Changelog

All notable changes to this project are documented here.

This project adheres to Keep a Changelog 1.1.0 and to Semantic Versioning.

Unreleased

0.1.0 - 2026-07-27

Added

• Parallel rendering with threads. render, render_file, load_preset, load_json and to_json now release the GIL, so Python threads that each own a separate Synth render on separate cores. See Parallel rendering and the new examples/multithreading_presets example.

• Synth.set_sample_rate to configure the render sample rate (#6).

• Documentation site built with Sphinx and published to GitHub Pages, covering a quickstart, parallel rendering, and a generated API reference.

• This changelog.

• Wheels for CPython 3.14.

• Type stubs. Wheels now ship vita.pyi and py.typed, generated from the compiled module by nanobind’s stub generator, so editors and type checkers understand the API.

• tests/test_threading.py, covering concurrent rendering, concurrent preset loading, shared-Synth serialization, and recovery from failed loads.

• tests/test_control_options.py, which reads the metadata of every control rather than a hand-picked few.

Changed

• Building from source is now just pip install . on every platform. setup.py compiles the extension itself, deriving the Python paths from the interpreter running the build, so no environment variables have to be set beforehand.

• ControlValue.set and Value.set register their integer and enum overloads ahead of the float one. Runtime behaviour is unchanged – nanobind tries every overload without implicit conversion first – but the generated stubs no longer look like the float overload shadows the others.

• Upgraded nanobind from 2.7.0 to 2.13.0. Among other things this fixes an extra copy of the return value when a call_guard is in use, and speeds up handing NumPy arrays back to Python.

• FFT::transform() now returns a thread-local FourierTransform. The IPP and kissfft backends keep mutable scratch state in the object, which concurrent wavetable work would have corrupted.

• RandomGenerator::next_seed_ is now std::atomic<int>, so constructing synths on several threads at once is not a data race.

• Docstrings across the bindings were filled in and corrected; render previously described itself as writing a file and returning a bool.

• CI builds and tests against manylinux_2_28 rather than manylinux2014, and tests the built wheel rather than a stray extension module in the source tree.

Fixed

• macOS wheels no longer carry a dead x86-64 slice. The Xcode project defaults to ARCHS = "arm64 x86_64", so it built both and lipo’d them together, while nanobind’s static library is built for one architecture only. The x86-64 slice therefore linked without any nanobind symbols – Python extensions defer undefined symbols to load time, so nothing failed – and delocate --require-archs arm64 was satisfied by the good slice. The build now targets only the architecture being built for, which also halves the macOS build.

• The oscillator and sample destination controls accepted one value more than there are routings. Vital sizes them as kNumSourceDestinations + kNumEffects where every comparable parameter uses count - 1, so the trailing value named no destination and silently routed the source nowhere; set_normalized(1.0) landed on it. Their max is now 13 rather than 14, so the full normalized range maps onto real routings. Presets are unaffected – they store raw values, and nothing clamps on load.

• get_control_details(...).options and get_control_text no longer read past the end of a control’s name table. Several controls accept more values than Vital has names for – view_2d and view_spectrogram span 0-2 with two names, filter_*_style spans 0-9 with five – and the count was taken from the value range rather than the table. In 0.0.5 reading .options on any of those seven controls crashed the interpreter; four more (osc_{1,2,3}_destination, sample_destination) silently reported a fifteenth option, 'Shelf', that does not exist. Both now stop at the last real name, so a control’s options may be shorter than max - min + 1 when the surplus values are unnamed.

• A failed load_json or load_preset no longer leaves the synth’s critical section held. Because rendering releases the GIL, a subsequent render would have hung uninterruptibly instead of raising.

• The render buffer is no longer leaked if an exception unwinds out of the DSP loop.

• The modulation source and destination caches are now initialized through a thread-safe function-local static instead of an unsynchronized flag.

• examples/multiprocessing_presets passed MIDI velocity as 100 where the API expects 0-1, and ignored its own --render-duration argument.

Removed

• build_linux.sh and build_macos.sh, and the separate msbuild step in CI. All three are now handled by setup.py.

• DistortionType.None, renamed to DistortionType.Off. Breaking, though only nominally: None is a Python keyword, so DistortionType.None was a syntax error and the member could only ever be reached through getattr(DistortionType, "None").

• macOS x86-64 wheels, so Intel Macs are no longer supported. The macos-13 runner image is retired and those CI jobs no longer start. There is no source distribution to fall back on, so pip install vita fails with “no matching distribution found” on an Intel Mac; stay on 0.0.5 there. Apple silicon, Linux x86-64 and Windows x86-64 are unaffected.

• librosa from the test requirements; nothing used it, and it was the main source of dependency-resolution failures on new Python versions.

0.0.5 - 2025-06-03

Added

• Normalized parameter access via ControlValue.set_normalized and get_normalized, plus parameter introspection through Synth.get_control_details and Synth.get_control_text (#3).

0.0.4 - 2025-02-13

Added

• Pickle support for Synth, which makes it usable across multiprocessing workers (#1).

0.0.3 - 2025-01-08

Fixed

• Wheel-building workflow corrections.

0.0.2 - 2025-01-08

Fixed

• Wheel-building workflow corrections.

0.0.1 - 2025-01-08

Added

• Initial release: Python bindings for the Vital synthesizer, covering preset loading and saving, control access, modulation routing, and rendering to a NumPy array or a wav file.