Slopsmith is a free, open-source music notation viewer with full-band support and an extensive plugin system. It scrolls a note highway in time with the audio so you can play along, and almost everything around that - instruments, visualizers, practice tools, tone modeling - is a plugin.

v0.2.9 is by far the largest release the project has had. It adds a whole new instrument, a teaching layer, a minigames platform, several new bundled plugins, a big performance pass, and **over 70 bug fixes**. Here's the full rundown.

# 🥁 Drums - a brand-new instrument

Drums are now a first-class arrangement, not a hack on top of guitar notes. They have their own on-disk format and their own stream to the renderer, and the release covers the whole pipeline:

* A **dedicated drum highway** with a proper lane layout.
* **Drum authoring in the editor**, so you can build or fix charts by hand.
* **Import from Guitar Pro and MIDI** (channel-9), preserving velocity and mapping hi-hat openness, with detection of flams, ghost notes, and cymbal chokes.
* An **18-piece kit vocabulary** \- kick, snare + cross-stick, four toms, hi-hat (open/closed/pedal), crash L/R, splash, china, ride + ride bell, and a couple of extras.

Any song that ships a drum track activates the drums view automatically, regardless of which guitar arrangement you had selected.

# 🎓 A video lesson engine (Tutorials plugin)

This turns Slopsmith into an actual teaching tool. Lessons are grouped into **tutorial packs**, and there are three modes:

* **Browse** \- a grid of packs and their lessons.
* **Lesson** \- watch a short intro video, then hit "Start exercise" to launch the paired song and play it. When the song ends you log your accuracy, which submits a run.
* **Author** \- build your own packs: upload a video (webm/mp4) or paste a link, pick an exercise song from your library, set pass/mastery thresholds, and tag techniques.

All progress flows through the shared minigames profile (so XP, streaks, and unlocks stay unified), and two starter packs ship built in: *Intro to Bends* and *Reading the Highway*.

# 🎮 Minigames framework

A built-in **Minigames** hub gets its own top-level nav entry (next to Library / Favorites / Upload, not buried in a menu). It adds XP, levels, per-game leaderboards, and cross-game unlocks on a shared profile. The first game, *Flappy Bend*, ships with it. There's also an SDK so any plugin can add a minigame without rolling its own pitch detection, HUD, or backend - it can lean on the framework's continuous / discrete / chord scorers.

# 🎤 Karaoke

The new Lyrics Karaoke plugin gives you a one-button setup. It runs whatever's missing for a song: Whisper alignment of pasted lyric text against the vocals stem, then per-syllable pitch extraction. In the player you get a SingStar-style **pitch ribbon** \- one bar per syllable, positioned by pitch, with a sweeping playhead. Both the synced lyrics and the pitch data persist inside the song file.

# ✨ Live note detection that lights up the gems

When note detection confirms a hit, the **note itself** now reacts: a bright gem on a clean hit, a glowing sustain trail while you hold a sustain correctly, and a faint red wash on a miss - plus a contained sparkle/sizzle effect on the note. It works on both the built-in 2D highway and the 3D highway, and custom renderers can opt in to the same per-note state.

# 🔌 New bundled plugins

* **SlopScale** \- turns scales, arpeggios, technique, and grooves into practice routines you'll actually run, played back in a DAW-style player with a real-sounding backing band. Pick a routine, set a tempo, and drill.
* **NAM Rig Builder** \- maps each song's amp + cab + pedal chain to neural-amp (NAM) captures and impulse responses from tone3000.com and chains them, so the song plays through a realistic modeled rig.
* **Song Preview** \- hover a song in the library to hear its short preview clip (no need to load the whole thing).
* **Tuner** \- a built-in instrument tuner, in the box by default.

# 🛣️ Highway & visuals

* **3D highway upgrades** \- a tone-change HUD (shows the active tone and the next scheduled change), fret dividers, a chord-diagram toggle, an on-screen FPS counter, and a fretboard preview of the upcoming note.
* **Tone Polish** \- an optional fixed 3-band mastering EQ on the guitar bus, for quick tone shaping without a full rig.

# 📂 Library, songs & audio

* **Loose-folder playback** \- point Slopsmith at a folder of audio + chart files and play it directly, with no conversion step. Loose songs appear alongside everything else with a FOLDER badge and full filtering.
* **Library power tools** \- a Filters drawer to require *or* exclude arrangements (lead/rhythm/bass/combo), specific stems, lyrics, and tunings; sort by year; and a tuning sort ordered by musical distance instead of alphabetically.
* **Song previews preserved** on conversion (powers the Song Preview plugin above).
* **ASIO input with non-ASIO output** \- you're no longer forced into a single ASIO device for both directions.

# 🧰 Quality of life

* **Settings export / import** \- back up, migrate, or share your entire calibrated setup (config + plugin state) as a single versioned file.
* **Diagnostics export** \- a one-click, redacted diagnostics bundle (logs, hardware, plugin inventory, console transcript) for bug reports.
* **No more screensaver mid-song** \- the display stays awake during playback (wake-lock in the browser, a native power blocker in the desktop app).
* **Opt-in LAN access** \- let other devices on your network reach the backend, for second-screen / tablet setups.
* **Structured logging** \- leveled logs with optional JSON output and request-correlation IDs, for anyone self-hosting.

# ⚡ Performance

The runtime Tailwind CDN is gone, replaced by a prebuilt stylesheet - that CDN was scanning the DOM on the main thread \~1.8×/sec and dropping \~26% of frames in long sessions with the 3D highway. On top of that, per-frame allocations are cut across both the 2D and 3D render paths (pre-warmed object pools, cached chord/lyric computations, a precomputed shimmer lookup table) so dense charts stay smooth.

# 🖥️ Desktop app

* **Single-instance lock** \- relaunching focuses the existing window instead of opening a second copy (this was the real cause of the "3D highway stutter" people reported - it was actually multiple instances running at once).
* **Auto-update with selectable channels** \- stable / rc / beta / alpha via Velopack, so you can opt into early builds or stay on stable.
* **NAM** \- support for Tone3000 **A2** models.
* **Linux** \- the AppImage now falls back to `--no-sandbox` automatically when the kernel's user-namespace sandbox isn't usable.
* **macOS** \- Retune fixed on Apple Silicon, a proper microphone-permission prompt, and a lower-jitter tuner feed.
* **Audio** \- monitor-mute now persists across device changes.

# 🧩 Plugin platform

For plugin authors: a versioned **capability pipeline** layer (with a bundled Capability Inspector to see the live graph), coordinated **audio control planes** for mix / input / monitoring / playback, and a generic plugin asset route so plugins can self-host their own AudioWorklets / WASM / images instead of relying on a CDN.

# 🐛 Bug fixes (70+)

A lot of stability work landed alongside the features. By area:

* **Audio & engine** \- contain non-finite / runaway signal-chain output, catch plugin crashes at runtime so the app stays up, fix a VST-scan crash on macOS, guard Windows-only code so the addon loads on macOS/Linux, multichannel input selection, pitch-preserving slowdown fixes.
* **Plugin sandbox** \- async plugin load so the UI stays responsive, top-level editor windows in the child process, IPC hardened against command injection & path traversal, better load-heartbeat / timeout handling.
* **Highway & rendering** \- extended-range (7/8-string) chord regressions, left-handed camera mirroring, sustain trails for open strings in a chord, stale chord-flag clearing, shortcut help on the 3D highway.
* **Library & import** \- multiple imported guitars now get distinct roles (Lead/Rhythm/Combo) instead of all "Lead", Guitar Pro note + technique recovery, GP8 embedded audio + percussion, stem-split fixes, atomic conversion writes.
* **Security** \- path-traversal rejected in the archive extractors and the file-serve endpoint; read-only `.git` mount for rebuild detection.
* **Desktop & packaging** \- reliable port reclaim so settings persist, orphaned-backend cleanup, per-machine MSI on Windows, macOS signing/notarization fixes, and a pile of CI/packaging hardening.

# ⬇️ How to get it

Downloads are on the GitHub releases page. Each desktop OS gets an installer **and** a portable build:

* **Windows** \- `.msi` installer (auto-updates) or a portable `.zip`
* **macOS** \- `.pkg` installer or a portable `.zip` (signed & notarized)
* **Linux** \- `.AppImage` or `.deb`

# ⬆️ Upgrading?

For the cleanest upgrade, delete Slopsmith's config folder before installing - it clears stale settings, the old plugin set, and the cached renderer (the usual cause of an upgraded build looking broken or "missing" new features). Your song files aren't stored there, so they're safe:

* Windows: `%APPDATA%\slopsmith-desktop`
* macOS: `~/Library/Application Support/slopsmith-desktop`
* Linux: `~/.config/slopsmith-desktop`

Now licensed AGPL-3.0. Free and open source - feedback, bug reports, and contributions are all very welcome.

**One more thing - the naming poll has ended.** Across three polls, more than **2,000 people voted**, and the winning name (with **415 votes**) is **fee\[dB\]ack**. There's now a community effort underway to design the new logo - come help shape it in the [Discord](https://discord.gg/TzPVK8fNBm).

Slopsmith Desktop v0.2.9 - a new instrument (drums), a video lesson engine, minigames, karaoke, loose-folder playback, and 70+ fixes