[v1.5.1 out] Gig Performer v1.5.0 released

Things are getting really exciting here at Deskew Technologies. We've just released Gig Performer 1.5 and it has two really super new features that really add even more value to the product.

 

 

Audio plugin hosts normally operate in one of two modes (and most only have one mode!). You can either preload your entire show or you can load just one set of plugins (a rackspace in Gig Performer terminology) at a time, perhaps everything you need for a particular song.

 

The benefit of the former is that you can switch from one set of plugins to another without any delay or glitches. Gig Performer has of course supported this approach from the beginning. The disadvantage is the potential to run out of memory if you have too many plugins that use huge amounts of RAM.

 

The advantage of the latter approach is that you can in principle have as many sets of plugins as you want because only one set gets loaded at a time. Unfortunately, you give up the ability to switch instantly from one set of plugins and it's never clear how long you might have to wait.

 

With predictive loading, we can gain the benefits of both approaches and with very little downside. We make the assumption that you have a setlist for your show, that is, you know the order in which you're going to need rackspaces to be available. When predictive loading is enabled, Gig Performer will automatically preload upcoming rackspaces and free up rackspaces that are no longer needed. This all happens in the background while you are playing the "current" rackspace without any audio interruption or glitches. As soon as you move to the "next" rackspace, the one beyond that (you can control how many beyond, by the way) will start being loaded.

 

So you get the benefit of reduced RAM and CPU cycles along with glitchless switching and of course Patch Persist technology will also work. Although you can still jump to an arbitrary rackspace, you might have to wait for plugins to be loaded. We feel this is a great tradeoff for anyone who is following a setlist in a show.

 

 

The other big new feature in Gig Performer 1.5 is the ability to control multiple parameters from a single widget (knob, slider, button, etc). Our approach to this feature is different than what we've seen in other products. In particular, we don't try to overload a single widget with multiple parameters. Instead, we maintain the 1-1 mapping between a widget and a parameter but we allow you to put multiple widgets into a group so that they are essentially ganged together. That means that when you turn one knob, all the other knobs in the same group will turn as well, with each knob controlling its own parameter. Of course, since widgets support scaling, you can control precisely how much influence a widget has on its associated parameter and so it becomes easy to implement such things as crossfades and panning of multiple sounds in different directions.

 

Keep reading for the official release notes.

 

See our online documentation for more on these updates

Gig Performer works on Mac OS X and Windows. 
Thanks!
— Gig Performer Development Team