of bugs that I have just discovered while testing 2012R, all of which appear to be new to "R" except for the first two:
- 2011 - Attempting to hit close while song is preparing data for playback will cause program to hang (Since 2.0.1.1)
- 2012Q - MIDI Input mode does not recieve any notes (Since 2.0.1.2Q)
- 2012R - Songs take twice as long to "prepare data for playback"
- 2012R - When using the Z-Doc Grand Piano soundfont, playing to file with "Max peak" selected causes the file to not be saved properly: instead as a loud/distorted file with .raw on it
- 2012R - Switching between large soundfonts during speaker playback causes wait cursor to remain until playback is stopped
- 2012R - Switching between voice limit settings during speaker playback can cause program to hang, especially with long decaying soundfonts
- 2012R - Certain stereo soundfonts do not render properly (Eg. SGM_V2.01, ZDoc Grand Piano.sf2)
- 2012R - Memory leak, each time a song is stopped and re-played, memory usage keeps going up. For example with that 32 million note MIDI I've tested before and now can play in full, there is an additional 200MB of memory usage every time the song is stopped and played
To be honest, I doubt I will see myself upgrading to windows 10 over Windows 7 any time soon. I don't see any appeal in Windows 8, but I don't see any appeal in 10 either. One of the main reasons being, it looks like Microsoft is not planning on fixing the MIDI lag problem very time soon.
Basically in Windows 8, MIDI performance got much worse performance than what XP and 7 has, especially when playing back Black MIDI files, just google "Black MIDI Windows 7 vs 8" and you will see what I mean. I haven't had the time to test whether SynthFont was affected by this or not but I sorta doubt it because I don't think SynthFont relys on the Windows MIDI Mapper system or whatever causes this issue. As far as your development PC goes, I don't know its specs but assuming you only have 4GB on it now, why don't you just consider just upgrading it to 6GB instead of going higher? That should still make a difference and not cost too much.
Lastly, I have noticed you have fixed the Player Piano mode's update rate limit. While in many ways it's nice to see this fixed, I sort of liked the old behavior too, so perhaps you could add a flag/option to use the old player piano limiting, but this is
low priority (I could always use the older version whenever I want to take advantage of it). Basically, the update rate emulated how it would look/sound if I were to play the MIDI on my old keyboard without exceeding polyphony, which I found useful along with another bug ** which I didn't bother to report yet.
**: When using MIDI Output mode combined with the older Player Piano, and things that cause thread takeover such as piano roll and continuously scrolling "MIDI Events" during playback, the MIDI output also delays the sending of MIDI Data. I didn't report this earlier because I found the impact to be very trivial and I in fact found it as an enhancement rather than an inconvenience in this following special/odd situation: In combination of old player piano's "limiting bug" and this bug, I found that this has allowed me to output MIDIs to my keyboard/piano without exceeding polyphony and causing the piano to glitch.