For this release I've bumped the version number to 9 because there are some substantial changes here, and because we were running out of 8.x version numbers.
The Windows version is now 64-bit and therefore requires 64-bit Windows 10. Also if you want to use GStreamer with Transcribe! (for viewing video, and other things) then you will need to install the 64-bit version of GStreamer which we provide at
www.seventhstring.com/resources/gstreamer.html.
And don't forget to delete the old GStreamer version before installing the new one, as explained on that page.
We will keep version 8.80.1 available for those few people still running 32-bit Windows 10.
The Mac version requires macOS 11 on Intel or Apple Silicon. We will keep version 8.75.2 available for people running macOS 10.15 or earlier.
The Linux version is now 64-bit only, see the Download page on the website for details. We will keep version 8.80 available for people running 32-bit Linux. I know from the download statistics on the website that very few people are running 32-bit Linux these days.
As usual, it is free to existing users.
Changes:
- We now support media files that have multiple sound tracks (e.g. Stem files or a film with sound tracks in different languages). Transcribe! will load all the sound tracks and you can select which one you want on the View menu. It has always been possible to have multiple views of a sound file by using the Split command on the View menu and this now becomes especially useful as you can have multiple views with each view showing a different sound track.
- When you save a transcription (xsc) file, we now save the state of all your views (if you have used the Split command and have multiple views) instead of just the currently active one.
- The "Reload last transcription at launch" Preferences option is now called "Reload open windows at launch" because that's what it now does. It loads all of the transcriptions that were open when you last shut down the app, instead of just the most recent one. On the Mac this also applies to when you shut down the computer and it asks whether to re-open windows when logging back in.
- We now save the window size when you save a transcription file. I don't know why we didn't always do this.
- With GStreamer we can now read various media files that didn't work before, particularly webm files.
- On videos we can now display subtitles in the usual way, overlaid on the video. This applies to "integral" subtitle tracks from within the video, and also external subtitle files (e.g. srt files). This may not be very relevant to musical transcription, but not everyone is using Transcribe! solely for music. This feature is accessed via the View menu of the Video Viewer.
- On Windows if you open a track on an audio CD then it will now copy the track to a temporary file, which works much better than playing it directly from the CD as we used to. We've also removed the "Copy sound file" command which was mainly for copying tracks from CD. If you want to use Transcribe! to copy a track from a CD then you can load the track and "Export sound file".
- A new option in Preferences: "Paused playback point follows selection" meaning that if you are paused and you adjust the selection or current point in any way then the paused playback point will be moved to the start of the selection. This is useful for people who want to use the paused point as their "current point".
- New commands for adjusting selection by 500ms and 30ms. You would need to program a keyboard shortcut to use them. The idea about 30ms is that with a video this is more or less frame-forwards and frame-backwards, depending on the exact frame rate of the video.
- Various other minor improvements and bugfixes.