In the news:

Work has continued in improving underlying code and frameworks used by Xhip. Skinning and configuration systems have seen many new additions. The alpha versions and upcoming Xhip Effects releases will include these new features.

The ability to replace the dynamic GUI elements with bitmap graphics has been improved. This includes bitmap scaling and selection features aimed at optimizing data size and performance.

Since the GUIs can be scaled to any ratio, the best method to avoid blurring during up-scaling is to prefer down-scaling bitmaps from higher resolution sources. This requires high quality interpolation (e.g. lanczos) at higher ratios to avoid aliasing. Such filters are also used for oversampling during bitmap rendering.

The LED and knob renderers have been improved significantly and now provide much higher quality output. Work is ongoing to ensure quality is always ideal. At higher target resolutions this has the issue of significant cost/time. Deferred processing and multi-threading are potential solutions. Most users will see some cost when opening a plug-in GUI only for the very first time.

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CHOMP!
XFX Clipper r1207.

Xhip development continues... although I have not posted any news updates for a long time. Most of the work has focused on improvements to the underlying frameworks.

Some notable new features will include: (some yet to be completed)

Reduced modulation rate support

Saving effects in presets

Significant GUI improvements (faster redraw)

Crossfeed effect (mono bass filter)

Linear interpolation mode for PCM (fully anti-aliased)

Improvements/fixes for RIFF WAVE loading

Numerous other small improvements

This version of the synthesizer builds on previous alpha versions and includes native Windows dialogs once again.

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Xhip ALPHA r1112.

Previous versions of the plug-in were not released as alpha due to the lack of native dialog support. In addition, native dialogs are now isolated in their own independent threads and no longer interrupt normal program flow in the GUI thread. This is a significant improvement compared to previous versions where this was a problem.

This version of the synthesizer for Linux is placed on the main synthesizer page. I haven't made the alpha available due to the dialog system not yet working fully on Windows.

The primary feature of this version is that it generates an "init state" populated with the factory bank on first run. This will give new users a bank of presets to play with immediately.

It also includes new preset library functionality. This version includes the two "factory" preset banks embedded in the plug-in and these are now written out and available to be loaded from the "load - library" entry in the menu.

The path of the library folder depends upon your OS. On Windows you can usually find it in /ProgramData/xhip/synth/library/ while on Linux currently it is ~/.xhip/synth/library/.

In order to use the preset library you can simply save or copy a Xhip bank file there and load it from the menu. Since banks are listed by bank name rather than file name it is important to carefully name your bank using the bank name editbox.

More work remains to be completed in fine-tuning of existing features. This r1100 is very close to becoming a release candidate once those fine-tuning steps are completed. You can read more about that on the alpha page if desired.

I've made some progress toward implementing a custom file browser dialog in Xhip which will allow this feature to work on Linux.

In Windows and MacOS I hope to handle this functionality with the native OS dialog launched in a thread to avoid locking up the host GUI processing while the dialog is in use.

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Xhip ALPHA r1073.

This implementation requires significant changes to the very simple dialog handling currently in place. This has led to a significant delay in getting the work done.

Work has been done to improve the way widgets and text labels are handled. The GUI currently is capable of drawing 100% of the text and backgrounds directly without use of background bitmaps. The knobs and switches have been replaced with self-drawn default widgets matching the GUI in Xhip Effects.

The same system of configuration will apply to Xhip Synthesizer as it does in Xhip Effects and this will allow users to customize elements of the GUI including colors, knobs, switches, fonts and many other elements.