🎉 Slopsmith v0.2.5
macOS users: the "Slopsmith.app is damaged and can't be opened" warning is gone. The app is now signed with a Developer ID Application certificate, hardened-runtime + entitlements wired up, and notarized via Apple's notary service. The DMG itself is also notarized and stapled, so it opens cleanly even on offline first launches. Drag to Applications, double-click — that's it.
✨ What's new
🎸 Reworked 3D Highway
The 3D Highway plugin gets a major visual overhaul in this release. It's now a stage-view-style camera perspective inspired by modern rhythm games — notes fly down toward a virtual fretboard at the bottom of the screen, with full depth and atmosphere:
- Glowing strings that pulse and brighten on every hit
- Chord frame-boxes with named-chord labels, plus a top-left chord diagram so you can read shapes at a glance
- Barre indicator that paints across the fret when a barre chord lands
- Heat-colored fret number row that lights up around your active playing region
- Selectable string color palettes — pick the look you want
- Audio-reactive ambient backgrounds — particles, silhouettes, stage lights, geometric shapes (or off, if you prefer it clean)
- Synced lyrics overlay
- Works as your main player view or per-panel inside the splitscreen plugin
Toggle it from the player's visualization picker; tune the look from Settings → 3D Highway.
✏️ Arrangement Editor (sloppak editor)
This release ships v1.0.0 of the Arrangement Editor, the DAW-like CDLC chart editor for Slopsmith. It's a full timeline-based editor for creating and tweaking sloppak/CDLC arrangements:
- Load existing songs or create a new arrangement from scratch
- Multi-arrangement support — switch between lead / rhythm / bass / drums / keys on a single song
- Add drum and keyboard arrangements to existing songs that don't have them yet
- Timeline editing with zoom in/out, BPM control, and play/pause scrubbing
- Full undo/redo (Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y)
- Build CDLC directly from the editor — produces a ready-to-share .psarc
This is the foundation for community charting workflows entirely inside Slopsmith.
🎯 Note detection — chord support + multi-string tuning
The note-detect plugin (which scores how well you're playing against the chart) gets a major upgrade in this release:
- Chord detection works now. Previously the detector locked onto the loudest string of any chord, missing the rest. It now uses a constraint-based per-string energy-band check: for each note in the chord, it looks at the matching string's frequency band in real time and scores how many strings are actually ringing. Result: barre chords, power chords, and complex shapes get scored as a unit instead of as the lowest note.
- New "Chord Leniency" slider in note-detect's settings (25–100%, default 60%). Sets how many strings of a chord need to ring to count as a hit — turn it up for clean precision, turn it down to play forgivingly.
- HUD chord readout. When you strum a chord, the player HUD shows e.g.
chord 4/6 (66%)so you can see exactly how the detector judged it. - Technique-aware thresholds — hammer-ons and pull-offs use a lower energy threshold (no fresh pick attack); bends and slides widen the pitch tolerance (pitch is in motion); harmonics drop the pitch check entirely (energy-only).
- 4/5-string bass and 7/8-string guitar arrangements now work correctly. A pre-existing bug used the tuning offsets array length as the string count, which silently broke per-string detection on bass / extended-range arrangements. Fixed — bass and 8-string charts get accurate scoring now.
- Bundled with the desktop app at v1.2.0 (slopsmith-plugin-notedetect).
Massive plugin bundle expansion (13 → 36 plugins)
Every desktop release now ships the full Slopsmith plugin ecosystem: all of the byrongamatos plugins (drums, editor, lyrics-karaoke, lyrics-sync, multiplayer, nam-tone, piano, stepmode, studio, plus the existing set), and 15 community plugins.
Build system rewritten for reproducibility
The CI workflow shrank from ~365 lines of inline bash to ~120 declarative lines. All bundling/signing/packaging logic now lives in versioned per-platform scripts under scripts/build-{linux,macos,windows}.sh plus a shared scripts/build-common.sh. Local builds use the same scripts as CI — ./scripts/build-release.sh from your dev box produces the same artifacts the runners do.
Linux: Docker-based cross-distro builds
Non-Ubuntu Linux users (Manjaro, Arch, Fedora, …) can now run ./scripts/build-release.sh and get a reproducible AppImage + .deb via a containerized build. No more "works on Ubuntu only".
macOS: switched Python bundling to python-build-standalone
The bundled CPython runtime is now Astral's python-build-standalone distribution — purpose-built for redistribution. sys.prefix correctly resolves inside the .app at runtime, removing a class of "the app launches but Python crashes on a fresh Mac" failures.
🐛 Fixes
- macOS: every bundled binary (fluidsynth, ffmpeg, vgmstream-cli, embedded Python interpreter, libpython dylib, extension
.sos, RsCli) is now properly signed with hardened runtime + entitlements before notarization - macOS: vgmstream-cli's brew dependencies (libspeex, libmpg123, libvorbis, libogg, ffmpeg libs) now bundled via
dylibbundlerso the binary works on Macs without those formulae installed - Linux: bundle script no longer trips on plugin
.git/dirs that exist when plugins are dev checkouts - Windows: fixed Git Bash MSYS path conversion bug in fluidsynth URL lookup
- Workflow:
CSC_FOR_PULL_REQUEST=trueso PR builds also get signed (was silently skipping signing on PR events, producing unusable artifacts)
👥 Contributors
This release is a community effort:
Build refactor (#23 → merged into #24): Big thanks to @mogul (Bret Mogilefsky) for the per-platform script architecture and Docker-based reproducible Linux builds. Every commit he authored is preserved in the merged history with attribution intact.
3D Highway rework: Massive credit to @topkoa for the major refactor that powers the new look — camera smoothing, dead-zone tuning to keep nut chords on screen, per-class text-sprite styling for fret numbers, fret-number-row legibility fixes, and the foundational rewrite that the rest of the new visuals build on. Plus @JoelD333 for the base visuals topkoa's refactor extended.
The wider community — thank you. The community plugins bundled here represent dozens of hours of work, and the plugin ecosystem just keeps getting better:
- alleexx —
transpose-chords - jweibel22 —
rs-2d-highway - masc0t —
find-more,invert-highway,midi-capo,rooms,the-daily,themes,slopsmith-update-manager - narvasus —
stem-mixer - renanboni —
jumpingtab - topkoa (also) —
guitar-theory,sloppak-converter,splitscreen,stems
You make Slopsmith what it is.
📥 Downloads
- macOS (arm64):
Slopsmith-0.2.5-arm64.dmg(signed + notarized) - Linux (x64):
Slopsmith-0.2.5.AppImageandslopsmith-desktop_0.2.5_amd64.deb - Windows (x64):
Slopsmith.Setup.0.2.5.exe