The next version of Z-Maestro, version 1.5 has now been out for about a week. I’d like to give a rundown of what’s new in this version, as well as the direction Z-Maestro is headed in the future.

On the surface, Z-Maestro 1.5’s user interface has had a lot of added polish and refinement. The main look is still the same, but many graphical tweaks have been made to make everything crisper and cleaner. For example, the coloring of parts in the track view has changed slightly in order to make parts “pop” and provide more focus on the content you are creating. The design of the audio editor has also been improved to make audio selections stand out.

Underneath, 1.5 is a relatively major revision, representing some of the most significant advancements to the underlying architecture since Z-Maestro’s inception. The mixing engine has been rewritten to take advantage of Windows Core Audio on Windows Vista and 7. On Windows XP, it still uses DirectSound for output, but it still gains all of the benefits from the work done on the rest of the mixing engine.

One new feature that we will be taking to its full potential in the next major release is the ability to mix with an arbitrary number of channels. In 1.5, this means that you can now have both stereo and mono audio parts instead of just stereo audio parts as in the previous version. It also means that in the next version, we will be adding powerful surround sound support.

Another feature added in 1.5 was one of the biggest requests: Ogg Vorbis export support. Previous versions allowed importing audio stored in Ogg Vorbis, but there wasn’t export support until now. Note that this feature is only available in the Pro edition, not the free version.

Performance, as always, was a big goal in this release. The new mixing engine is significantly faster and provides much lower latencies than ever before, but that is just the beginning. We also added hardware accelerated compositing to all of the editing panes that comes into effect during project playback. This addresses the chief performance problem of previous releases; namely, during playback, the editors constantly rerendered themselves in order to update the location of the playhead. Z-Maestro now uses Direct3D (version 9 right now in order to ensure XP compatibility) to draw the playhead movement which is incredibly fast (60 fps with low CPU usage).

In the next version or two, the current plans are to add:

• Surround sound support
• Simple video support
• DirectShow import/export support
• VST and VSTi support
• Direct2D hardware accelerated rendering (maybe?)

If you haven’t already, be sure to download the latest version from the Z-Maestro page!