Release Plan

Flocking Release Plan

✅ Migrate website to more reliable hosting and change to stable branch
✅ Migrate mailing lists to the Fluid Project
✅ Basic, view-only version of the Flocking "live" graphical Playground
✅ Playground's play button should fade in and out smoothly to avoid clicks
✅ Ability to record to a buffer and asynchronously save it as a WAVE file
✅ Upgrade to latest version of Infusion 2.0.0-beta
Improved factoring of core components
- ✅ Merge in the graphical-ioc branch
- ✅ Remove all hard-coded references to flock.environment
Performance improvements
- ✅ remove Infusion events and invokers from the main processing loop
- ✅ Functions + state for main sample processing loop
Better error reporting in new Playground
Comprehensive, basic tutorial for using Flocking, including: ** How to create synths ** How to start and stop the environment and add/remove synths in the environment ** How to sequence and schedule in-graph changes (using flock.sequencer and flock.change) ** How to schedule other events using the bare Schedule API (i.e. once(), repeat(), and clear()
Reference documentation for all unit generators

Block-accurate scheduling (via Bergson)
Declarative means to perform all major actions in Flocking via the scheduler (and eventually via OSC-style remoting), including: ** Create, add, remove, and destroy synths ** Update synth values ** Start and stop the environment
Improvements to flock.modelSynth, which will become the default
Improved MIDI support
Out of the box support for OSC.js

Complete rewrite of the Flocking interpreter (a.k.a. the parser) to be more modular
Support the separation and naming of unit generators with wire specifications, which will enable one unit generator to be hooked up as the input to more than one other unit generator (sketches)
Consider an expression syntax (compatible with Infusion) that will allow for a more terse means of wiring
Refactor the Live Playground to support wire specifications

SignalEvaluator
JSON Specification for wiring up WebAudio nodes
Ability to connect synths up to other synths directly, rather than depending on buses
Ability to schedule WebAudio AudioParams declaratively

"Generous" JSON parser and CodeMirror mode that supports unquoted keys, comments, and line/character index metadata
Expression parser that supports mathematical expressions, references to constants, etc. in JSON
Ability to load a JSON file containing a band/synthDef from the local file system or a URL
Refactor flock.synth so its synthDef is a "live model," where all changes to the unit generator graph are mediated by the ChangeApplier and take effect on-the-fly

Rewrite the visual playground and underlying synthDef/ugenDef parsing logic
Replace JSPlumb with Cytoscape or equivalent
Better visual representations for unit generators, envelopes, etc. (i.e. render them directly)
Support for rendering multiple synths and bands
Support for rendering common Infusion IoC expressions
Add ability to edit unit generator graphs

Functions + state for all unit generators
Further optimize all hot paths
Ability to inject change unit generators for sample-accuracy when scheduling value changes