JUCE 8?

General JUCE discussion
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I just saw this: https://gearspace.com/board/new-product-alert/1422096-introducing-juce-8-a.html

But no mention on the site, neither on the git repo. Looks like webview is the main thing.
Is there an updated changelog yet somewhere?

Thanks,
Luca

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fwiw, the direct2d branch has its readme updated to state JUCE 8 technical preview. Iā€™m certainly extremely curious about the rest though.

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Seems everybody else knows itā€¦

Why are we still here? :wink:

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I guess it was announced at NAMM, thatā€™s why thereā€™s no notice here yet.
Anyway, what worries me that the main features announced with JUCE 8 are not audio related.
I feel that JUCE is shifting away from being an audio framework, towards becoming something else.

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What audio-related features would you like to see, out of interest?

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Maybe itā€™s less about shifting away from audio, and instead giving attention to some large pieces of work relating to UI.

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I actually feel the opposite - if JUCE was purely an audio framework, weā€™d already have the easy ability to make plugins with other UI systems, like webviews.

Iā€™m also not sure JUCE ever was just an audio framework - Iā€™d take a guess that the largest appeal to most people is actually that it handles all of the non-audio related things - wrapping the plugin for various formats, handling the message loop, parameter systems, etc.

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The features of JUCE 8 were discussed before, and there are opposing views. That will always be the case.

What sadens me is that there is nobody in the JUCE team interested to update their very own community. Just copy the same press release as a minimum here would have felt a little less abandoned.

But it just echoes the silence that is felt here for a while already.

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Complaining will not make the team change

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But sometimes it feels good :slight_smile:

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Not complaining guarantees the team wonā€™t change, and least there is a chance if people do complain, especially pro license holders.

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Yeah enterprises bought the webviews basically, we will all be standardised to frontend developers

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I wonder if the most required FR is coming :slight_smile:

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  • sample accurate parameter updates, for example.
  • or like an overhaul of certain dsp classes, maybe a dedicated dsp2 namespace where everything is rewritten and improved with added features, just like they rewrote lookAndFeel in the past until it got really good.
  • a much better performing FFT class to prevent everyone from having to figure out which 3rd party library works best

true, tho

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A couple of things would really help us plugin devs:

  1. Working pinch-to-zoom in Windows using the trackpad on our laptops.
  2. Implementing CompareActiveChunk in the AAX wrapper, with a call in the Processor component to handle it.
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That PR piece was something that was rolled into a larger package to go out with other NAMM news. It was intended to be a brief overview of the things that will be in JUCE 8, rather than a formal announcement of the release. The way press releases work is a little complex and it ended up being positioned as a release announcement in news outlets that picked the story up. Apologies for any confusion there.

Weā€™ll do a much more thorough, developer-focused, dive into all of the JUCE 8 features once weā€™re also in a position to announce things like an expected release date and pricing. Weā€™re currently deep in the weeds getting ā€œunicode supportā€* ready, but once this is done weā€™ll put it onto a juce8 preview branch, alongside the other features, and weā€™ll do a proper announcement.

* ā€œUnicode supportā€ doesnā€™t really convey the complexity of the task, but we need something short to refer to it.

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Thanks for chiming in Tom!

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Thank you Tom for the clarification.
Assuming youā€™re in NAMM I guess itā€™s more tricky to be promptive in general.

To clarify, this is for the existing backends right?

(Since WebViews would actually get those out of the boxā€¦)

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.
WebViews get all of that as part of their built-in renderers, but there are people who want access to a wider range of languages in their existing JUCE apps.

Apologies again for the poor communication of this. Weā€™ll follow up with a much more interesting update in a few weeks.

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21

What audio-related features would you like to see, out of interest?

MIDI 2.0 Device and MIDI 2.0 UMP support.

I actually went to the JUCE booth at NAMM (Saji (@saji8k) on Threads) and they told me that MIDI 2.0 device and ump support would be in the first public preview of Juce 8 that they said was coming in Q1 of this year. MIDI 2.0 is suspiciously missing from the press release in the OP so that is cause for concern.

Weā€™re going to wait for Windows before we add device support to JUCE. Delivering something now that we then might have to reconfigure to conform to how things work in Windows would be double the work for the JUCE team, and disruptive to everyone already using the new functionality. (Nov 2023)

Pete Brown from Microsoft gave a public demo of Cubase on Windows recording from a Roland MIDI 2.0 keyboard already available on the market using the Windows MIDI Service API code available on Github. You can see a video of it here: Saji (@saji8k) on Threads . I also was able to try out Windows multi-client support myself on a side demo at the MIDI booth.

I would counter that now is the best time to deliver something. If you do encounter missing features or issues in the Windows API, compared to the already final macOS/iOS/Android/Linux MIDI 2.0 APIs, you can get these fixed now by Pete and his team, before the code is frozen and deployed to a billion Windows devices.

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