Miditzer 216 alpha release is near!

[Jim Henry]

There are a small number of issues remaining to be fixed before we are ready to release an alpha version of Miditzer 1.0. Our goal is to release this before Christmas.

As an alpha version there will be things that are known to need a fix before a final release. But we don't think there will be any "show stoppers" in this first release.

The big step forward from the user perspective will be that the Miditzer will now use the most current version of FluidSynth and the Windows WASAPI connection to the audio hardware. This should reduce latency, the lag from pressing a key to hearing a sound. The Miditzer window will be resizable. In the alpha release, the window will probably be freely resizable, which means it is easy to distort the console image. We probably will improve that to always maintain an undistorted console image as the window is resized. There are a lot of changes "under the hood" to bring the Miditzer code up to current standards. The Miditzer will now be a 64 bit application, which should improve its performance on newer computers.

I hope that a lot of you will download the alpha release and put it through its paces. The more testing the alpha version gets, the faster we can get to a beta release and a production release.

[ChuckH]

Wonderful news Jim. Wha a Christmas present! I have been waiting for this for a long time. I love the sound of Miditzer but I simply couldn't get used to the latency issue so I reluctantly stopped using Miditzer. I come from an electronic organ background and have had very few opportunities to play a real TPO so I have a strong expectation to hear the sound immediately I press a key. I am sure that many more organ players will start using Miditzer when they learn that latency is a thing of the past.
thanks and best wishes,

Charles
(Melbourne, Australia)

[Jim Henry]

Just to manage expectations, latency will be reduced but not eliminated. I really don't know how big the difference will be because I haven't had a chance to play the new version from a MIDI keyboard. You are never going to have the kind of response you have on an electric organ when you are using a computer to compute the audio waveform and send that data to hardware for conversion to an electrical signal. I am actually impressed that using a software synthesizer is playable at all.

[Jim Henry]

Here's a report from our graphic wizard, Graham Wykes, who is running an early release on a Mac running Linux using WINE:

• Hardly noticeable latency running on an X86_64 mac mini from 2014.