Hokusai updated
Another free update to our iOS audio editing package, /products/hokusai/ Hokusai], is now in the App Store – we got the notification from Apple last night, so the update should have rolled out across the different regions by now.
It brings a number of new features as well as bugfixes and so on. We’re also working on even more stuff for future updates, of course! I’ll write more on that another time…
So what’s new in Hokusai version 1.0.2?
When browsing your projects, you can now duplicate one. This is very fast (even for projects with lots of audio), so you can quickly make a “spare copy” of a project, experiment with it, and throw it away if you don’t like the results.
On the iPad, we’ve moved a few commands so the UI makes a little more sense. The “Project actions” button still provides tools to rename, mix down, quick-export your project and so on, but the view controls have been placed in a separate View panel. The View panel lets you show or hide the side bar, zoom out to see the whole project, or apply the new 2x vertical zoom.
A number of customers asked for vertical zoom, and we’ve provided it in this update. Why did we place it on a switch, instead of using pinch-to-zoom? Several reasons, the first is that it’s not very “discoverable”. If you pop up the View panel (or the actions menu on iPhone), you can see Vertical Zoom listed. If we hide it on a gesture, you might never know it was there. But also, it just didn’t feel right using Yet Another Gesture. You can already do so many gestures on the wave view: tap, double-tap, swipe, drag, tap-and-drag, horizontal pinch/unpinch… also, in almost all apps where you pinch-to-zoom on iPhone or iPad, you can pinch in any direction and it zooms evenly in both the horizontal and vertical direction. Having to pinch “carefully” to indicate whether you mean horizontally or vertically, isn’t as natural. Also, on iPhone (held in landscape mode, as it is for Hokusai), there just isn’t that much finger-space to unpinch vertically!
For paying customers, each track now has a small peak meter (or two, if it’s a stereo track). As well as showing the current peak level during playback, they also light up red if your audio “clips”, and the clip indicator stays lit and fades away over a few seconds, in case you missed it. Talking of clipping, we’ve also changed the audio playback behaviour when your audio clips. It will still clip – that’s unavoidable – and if you get clipping, you should adjust your audio to fix it. But the results of clipping shouldn’t sound so nasty now!
We’ve also put General Pasteboard support in to our AudioPaste panel. Please, only use this for backwards-compatibility with apps which don’t support Sonoma Wire Works’ AudioCopy/AudioPaste natively!
And some bug fixes, relating to Dropbox support, “split” mono/stereo channels, and other minor issues.