(mirroring the shitty news post I made on the Musewave website)

At long last, Musewave 1.3 has finally landed.

It was my intention to do this years ago, as you can probably judge by the past news posts, but various things got in the way as well as my own dwindling interest in the project. Thus this release isn't really worthy of the fanfare it would've been worthy of years ago. In fact just about all of the code in this release has been sitting in my private git repository for about a year or two now. It'd be a waste to let it go completely unused, or only be present in random shoddy debug builds I hand to people in private, so here it is.

I'd say there were two roadblocks preventing this release from happening. One artificial, one actual.

The artificial one was mostly my own requirement for automatic updating and component retrieval. It was originally my plan for the download to just be the Musewave.exe, and then download native libraries as required. For example; if you were never planning on exporting songs as .mp3 files and never selected that option in the export window, the library required to do so wouldn't even be present in your Musewave program folder. Unfortunately, I did not have the time or interest required to adjust the codebase in order to implement this properly.

Which leads me onto the second roadblock, the actual one; the code. Musewave started as a program simply called Midi Player. A personal experiment and tool useful to myself for quickly checking out MIDI songs with various different soundfonts. This is still its primary function and it still performs this function well in my opinion. However because this project started out as an "experiment", the code is very, shall we say, "experimental". It's a pain in the ass to work with. There's a lot of bad practices, assumptions and hacks going on that are so deeply rooted in the way the program throws itself around that adding anything requires me to dance around these obstacles. You may wonder how such a small program would have such things going on but it mostly comes down to me either not caring about or not understanding the finer points of threading within Windows Forms/Win32 UI programming.

What I can say for sure is that this is the last entry in the Musewave 1.x series that will include new features. If I ever do regain interest in this project, expect a from-the-ground-up 2.0 release.

If you discover any issues in Musewave 1.3, please do not hesitate to let me know so I can attempt to fix them. You can either post in the forum topic on flashii.net linked in the header, or contact me through the e-mail address listed on flash.moe.

Thank you for using and supporting Musewave!