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Magic 2.31 released

Posted: Thu May 06, 2021 3:43 pm
by Magic
Hi guys, I'm pleased to announce that Magic 2.31 has been released, with some fun new features and some important bug fixes. Many of the items below were suggested/reported by users, so please keep the feedback coming!

- New "Null" module. This basically does nothing, and uses the absolute minimum processing. It's good to use as a "junction box" in your scenes, or just for annotations only. The annotation is visible by default.

- New SineWave module. Very similar to the Waveform module, but it draws a basic sine wave where you can control the frequency and the phase, so you can make some simple yet interesting wave patterns. The Phase parameter controls one full loop of the wave, so it's good to use with a Ramp modifier.

- New Restart module. When you trigger this module's Restart Now parameter, it restarts all the modules connected to the input. You can think of it as a local version of the Synchronize Modules command (which is now renamed, see next item).

- Synchronize Modules command (Ctrl/Cmd+E) renamed to "Force Restart". It makes more sense with the previous item, and the next:

- New option *not* to restart modules when changing inputs/scenes. As an "inverse" to the Restart module, there is a new option in every module's menu that lets it Ignore Restart when changing scenes, etc. Besides ignoring all time-dependent parameters, this option will automatically preserve the module's graphics memory to keep the internal state continuous, so keep an eye on your graphics memory usage. Also, It's important to note that the Force Restart command (see above) will still override the Ignore Restart option.

- New 'xp' and 'y' and variables in the Expression modifier, which store the previous input and output values, respectively. These are tiny changes with big implications, and I'm sure there will be lots of uses for them.

- New option to loop individual videos in the VideoFolder module. Pretty self-explanatory.

- New ProRes 4444 codec for movie exporting. This codec is extremely high quality and has full alpha channel support. But it's very slow and the file sizes are enormous. So, use sparingly.

- Movie exporting now doesn't include an audio track when all audio files are muted. Previously there was an empty audio track that was taking up a tiny bit of extra space for no reason.

- Movie exporting now uses uncompressed (CD-quality) audio in all .mov formats. This really only matters if you are using uncompressed audio files to begin with (.wav, .aiff, etc.), or if you are mixing several files (even if they're compressed) and don't want a quality loss.

- Removed the description in module Feature box when "(No source)" selected.

- Bug fix for loading Playlist MIDI commands from older projects.

- Bug fix for AAC audio encoding in exported movies.

- Bug fix for one frame of audio being cut off from the beginning of movie exports.

- Bug fix for loading globals from older projects.

- Bug fix for drop-down menu separator not displaying properly on macOS Big Sur.

As always, you can download v2.31 by going to https://magicmusicvisuals.com/getfullversion.

Thanks very much!
-Eric