Release 99 is Now in the Store

Something Went Wrong with Release 98

Chronotron version 98 was a bit of a sloppy release, to say the least. It turned out that a nasty Microsoft compiler bug caused Chronotron to crash on some systems, rendering the app unusable for some of you.

Crash telemetry data from the Windows Store. The peak occurs at the date when Release 98 was published.

That’s really bad. Compilers bugs are one of the worst things that can happen to an app. They are hard to catch because we developers are programmed (pun intended) to assume that application errors are always our own fault, which most of the time is true.

After figuring out what the problem was, I reverted back to a previous version of Microsoft Visual Studio and submitted a new app build to the Store, which was promptly approved.

I’d like to thank those who were impacted – and those who reported the issue – for their patience.

The good news is that the next planned release – Release 99 – was already feature-complete, so in addition to the urgent bugfix, in the new build there’s also new functionality!

What’s New in Release 99

After my previous blog post on the demise of the Chronotron plug-in, a few of you reported that a key feature of the plug-in had not made it to the app, which is the ability to operate the Tempo and Key sliders simultaneously to perform pure resampling. This is akin to changing speed in a turntable and can be very useful in some scenarios.

Release 99 brings back this feature by the means of a new Speed slider, which can be found in the Tempo and Key pane.

Other improvements in this release are:

• A couple of switches to control the app layout have been moved to the Options pane under the Appearance section, where they naturally belong. The documentation has been updated accordingly.
• Polyphonic note detection now works better, especially with the bass guitar.
• The layout of the Tempo and Key pane has been revamped.

The change log can be found here.

What Was New in Release 98

For those of you who could not fully enjoy Release 98, you will be glad to know that its most welcome feature is the addition of Bass Guitar to the Instrument pane.

As with every release, in Release 98 there were also some layout improvements, bugfixes and a major bug introduced by the compiler, but the latter is now a thing of the past.