hey y'all! been a minute. i've been hard at work on both SFLT and my upcoming rhythm RPG CHORDIOID, and while not everything i've worked on is ready quite yet, i figured it was about time to release all the bugfixes and little improvements i've made into a new beta.

SFLT beta v0.4 patch notes

features/improvements

added a filter bypass option, letting you disable the built-in lowpass filter entirely for the crispest possible sound
added threaded soundfont loading, which prevents the audio or UI threads from locking up when loading large soundfonts
added channel auto-renaming, which automatically updates the plugin's channel name to match either the current SoundFont file or patch name (configurable in the settings)

fixes

atonal instruments (like drumkits) now properly respond to pitch bends and the pitch wheel, matching Fruity SF Player's behaviour
fixed library location not being saved properly after using the native folder picker
fixed an issue where having multiple SFLT windows open could cause input to be piped to the wrong window
lots of other small stuff i forgot about

apart from all this, i've also been working on a much bigger change to SFLT. check it out:

sflt-rs is a complete rewrite of SFLT in the Rust programming language.

when i started working on SFLT, i reluctantly decided to use C++, in large part due to the SDKs i needed for the plugin lacking mature/robust Rust bindings. the longer i've worked on this C++ version of SFLT, the more i've struggled to keep the codebase in decent shape, and catch issues related to multithreading and low-level APIs.

in the end, i decided to bite the bullet and switch to Rust, using the opportunity to both migrate to a DPI-independent UI solution (in the form of egui), as well as make the core soundfont synthesis code far more DAW-independent. i've made a lot of progress, and while feature parity is still a ways off, i expect the next major release of SFLT to be the Rust version.

this also opens up the possibility of porting SFLT to formats like VST3 and CLAP - although that's another headache entirely, so don't expect too much news on that in the short term.

all in all, i'm very excited about this rewrite. it's been a bit of a nightmare getting all these poorly-documented libraries working with a language as opinionated as Rust, but i feel much more confident about the prospect of getting this new version of the plugin in a polished state, compared to the "legacy" C++ codebase.

the Rust rewrite of SFLT will be fully backwards-compatible with existing project files made using SFLT, and i intend for it to be two-way compatible with this v0.4 release (so you'll easily be able to downgrade if the rewrite ends up giving you problems)

that's all for now! thanks for using SFLT <3

0 comments

SFLT beta v0.3 released

See all posts from ash taylor?!