STRAUSS<sup>1</sup> v1.00 Release Notes
==================================
<sup>1</sup> _Sonification Tools and Resources for Analysis Using Sound Synthesis_
A summary of the major changes from the STRAUSS pre-release. This includes a submission to the _Journal of Open Source Software_ ([JOSS](https://joss.theoj.org/)), found [here](https://github.com/james-trayford/strauss/blob/v1.0.0/joss/paper.md).
- **Fast Spectralisation**: The `Spectraliser` generator type uses IFFT via `scipy` to rapidly generate [spectral audifications](https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.10126), supporting time varying spectralisation, as a method of image sonification (inverse spectrogram method).
- **Soundfont Support**: Alongside user-curated sample sets, STRAUSS can now interface with _soundfont_ (`.sf2`) files directly - allowing easy use of organic sounding instrumentation with widely available soundfont files.
- **Audio Captioning and Text-to-Speech (TTS) Support:** added TTS support with multiple backends - either _AI_ (`coqui-tts`) or _platform_ (`pyttsx3`) text-to-speech. This allows embedded audio captions to be written as text, providing context for sonifications in multiple languages. The TTS functionality will be extended further in future versions
- **Spatial Audio Support**: Spatial audio can be generated as any other channel set-up with `setup="ambiX<N>"`, where N is a positive integer, producing N<sup>th</sup> order _Ambisonic_ format. Uses the `ambisonic` channel type with ACN ordering of spherical harmonic using SN3D normalization.
- **Extensive Documentation**: We adopt a new parameter file metadata system such that descriptions can be added alongside any new `Generator` parameters. These are tabulated in the documentation automatically along with in-code documentation to provide a more complete reference. [See Here](https://strauss.readthedocs.io/en/v1.0.0/).
- **Examples**: [Extended examples](https://strauss.readthedocs.io/en/v1.0.0/examples.html) provide example usage of major code features in both python notebook (`*.ipynb`) and script (`*.py`) format, for accessibility.
- **Fixed Bugs**: bug preventing multiple oscillators in the `Synthesizer`, Bug effecting the time domain of sonifications using percentiles, *etc...*
v0.1.0_pre-release
First publicly available version of the `strauss` code, with documentation available here: https://strauss.readthedocs.io/en/latest/. This is in pre-release form, awaiting the v1.0.0 release and accompanying article (_Trayford et al in prep._)
- Features example notebooks demonstrating the Sonifications included in the [Audio Universe tour of the Solar System](https://www.audiouniverse.org/tour-of-the-solar-system) (full article [here](https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021arXiv211202110H/abstract))
- Also demonstrates sonification of 1D data series, applying various mappings of the expressive properties of sound (pitch, filtering and volume).