Welcome to another devlog. We've just released a new beta version of Floe, version 0.9.1-beta: try it out today. There's 5 free sample libraries to try, and all of FrozenPlain's existing Mirage libraries work seamlessly too (please install the Mirage Compatibility package for this).
Lots of people are already finding that Floe is working well for making real music. It's still a beta though, and there might be unexpected behaviour. Floe's autosave feature might be useful if a crash occurs.
Version 0.9.0 contains a handful of bug fixes and tweaks, notably fixing a crash in the AU version when trying to open the file/folder picker. Additionally, our automatic error reporting is improved, and there's a load of new additions for developing sample libraries. See the full changelog here.
Find the right sound quickly
One of Floe's key goals is giving you the option to find the right sound quickly and intuitively. We want to put production-ready sounds at your fingertips, with the added option to tweak the sounds if needed. A big part of achieving this goal is Floe's preset browser and preset tagging.
Factory presets
Each sample library is encouraged to include a bank of factory presets — with each preset extensively tagged using the standard pool of tags. We will be doing this for all FrozenPlain libraries. They will be updated to the Floe sample library format, and all the presets will be tagged.
The result is a large palette of playable instruments selectable by mood, tone, timbre, type and more — all accessible from the same interface and open for blending sounds from different libraries.
On the topic of tags, we want to know your thoughts: should selecting multiple tags, such as 'acoustic' and 'smooth' show the all presets that are either acoustic or smooth, or, should it should presets that are both acoustic and smooth? Let us know your thoughts below.
Other news:
Improvements over Mirage
As a reminder for those that have used Mirage before, here's a list of key improvements that Floe has:
- CLAP and VST3 support added.
- Combine sounds from different libraries at the same time.
- GUI resizable to any size.
- Install libraries/presets easily with a few clicks.
- New pickers for selecting instruments, presets and IRs.
- Free and open philosophy: open-source, designed for longevity, libraries are open folders of FLAC/WAV files.
- Bug fixes.
Technical details
- We've upgraded to Zig 0.14.0, fixing an issue where our custom undefined behaviour sanitizer was not working on Windows. We should hopefully now get some better information about the last few bugs.
- Submitted patches to the CLAP-wrapper project: 374, 388. With additional ongoing work on VST3 support on Linux (not planned for v1 though).
- Added a simple free-list allocator allowing for reusing memory when running a Lua script whilst retaining our ability to limit the script's memory usage: 9ec9d11.
Wrapping up
Our focus is balanced threefold: fix Floe bugs, develop a new sample library for it, and update our existing products — with Floe fixes being the top priority. We're also posting a bit more often on our social media. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter/X and YouTube. See you in the next one.
