nota-daw/nota v0.55.1

Nota 0.55.1

on GitHub

🎛 Nota 0.55.1 is out

Nota 0.55 is a new look. The interface steps back so your music carries the colour, and you can pick the colours yourself: four themes, including the warm Ember look of earlier versions. The new look, the themes, the browser's categories and the matching Nota Remote are the work of Chris Laupama. The arrangement learns to resize its tracks, the browser sorts devices by category, and Nota is lighter on the CPU, especially on Linux.

1. Studio, a new look
Neutral greys and one orange accent that means only one thing: playing, selected or switched on. Knobs, faders and device graphs stay quiet at rest and light up under your hand. Mute is amber, solo blue, record-arm red. The browser, arrangement and detail panel sit edge to edge on thin seams, the transport is a slim flat row, and clips are drawn in their full track colour. Device cards lose their inner boxes and share one header, so presets and power switches line up down a chain. Labels are in sentence case everywhere. Every feature, shortcut and menu is where it was, and your projects open unchanged.

2. Colour themes
Preferences → Appearance has four themes: Studio Dark, Studio Light, and Ember Graphite / Ember Paper, the browns and brass of Nota's earlier look on the new layout. Each is shown as a miniature Nota window, and picking one recolours every window at once. Choose Follow system to set one theme for dark mode and one for light, and Nota switches with your computer. Themes change colours only, never your projects.

3. Resizable tracks
Drag the bottom edge of a track to make it taller or shorter. It snaps lightly to Compact, Standard and Large. Drag with several tracks selected to resize them together, or hold Alt (Option on macOS) to resize all of them; double-click the edge to reset. A short track fits its name and buttons on one line, a tall one gives the input, fader and pan a row each, and clips and automation grow with the row. The track list itself is resizable too: drag the seam between headers and lanes. Heights and width are saved with the project.

4. Category chips in the browser
The Instruments, Audio effects and MIDI effects tabs have a row of chips: Synths, Drums, Samplers; EQ & filter, Dynamics, Reverb & delay, Modulation; Generate and Shape. Click one to see only that kind of device. Chips work together with search, Favorites and tags, and your plug-ins land in the same categories.

5. Nota Remote matches Nota
The phone wears the same theme as the computer and follows it live, without reloading or cutting a held note. Or set it to follow the phone's own dark and light mode. Its screens take the Studio look as well.

Also
• Arrangement, Session and Modular are now three icon keys in the transport, freeing room for the rest
• The Mixer window is as wide as its strips and resizes as you add tracks; Escape closes it
• Less CPU while idle: meters and the playhead redraw only when they change, and nothing redraws while the window is minimized
• The transport meter is now labelled DSP, which is what it always measured; its tooltip shows the CPU of the whole Nota process
• New tracks scroll into view instead of hiding under the Return and Master rows
• The Session toolbar fits small windows, and its inspector can be hidden
• Modular lists your tracks right after a project opens
• Linux: popping out the piano roll no longer crashes Nota
• Linux: settings live in one folder, ~/.config/nota; files from ~/.config/Nota move over on the first launch

Thank you, Chris
A huge thank-you to Chris Laupama, who designed and built Studio, the colour themes, the category chips and the new Nota Remote. Most of what looks new in this release came from him.

Install

First launch: Nota isn't signed with a paid certificate yet. On macOS, if it says Apple could not verify Nota, open System Settings → Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway — step-by-step guide. On Windows, click More info → Run anyway in SmartScreen.