Build: bad69db | October 15 – October 17, 2026
Hot on the heels of the recent performance overhaul, development on Omni has delivered a major burst of musical workflow and composition features. Over the past 48 hours, twenty-one targeted improvements have landed across the engine, sequencing tools, and interface.
Here is a tour of the key additions in Build bad69db!
🥁 Global Groove Engine: 9 Swing Models & Dedicated Panel
Swing is no longer just a simple percentage slider. Omni now features a standalone, deterministic Groove Engine (omni_engine/src/groove/) that treats musical feel as a structural dimension of your project:
- 9 Musical Swing Models: Choose between classic MPC 50–75%, Jazz (with an organic ratio that dynamically adapts to project tempo), Nest, Push, Drunk, Samba, Waltz, and fully configurable Custom curves.
- Coherent Time-Warping: Groove applies monotonic time curvature across both the start and end of notes, preserving note lengths and aligning off-grid syncopations cleanly.
- Unified Across the Workstation: Swing is now heard coherently across Session View piano rolls, Arrangement MIDI clips, the Step Sequencer, and Euclidean rhythm generators (with per-track bypass if you want drums tight and straight).
- Interactive GROOVE Panel: A dedicated panel displays written versus played timing in real-time with visual hit accents, humanize drift, and a live playhead. You can even extract groove directly from any audio or MIDI clip with the
GRABfunction.
🔗 Rebuilt Clip & Scene Chains: Deterministic Follow Actions
Clip and Scene Chains have been redesigned from scratch around a unified, real-time-safe core (Chain<S>):
- Pure Function Determinism: Every random branch or shuffle is hashed from the seed and loop count. Seeking, looping, and offline bouncing produce bit-identical playback every single time.
- Playback Modes: Run chains in Forward (FWD), Reverse (REV), Ping-Pong (PING), Shuffle (SHUF), Random without consecutive repeats (RAND), and random Walk.
- Visual 16-Loop Lookahead: The chain editor now draws a live timeline predicting the next 16 iterations directly using engine simulation, letting you see exactly where your sequence will travel before it plays.
- Zero Allocations: Memory allocations during loop transitions have been completely eliminated. Long chains no longer overlap UI buttons or lose playhead position during live tweaks.
🎛️ MIDI FX Overhaul: Tuplets & Ornaments Rewritten
Two essential MIDI effects have been re-engineered as modular, high-precision musical processors:
Tuplets (Polyrhythms & Micro-Timing)
- 4-Layer N:M Engine: Effortlessly dial in complex polyrhythms (3:4, 5:4, 3:4:5) across four simultaneous layers.
- Quantize with Automatic Lead (PDC): Lookahead quantization shifts notes ahead or behind the beat without dropping late hits, seamlessly compensated by Omni's Plugin Delay Compensation.
- Interactive Wheels: A dedicated ring display visualizes phase cycles, while a live piano roll displays shift threads and ghost hits. 50 factory presets included.
Ornaments (19 Historical & Contemporary Figures)
- 19 Authentic Ornaments: Instant trills (standard, upper, with Nachschlag, inverted), mordents, turns, appoggiaturas, acciaccaturas, flams, slides, and traditional Irish rolls.
- Musical Resolve: Trills continue smoothly while a key is held, automatically completing their final turn and resolving onto the sustained root note upon release.
- 4 Filter Slots: Map ornaments across 4 configurable slots filtered by velocity windows, keyswitches, or lane triggers. 45 factory presets included.
🎚️ Modular Track Strips: Fixed-Height Pages (VOL / FX / SND)
Session View track strips now maintain a clean, consistent height, regardless of how many inserts or routing points you add:
- Three Dedicated Pages: Switch between VOL (fader, bipolar pan arc, dB trim knob, and LUFS meter), FX (full-width device chain with horizontal scrolling), and SND (matrix of return bus sends).
- Smart Indicators: Tab buttons display active device counts and send activity LEDs. Double-clicking a tab toggles all tracks simultaneously.
- True Peak Hold: Track meters and return strips now feature persistent peak hold markers and latching overload clip indicators (cleared with a click).
🎹 Piano Roll & Interface Refinements
- Minimap Scrollbar: The piano roll's vertical scrollbar now renders a live minimap of note densities across octaves, making it effortless to jump to active chords in dense arrangements.
- Real-Time DSP & Master Telemetry: A new DSP row above the Master console tracks the exact execution load of the main audio callback, alongside real-time CPU and RAM indicators.
- Smooth Modular Patching: When routing modulation cables, dragging towards screen borders smoothly scrolls the device rack. Modulation sockets now feature tactile 3D jack connectors with animated swinging cables.
- Phosphor Vector Icons: Over 180 legacy Unicode glyphs have been replaced with crisp Phosphor vector icons, eliminating blank box glitches on Windows.
- Unified Project Loader: The Load menu now features dedicated tabs for Recent projects and Autosave Recovery with age filters (Today, Yesterday, This Week) to recover crash snapshots in a single click.
- Interactive Euclidean Rings: Adjust pulses, rotation, and pitch offset by dragging directly onto the circular Euclidean dial.
Build bad69db represents another huge stride towards making Omni the most responsive, creative, and dependable DAW available. Grab the latest build and explore the new groove engine today! 🚀