Dear impro-visor group members,

I've posted version 3.0 of our tool in the Files area as:

improvisor300.zip

If you would like to give it a test, please download, taking care to
unzip everything into a single directory. Then double-click the
improvisor.jar file, as usual.

Due to extreme time commitments for the actual development, the
documentation is a bit backlogged. I'll try to provide it over the
coming couple of weeks, by updating the web pages. The new version
is similar enough to the old that present users should not have
difficulty with using the prior features.

What's new? (How is the world treating you? ...):

The major change is that styles are now in separate files, in
the directory 'styles'. Also, the style specification
language has changed a tiny bit. While I doubt many of you have
created your own styles, if you have, let me know and I'll either
tell you how to change them or do it for you. (I wouldn't mind
having some groovy styles submitted by our members, and some of
our styles are still rough around the edges. You have been warned.)

There are now two note-entry modes. The default one (called "smart")
observes chord scales in choosing whether to make a note an accidental
or not. The other one (called "simple") ignores chords, but does
respect the key signature as before. Of course there are always
key-stroke corrections if it does do what you were hoping.

There is a "tracker delay" field that allows you specify the delay
between the tracking line and midi playback. This was introduced
specifically for the MacOSX Leopard problem that has been observed,
although I've not tried it on Leopard yet. I have tried it on
the previous MacOSX and on XP. (It seemed to be slow to start
there, but I was working with an older machine.)

There is a style editor, which works like a spreadsheet, displaying
instruments as rows and patterns as columns.

There is a style extractor, which will create a style from a midi
file, if a .ls file containing the chord changes is provided.

The leadsheet files now remember the playback transposition, if
set for transposing instruments.

The number of bars per chorus can be set from the main window.

The preferences menu has been made nicer and the button is now
on the top right of the screen.

And of course, there have been some bug fixes.

More will be in the documentation as soon as I can get to it.

I'd like to thank our summer research students Jim Herold,
Brandy McMenamy, and Sayuri Soejima for their work on style
extraction, and also John Goodman who joined the project from
the U.K.

Please let me know how you like the new version.

Regards,

Bob Keller
Impro-Visor project director