Sonic Pi v4.2.0 Release Notes

  • 14th September 2022 <!-- (view commits): -->

    ๐Ÿš€ The main purpose of this release is to address a booting issue discovered on a school Windows cluster with common security restrictions. This issue was reported by Adam Cooper from Moor Park High School & Sixth Form in the UK. Adam was wonderfully helpful in finding the specific issue and testing potential solutions. Thanks Adam!

    ๐Ÿš€ If you happen to have had any trouble running v4 of Sonic Pi on your school clusters, please give this release a go! (Note, this issue didn't affect v3 of Sonic Pi).

    ๐ŸŒ In addition, there have been some translation improvements, Global Time Warp now has a greater range and a couple of time_warp related bugs were found and dealt with. Have fun!

    GUI

    • ๐Ÿ”„ Change Global Time Warp range from +-250 to -250 -> 999. This lets users access the full phase down to a BPM of 48.

    ๐Ÿ‘Œ Improvements

    • ๐Ÿ Booting process on Windows has been modified to enable it to run when executing in an environment which restricts access to CMD (which prevents terminal usage and running .bat files). This is typical in schools.
    • Sonic Pi stores all its history, configuration and logs in a folder called .sonic-pi which is typically placed in the user's home directory. If the user happens to not have permission to write to their home directory, Sonic Pi now raises a descriptive error on boot and explains that the fix is to set an environment variable called SONIC_PI_HOME to point to a directory the user does have permission to write to.

    ๐ŸŒ Translations

    • ๐Ÿ‘Œ Improvements to the Dutch, Hungarian and Indonesian translations.

    ๐Ÿ›  Bugfixes

    • Teach timing safety system that time_warp doesn't sleep (even if it contains calls to sleep internally). This now means that wrapping all code within a live_loop with time_warp no longer causes the thread to spin out of control. It instead reports that the live loop did not sleep as expected.
    • ๐Ÿ”€ Throw error when attempting to call sync within a time_warp. This is because time warps are effectively timeless and sync asks the running thread to wait for an unknown period (until a matching event appears). Attempting to wait within a timeless context is clearly nonsensical!