Friture 0.25

Friture 0.25 includes changes in the user interface, performance improvements and bug fixes.

• The user interface now always displays the audio levels on the left. This widget is very useful, if only because it allows to check that the levels are neither too small that they fall in the noise, and neither too large that saturation occurs. That's why it makes sense to always have it on screen. However, it has an aspect ratio that is very different from the other widgets: it is mostly a narrow vertical widget, as opposed to the close-to-golden-ratio rectangles of the other widgets. Consequently the widget has been moved to a permanent location on the left of the window, where it can take the whole window height without losing too much screen estate.

• The widgets are no longer resizeable and they can no longer be dragged-and-dropped. Although this sounds like a loss of functionality, I observed that most of the time the desirable result is to evenly distribute the widgets on the screen. I found myself repeatedly fighting with the widget handles to get that result. So instead of the repositionable docks, Friture now contains a simple tiling mechanism that will do its best to split the screen evenly among the widgets. The dock titlebar is no longer needed, which saves some screen real estate.

• The OpenGL code has been modernized to use shaders instead of the fixed pipeline. This has no visible impact, but should hopefully be nicer with your GPU!

• Some warnings have been fixed, mostly related to issues with integer division.

• If no input device is available, Friture will now show a nice warning message instead of crashing.

• Frequency labels in the octave spectrum were wrong when using only one band per octave. This has been fixed.