Sonic Pi v3.2.1 Patreon Pre-Release is Available Now

Hi everyone,

I just released v3.2.1 on Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/35431289

(The public release will be on Friday the 3rd of April)

This release is another maintenance release with a primary focus on increasing stability and reliability. There are therefore no major new features, but instead there are significant improvements to the internals and the packaging of the Windows installer.

Whilst there are no major new features, we have still been working hard engaging with users with accessibility requirements. We have added a number of modifications to the GUI to improve keyboard navigation which should improve things for users that do not use a mouse (for example, users working with a screen reader). As mentioned in the previous release, we will continue to work to improve accessibility support wherever possible in each release.

One core internal focus has been improving memory utilisation of the app. A number of memory leaks have been hunted down and fixed. A memory leak is where the application requests increasingly more memory from the computer and never gives it back. Over time this means that the app would waste a lot of the system memory. This might have not been too noticeable using Sonic Pi on modern computers that typically have incredibly large amounts of memory. However, it was noticeable and problematic on low-powered systems with limited memory capacity. Sonic Pi now uses a lot less memory and after a warm-up period, the memory usage stays much more constant than before. We will continue to look for and fix memory leaks going forward.

Finally, this release is the first to ship with a fully signed Windows installer. This is a major milestone as we now ship with signed versions for both macOS and Windows which should help more users and organisations (especially schools) trust the installation and running of Sonic Pi.

Now, go and get live coding!

Full release notes: https://github.com/samaaron/sonic-pi/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#version-321---take-tau

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