Hi, it's been rough last couple of months for me and this took a bit longer than usual, but oh dear, where to start? This has gotta be the biggest update ever. geez... there's too much stuff, and I just decided to stop arbitrarily cause there's still lots of stuff to do. Ok, here goes the highlights!

This is the 1st multichannel (MC) aware release of ELSE! So many many many objects were updated to become MC aware: 42 of them to be exact. There are also many many new objects, and many of them are MC capable, 20 out of 33! Som in total I have 62 objects that deal with MC... that's a good start. More to come later!

Note that 4 of these new ones were just me being lazy and creating new mc oscillators with [clone], I might delete them and just make the original objects MC aware... so basically these new MC objects bring actual new functionalities and many are tools to deal with MC in many ways, like spliting, merging, etc...

With 33 new objects, this is the first release to reach and exceed the mark of 500 externals, what a milestone! (This actually scares me). We now have 509 objects and for the first time ever I have reached the number of examples in the Tutorial, which is also 509 now! But I guess eventually the tutorial will grow larger than the number of externals again...

Since the last release, ELSE comes with an object browser plugin, I have improved it and also included a browser for Vanilla objects. I think it's silly to carry these under ELSE and I hope I can bring this to Vanilla's core. see https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data/pull/1917

A very exciting new object is [sfz~], which is a SFZ player based on 'SFIZZ'. This is more versatile than other externals out there and pretty pretty cool (thanks alex mitchell for the help)!

I have created a rather questionable object called [synth~] which wraps around [clone] and [voices]/[mono], but I think it will be quite interesting to newbies. It loads synth abstractions in a particular template and makes things a bit more convenient. It also allows you to load different abstraction patches with dynamic patching magic.

[plaits~] has been updated to include new 8 synth engines with the latest firmware. Modular people are happy... (thanks amy for doing this)

One cool new object for MC is [voices~], which is a polyphonic voice manager that outputs the different voices in different channels. If you have MC aware oscillators and stuff this allows you to manage polyphonic patches without the need of [clone] at all. This is kinda like VCV works and it opens the door for me to start designing modular inspired abstractions, something I mentioned before and might come next and soon! So much being done, so much to do... What an exciting year for Pd with the incredibly nice MC feature!

There's lots more stuff and details, but I'l just shut up and link to the full changelog here https://github.com/porres/pd-else/releases/tag/v1.0-rc9

You can get ELSE from deken as well. It's up there for macOS, Windows and Linux. Please test and tell me if there's something funny (raspberry pi may come soon).

Cheers.