Hi everyone,
There’s a new build ready, and it’s huge. I’ve been working so hard over the last few months, some of the developments will be obvious - new features and refinements of the zone editor, clip deck and clip editor - and many of them are invisible - performance optimisation, code architecture improvements, and an all-new open source laser control code library (called Libera).
If you want to give it a try please join the new beta testing programme.
(If you already applied I’ll be reviewing applications this morning - expect to hear soon)
Cheers!
Seb
Liberation new build may 2026 1.0.12
Output view - New zoning system
- Better handles, interface
- Circle zone
- Simpler line / curve zone
- Dynamic subdivided zone
- Better grid controls
- Better zoom in and out controls
- Test pattern preview selection
Top Icon bar
- New CPU performance meter
- Keyboard mode toggle (see below)
- Test pattern selector with preview
Custom MIDI devices
- Now uses text based (hopefully readable) MIDI config files for specific devices.
- Clip trigger uses same press/release model as APC40
- Can be relative to scroll position or absolute clip position
- Map any controller to any function
- Automatically assign a connected device to a config or manually choose (or disable)
- All controllers now use this system so you have some examples to look at!
- I’ve added quick (and likely incomplete) implementations of APC64, and launchpad mini
- See the documentation in the working folder midi folder. This can be used with any AI agent - probably the fastest way to create these config files for custom controllers.
Completely rewritten laser control back end (Libera)
- IDN support
- Now built on my new open source library Libera.
DMX control
Liberation now has a zone-per fixture system for control via a lighting desk. It’s designed in a similar way to X-Laser Mercury in that it provide DMX profiles for each zone rather than offer remote control for Liberation itself.
All zoning still done in app.
- Completely separate render pass from in-app control
- 16 and 32 channel profiles available.
- Clip deck is treated like a collection of “gobos” and each 8 x 5 “page” is selectable on its own channel
- RGB channels for colour override or blend with liberation clip colours
- 16 bit X and Y position
- Scale and spin available
- 32 channel profile also has effects that can be applied per zone
App wide undo / redo
- App level undo/redo that is state aware. IE if you edit a zone, then move a clip, the first undo will reset the clip. The second undo returns to the output view and undoes the zone edit.
- Works in all “edits”, clips, zones, timeline etc.
- Probably some broken edge cases - please test and report back!
- Probably some things that should be removed or added from the undo system
- Has potentially made some operations slow while caching large amounts of data - let me know!
Keyboard clip control
- Toggle keyboard clip control with the icon in the top bar
- Top three rows of clips show a letter to indicate the key that triggers them
- Press ALT / OPTION to use the low 2 rows of clips and to toggle effects
- Fullstop key to stop all clips
- When in keyboard mode you need CMD for R, T, Y tap tempo keys. Will rethink this in future.
Canvas
- New distribution method
- put a canvas zone in more than one laser and it automatically shares the load
- Better interface - can now click/drag target areas
- Still to do - refine interface - right now it’s awkward to move target areas to back to access zones etc.
Clip deck
- Smooth scrolling!
- Left and right arrow keys now “snap” to a page position. Easier to find your bearings.
- Mini clip visualiser bar - can now click to jump to a location
- Clip preview caching system - gradually converts all button previews to bitmaps - slow clips shouldn’t drag down the entire app now. Huge engineering task!
- Optimised button shape rendering
- Improved 3D point rendering
- Cut / copy / paste clips
- MIDI channel/note shown in right click menu when MIDI send/receive system is enabled
Visualiser support
- Depence added
TouchDesigner / MadMapper integration
- New PONK input node, can ingest paths from anything that can make PONK paths
Timing
- Added MIDI timecode, Artnet timecode and SNTC (for Depence)
- Ableton link completely rewritten for reliability (was a bit crashy before)
- Aimed to simplify timing system a little, now choose LIVE or TIMELINE with external options separate for each of those. More refinement / simplification to come.
Timeline
- New audio engine,
- rewritten from the ground up.
- better sound card support
- More accurate timing.
- Smooth varispeed correction for incoming timecode signals
- Can shift up and down when syncing to live tempo - good for slowing down timelines while building
- Interface clean up
- zoom slider
- mute toggle button with volume pop up
- snap toggle button with interval pop up
- Minimise / maximise toggle
- Top edge drag to resize rather than all of transport bar
- New settings panel
- Cut / copy / paste blocks
Start up refinements
- On first run the app now offers to import older versions’ content (if any exist)
- On first run, auto scale interface for the screen resolution - should help particularly on lower resolutions
- Remembers app size and position from last session
Crash reporting
Extremely complicated and tedious but important. Hopefully now if you crash, it should send the server a report. As you can imagine this is difficult to test!
Clip editor
- Multi node selection and drag, cut/copy/paste, undo.
- Automatic connection routing and improved render style
Text Creator
- Now has a nice curated library of single stroke fonts
- Caches shapes so if you move the project to a computer without the font, the glyphs are retained
- Has smoothing option - can be useful for low poly line fonts
Custom oscillator
- Much simpler interface
- Click drag points
- Right click on lines to select easing
Shimmer
- optimisations and colour/resampling fixes
Linked Oscillators
- CMD/ALT drag oscillators to create “linked” copies that use all the same settings but with a different range. This is experimental and I think I will likely change the interface for this in future.
UI/App wide refinements
- Native trackpad zoom scroll now enabled for OUTPUT and CANVAS views and timeline
- Global brightness level now retained between sessions
- Quit confirmation message (inspired by Chrome - hold CMD Q to quit)
really really excited to give this a go this week!!
- super excited to use this, I think right now I’m gunna just try every channel until I find it!