github slopsmith/slopsmith-desktop v0.2.9
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Slopsmith Desktop v0.2.9

The biggest release yet — full drum support, an interactive video lesson engine, a minigames framework, karaoke, scale/technique practice routines, loose-folder playback, live note-detection that lights up the gems, a major performance pass, and over 70 bug fixes across the desktop app and bundled plugins.

Slopsmith is a free, open-source music notation viewer with full-band support and an extensive plugin system.

⚠️ Upgrading? Read this first

For the cleanest upgrade we recommend deleting Slopsmith's config folder before installing 0.2.9. This clears stale settings, the old bundled-plugin set, and the cached renderer — the usual cause of an upgraded build looking broken or "missing" new features. Your song/library files are not stored here (only settings, plugins, and caches), so they're safe; back the folder up first if you want to keep your current settings.

  • Windows: %APPDATA%\slopsmith-desktop  (e.g. C:\Users\<you>\AppData\Roaming\slopsmith-desktop)
  • macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/slopsmith-desktop
  • Linux: ~/.config/slopsmith-desktop

🥁 Highlights

Drums are here

Drums are now a first-class arrangement type — a dedicated drum highway, drum authoring in the editor, GP/MIDI drum import, and an 18-piece kit vocabulary (kick, snare, toms, hi-hat open/closed/pedal, crashes, splash, china, ride + bell, and more). Songs that ship a drum track activate the drums highway automatically.

Minigames

A new Minigames framework ships built in: a top-level Minigames hub with XP, levels, and per-game leaderboards. First game included — Flappy Bend. Plugin authors can add their own minigame with a few lines of manifest and the shared scoring/HUD SDK.

Karaoke

The new Lyrics Karaoke plugin: paste your lyrics, press one button, and Slopsmith aligns them to the vocals stem and extracts per-syllable pitch. In the player, a SingStar-style pitch ribbon sweeps along as you sing.

Loose-folder playback

Drop a loose song folder (audio + chart files) straight into your library and play it — no conversion step. Loose songs appear alongside everything else with a FOLDER badge and full filtering support.

Live note detection lights up the gems

When note detection confirms a hit, the note itself lights up — a bright gem on a clean hit, a glowing sustain trail while you hold it correctly, and a contained sparkle/sizzle effect. Works on both the 2D and 3D highways.

✨ More features

  • 3D highway: tone-change HUD, fret dividers, chord-diagram toggle, on-screen FPS counter, and a fretboard preview of the upcoming note.
  • Song previews: short hover-to-listen preview clips are now preserved when converting songs to sloppak.
  • Library power tools: filter by parts present or missing (lead / rhythm / bass / combo, stems, lyrics, tuning), sort by year, and a tuning sort ordered by musical distance.
  • Settings export / import: back up, migrate, or share your entire calibrated setup as a single file.
  • Diagnostics export: one-click, redacted diagnostics bundle for bug reports.
  • No more screensaver during playback: the display stays awake while a song is playing (browser wake-lock + a native power blocker in the desktop app).

🔌 New bundled plugins

This release ships several new plugins in the box:

  • Tutorials — an interactive video lesson engine. A top-level Tutorials hub with three modes: Browse (pack + lesson grid), Lesson (watch a short video, then "Start exercise" launches the paired song), and Author (build your own packs — upload a video or paste a link, pick an exercise song, set pass/mastery thresholds and technique tags). Lessons are grouped into tutorial packs, completing exercises earns XP through the shared minigames profile, and two starter packs ship built in (Intro to Bends, Reading the Highway).
  • SlopScale — skill practice routines. Turns scales, arpeggios, technique, and grooves into practice routines you actually want to run, played back in a DAW-style player with a real-sounding backing band. Pick a routine, set a tempo, hit play, and drill.
  • NAM Rig Builder. Maps each song's amp + cab + pedals to neural-amp (NAM) captures and impulse responses from tone3000.com and chains them, so a song plays back through a realistic modeled rig.
  • Song Preview. Hover a song in the library to hear its short preview clip (powered by the new preview-clip support in sloppak conversion above).
  • Tuner. A built-in instrument tuner, bundled by default.

🖥️ Desktop app

  • Single-instance lock — relaunching focuses the existing window instead of opening a second copy (fixes the "3D highway stutter" that was actually multiple instances running at once).
  • NAM: support for Tone3000 A2 models (NeuralAmpModelerCore v0.5.3).
  • Linux: the AppImage now falls back to --no-sandbox automatically when the kernel's user-namespace sandbox is unavailable.
  • Audio: monitor-mute now persists across device changes; dismissable empty-chain hint.
  • macOS: retune fixed on Apple Silicon (Rosetta ffmpeg with rubberband); microphone-permission prompt; lower-jitter tuner feed.
  • Tutorials: embedded videos load correctly behind the off-origin frame guard.

⚡ Performance

  • Prebuilt Tailwind stylesheet replaces the runtime CDN — no more main-thread DOM scanning (~26% fewer dropped frames in long sessions with the 3D highway as default).
  • Reduced per-frame allocations across the 2D and 3D highway render paths.

🧩 Plugin platform

  • Capability pipelines — a versioned coordination layer for plugin authors, with a bundled Capability Inspector.
  • Audio control planes — mix, input, monitoring, and playback are now coordinated capability domains.
  • Generic plugin asset route — plugins can self-host worklets / WASM / images under their own assets/ directory.

🐛 Bug fixes

Over 70 fixes landed since v0.2.8 across the desktop app and the bundled core/plugins. Highlights by area:

Audio & signal chain

  • Contain non-finite / runaway signal-chain output so a bad plugin can't blow up the mix (#403).
  • Catch plugin crashes at runtime so the app stays up (#244); guard against synchronous setGain throws (#326).
  • Prevent a crash when scanning VST plugins on macOS (#177); guard Windows-only sandbox RTTI so the addon loads on macOS/Linux (#263); wrap numeric_limits::max() to defeat the Windows max macro (#239).
  • Multichannel device input selection (#134); ASIO input with non-ASIO output (#232); LV2 scanning on multilib Linux (#120).
  • Re-route song audio when the engine starts/stops (#325); restore VST preset state on a mid-song tone change (#255); pitch-preserving slowdown timing fixes (#252, #230).

Plugin sandbox

  • Top-level editor window in the child process, Reaper-style (#250); async plugin load so the UI stays responsive (#178, #195).
  • Harden the plugin-manager IPC against command injection & path traversal (#268); skip missing plugin files instead of crashing on startup (#662).
  • Load-heartbeat reliability + clearer timeout reasons (#245, #251); pre-seed AmpliTube / TONEX into the sandbox list (#246, #204).

Highway & rendering

  • Fix extended-range (7/8-string) chord regressions (#756); single sustain trail for open strings inside a chord shape (#327); live sustained-note glow (#707).
  • Mirror left-handed camera state (#603); clear stale chord flags between notes (#613); restore shortcut help on the 3D highway (#602); preserve naming mode on arrangement switch (#410).

Library, import & conversion

  • Multiple imported guitars now get distinct roles (Lead/Rhythm/Combo) instead of all "Lead" (#741).
  • Guitar Pro import fixes: recover dropped notes + techniques (GPX/GP/GP5) (#729), string order / bass naming / percussion + embedded-MP3 audio for GP8 (#714, #713).
  • Stem-split songs whose mix isn't named full.ogg (#717); split decoded audio before lossy re-encode (#665); exclude tutorial drills from the library scan (#600); spawn-safe library scan pool (#601).
  • Atomic conversion writes (#291); carry guitar tones through conversion (#308); decode song archives on macOS (#147).

Player & UI

  • Replace prompt() in the A/B loop save with an in-app modal so it works in the desktop app (#747).
  • Section Practice bar no longer breaks plugin button injectors (#694); mixer song-volume handler no longer wiped on re-registration (#725); Song fader drives the stems master gain (#324).
  • Auto-save Default Arrangement & platform dropdowns (#359); inject plugin CSS before core styles so it can't clobber utilities (#666); read settings/plugin HTML as UTF-8 (#356).

Security

  • Reject path traversal in archive extractors (#382) and the file-serve endpoint (#638); read-only .git mount for manual-rebuild detection (#347).

Desktop, build & packaging

  • Reliably reclaim the preferred port so settings persist across restarts (#491); reap orphaned backends on startup (#180); free the port on exit (#159).
  • Per-machine MSI only on Windows (#190); macOS Velopack signing/notarization fixes (#184, #187); CI/packaging hardening (artifact size, PDBs, asset naming).

📄 Licensing

Slopsmith is now AGPL-3.0-only (the desktop build statically links JUCE 8). See LICENSE and CONTRIBUTING.md (DCO sign-off + plugin licensing policy).

💜 Support Slopsmith

Slopsmith is free and open source. If it's useful to you, you can support development:

⬇️ Download

Grab your platform from the assets below. Windows installs via MSI (with auto-updates), macOS is a signed & notarized build, and Linux ships as AppImage and .deb.

Full changelog: v0.2.8...v0.2.9

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