Crossfading Between Scenes

The headline feature of this release. A new setting now allows you to smoothly fade between two scenes using the "Scene Transitions" feature.

• Scene Transition Mode - Now Crossfade (and Fade to Black) are options in the "Scene Transition Mode" dropdown. Selecting "Crossfade" will render both scenes at once and fade between them for smooth transitions from one to the next during a show.
• Note: This is the first feature powered by our new multi-scene engine, but expect more powerful features for transitions, scene mixing, and compositing soon.

New Built-In Scenes

Continuing the free content train! Mrange absolutely went off in this one, releasing 5 new built-in scenes that are sure to be instant classics. Meanwhile Psybernautics pioneered a brilliant new glyphset and painted the walls with 'em in a scene that shows off his style perfectly.

• Neon City - Cyberpunk retro, reactive, reflective. The 90's are back, baby.
• Entombed Silicon Dreams - Use this alongside Mrange's Neon Giza (a Marketplace Freebie) to complete the stargate saga.
• Beats in 4D - Glowy twisted grids with lots of reactivity
• Dark Twister - Explore the depths, but don't get caught in the tangles
• Bouncy Hexagons - Media on terrain. Bees love this one.
• SkaiWalkerOG - Fall upwards through evolving portal rooms emblazoned with alien alphabets

Meta and Media Control Changes

Saturation and Media Scale changes, and a new control that lets you universally overlay media over any scene.

• New Control: Media Overlay - A new dropdown and opacity knob let you blend your media input on top of your shader output. The media is mixed over the last render pass and will not change how the underlying scene already interacts with the media.
• Media Blend Modes - Choose from six blend modes: Add, Alpha, Screen, Multiply, Max, and Subtract; then dial in the opacity to taste.
• Saturation Fix - Saturation now works like it does in photo editing software, and should produce more reliable and aesthetic results across the board, with less color burn and unnexpected salmon tones. Note: This may subtly change the way some of your presets look, but we asked on our Discord server and the consensus was we should just change it. If you really need the old look, there's still a _hueSaturationLEGACY() function you can use to edit your scenes to reproduce the old look.
• Media Scale: Action Reversed - Now turning this control down makes your media smaller and turning it up makes your media bigger. It used to work backwards. Your presets should function as normal.
• Media Scale: No More Clipping - Media at odd aspect ratios has always loaded in Synesthesia well, but the media scale slider wasn't interacting perfectly with aspect ratios in the past. Now media will scale well up or down regardless of aspect ratio or resolution, in any scene. Note to GLSL devs, make sure you're using syn_Media, _loadMedia() and _textureMedia() in your code to take advantage of all the media controls.
• Middle Click to Default a Control - Now you can click the scrollwheel on a control to reset it to default. Don't forget you can also hold SHIFT to increase sensitivity, or use the hotkeys: R for random, D for default, L for lock, P for preset.

Settings & Behaviors

Recursive folder search, more performant controls, better playlist editing.

• Recursive Media Folder Adding - You can now control whether you want your media folders to load recursively or only go one layer deep. Now you can add a single parent folder and all media inside of all baby folders will also be loaded.
• Recursive Scene Folder Adding - You can ALSO now control whether you want Synesthesia to load shaders recursively from your custom scene folders, or only go one layer deep.
• Smoother Sliders & Knobs - We changed how linear controls track your mouse, more directly tracking your mouse's position 1:1.
• Legacy Transition Button - With the release of the "Transitions" feature and crossfading, we're moving the old "Transition" button and its associated "Transitions" checkbox in settings. This is what controls whether scenes like Glassier or Churning automatically change color palettes. For those who use this feature, everything will continue to work the same as it ever did, but now the checkboxes are down in the "Legacy" Settings.

Shader Editor Improvements

Quality-of-life upgrades for the code editor and dev console.

• Ping Pong Buffers - Optional flag to add to your scene.json buffers which will automatically "ping pong" the buffers, allowing for read and write from the same buffer without domain tearing (ideal for feedback scenes or simulations)
• Scene Folder #include - GLSL #include directives now resolve from the scene's own folder, making it easier to organize reusable shader code alongside your scenes. You can make your own include files!
• New Audio Variables - The audio engine now exposes tri4, tri8, and sin8 BPM oscillators, available in both OSC and the IDE
• Optional Autocomplete - IDE autocomplete can now be turned off in Editor Settings. You can still summon it on demand with Ctrl+Space
• Adjustable Font Size - A new slider in Editor Settings lets you set your preferred editor font size
• Console Error Reporting - Color indicator now properly clears back to green after successful scene loads
• Console Auto-Scroll - Opening the console now scrolls to the bottom immediately, so you always see the most recent output

Graphics & Stability

The new engine brings a number of rendering fixes and performance updates. You mostly shouldn't notice anything different about how scenes render.

• Major AMD Fix - Fixed the "black screen" issue that was affecting AMD GPUs on certain AMD drivers.
• Scene Loading Speedup - Scenes now load 5x faster. (Note there's still slow compilation times for first loads of certain scenes that use Lygia #includes, we're working on a solution.)
• Scene Duplication/Renaming Fixes - Many potential crashes were isolated and removed, meaning scene duplication and renaming should be stable/trustworthy processes.
• Desktop Audio CPU Fix (Windows only) - Fixed a bug where the desktop audio capture loop could max out CPU waiting for audio (ex: when Spotify is paused).
• Audio Engine NaN Fix - Fixed NaN corruption in the audio engine that could affect default scenes.
Windows Changes
• Synesthesia no longer requires admin permissions on Windows
• The installer handles version upgrades and license migration more gracefully, and no longer leaves "ghost installs" in the Windows installed software list

Interface Updates

The frontend has been modernized under the hood. You'll notice some subtle visual changes across the app, but overall the UI should feel more snappy and tab changes should be quicker.

• Refreshed Look - Refined colors, updated fonts, and cleaner spacing across the control panel, media panel, and scene library. The overall look is more cohesive
• Folder Name Truncation - Paths for Scenes and Media folders are now truncated where before long paths would require horizontal scrolling
• Settings Page Cleanup - More readable, easier to navigate, better spacing, less horizontal scrolling
• Refresh Button - The refresh button above the media gallery now also works to refresh your live sources like Syphon/Spout and NDI input servers.
• Spout/Syphon Output Fix - Fixed Spout/Syphon Output not showing up in Live Sources for trial users.
• Scene Info Selectable - Scene info text is now highlightable, so you can copy scene names and details.

Scene Fixes + Small Bugfixes

• Filter Blown - You can finally use Syphon/Spout input in this scene instead of getting black output!
• More Scenes Respect Media Controls - More scenes now respect the aspect ratio of media and properly apply all media controls, including media scale. Scenes modified: Deeper V2, Raymarched Reflections, Raymarching Experiment 62, KIFS Flythrough, Rearranged, Sinusoidal Warp, Equirectangular, Fuzzy_Signal, Hexoplanet, Tunnel Beauty 6, Transparent Isoslices, and Terrain Lattice.
• Fixed a bug where adding a scene folder could prevent scenes from other folders from showing up in your library until refresh.
• Fixed a bug that could eat your first click to start a scene after searching in the search bar.
• OSC is much more stable. Fixed some memory leaks and connection issues that could lead to crashes or slower performance when using OSC over days or under heavy load. Also fixed some bugs that wouldn't trigger playlist selection or media next/previous mappings correctly.
• Knob Drag Fix - Knobs now properly reset their drag range on release, preventing stuck or drifting controls.