planet.linuxaudio.org

June 03, 2025

Linux Archives - CDM Create Digital Music

New VCV Rack modules – including JW Arrange so you can finish tracks

Ah, shiny, new, free modules for the free VCV Rack. They're a perfect solution to starting new tracks and playing with new toys. Of course, that's not a problem most of us have. Starting is easy; finishing is hard. Enter JW Arrange. Let's have a look.

The post New VCV Rack modules – including JW Arrange so you can finish tracks appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

by Peter Kirn at June 03, 2025 05:37 PM

June 02, 2025

rncbc.org - a.k.a. Rui Nuno Capela

qpwgraph v0.9.3 - An End-of-Spring'25 Beta Release

qpwgraph v0.9.3 - An End-of-Spring'25 Beta Release

Greetings,

qpwgraph v0.9.3 (end-of-spring'25) released!

Change-log:

  • Corrected (again) salvage of node positions that possibly have the very same and exact name.

Description:

qpwgraph is a graph manager dedicated to PipeWire, using the Qt C++ framework, based and pretty much like the same of QjackCtl.

Project page:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/rncbc/qpwgraph

Downloads:

Git repos:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/rncbc/qpwgraph.git (official)
https://github.com/rncbc/qpwgraph.git
https://gitlab.com/rncbc/qpwgraph.git
https://codeberg.org/rncbc/qpwgraph.git

License:

qpwgraph is free, open-source software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 or later.

Enjoy!

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by rncbc at June 02, 2025 05:00 PM

June 01, 2025

Home on Libre Arts

Weekly recap — 1 June 2025

Week highlights: new features in GIMP, new versions of PDF Arranger, Odin 2, and Tumult; new VAMP plugins.

GIMP

Two interesting patches merged to GIMP this week:

  • Importing legacy drop shadows in PSD (MR #2297).
  • Loading layered EXR files (MR #2301).

EXR with layers opened in GIMP

Other interesting changes in review:

  • JPEG 2000 exporting, with options for quality, CMYK exporting, and Digital Cinema Specification compliance profile (MR #2291).
  • Loading Photoshop patterns (MR #2285).

Because it’s LGM week, the team attended the conference, and this seems to have brought back Michael Natterer, who hasn’t been active in the project in the past two years.

PDF Arranger 1.12

This is a convenient little application by Konstantinos Poulios for performing various operations on PDF files. Here is what’s new in this release:

  • You can now export pages to PNG, JPEG, and rasterized PDF.
  • There’s a new option to drop document-level information like outline, passwords, and tags when exporting.
  • You can now do reverse imposition (booklet to pages).
  • It’s possible to do range selection for pages now.
  • You can now choose standard paper sizes when inserting a blank page or changing the page size.

PDF Arranger 1.12

There are builds for Windows on GitHub and a Linux build on Flathub.

Odin2 v2.4.0

TheWaveWarden released a new version of this free/libre virtual synth with a complete UI revamp. Already covered this in a few more details on a dedicated post earlier this week, have a read.

Odin 2.4.0

Tumult 1.1.0

Consint released a new version of Tumult, a plugin that adds noise to your audio for aesthetic reasons. You can now import custom samples and use 50 more noises added from the “Noise Plethora” sample pack.

Tumult 1.1.0

Here is an earlier video demonstration of the plugin:

New VAMP plugins

Chris Cannam released two new VAMP plugins:

  • MERT Vamp plugin extracts feature vectors ( you could call them patterns) that can be used in machine learning for music interpretation.
  • Lossy Encoding Detector attempts to determine if the audio was ever subjected to a lossy compression algorithm.

Technically, you can use both of them with Sonic Visualiser, but only the lossy encoding detector renders an immediately useful plot.

Lossy detector VAMP plugin

Ardour and the Linux kernel

Linux 6.x broke support for Launchkey MK4 users in Ardour. This is because the system builds the names of ports from USB iProduct and USB iJack names, and some manufacturers put the product name into both. So instead of a telling port name Ardour sees something like “Launchkey MK4 61 Launchkey MK4” for all available ports and doesn’t know which one to pick.

Paul Davis ended up rolling up his sleeves and submitting a patch to introduce some basic heuristics and make the naming of MIDI ports smarter. Now, instead of non-descript “Launchkey MK4 61 Launchkey MK4”, you get regular port names like “Launchkey MK4 61 DAW In”. The patch has already landed in the kernel v6.14.8.x, and users report that it resolves the issue.

Artworks

Flooded Temple by OOFBurrito, made with Blender and GIMP:

Flooded Temple by OOFBurrito

They Will Kneel Soon by Arshad T P, made with Blender, After Effects, and Photoshop:

They Will Kneel Soon by Arshad T P

Entrance to the Research Facility for The Dark Eye by Illarstration, made with Krita:

Entrance to the Research Facility for The Dark Eye by Illarstration

Disney SpeedStorm: The Castle by Pedro Pitéu, made with Blender, Krita, and Photoshop (all artwork in the series made in pre-production and during development of the game):

Disney SpeedStorm: The Castle by Pedro Pitéu

Ruins of the Frozen Viking Ancients by YKK, made with Blender, 3DCoat, and Photoshop:

Ruins of the Frozen Viking Ancients by YKK

Fantastica Kowloon - Mufant Contest Entry by Alessandro Rocco, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Fantastica Kowloon - Mufant Contest Entry by Alessandro Rocco

June 01, 2025 08:14 PM

May 30, 2025

Linux Archives - CDM Create Digital Music

Unofficial “Move – Extended” hacks extra powers for Ableton Move, free

It's unofficial. It'll void your warranty. But - that adds to the fun, right? Move-Extended gives you a companion website for Ableton Move that adds new features, including sample reverse, a Drum Rack Inspector, Macro editing for synths, kit slicing, chord kits, and MIDI import. It's free, open source, and fully documented.

The post Unofficial “Move – Extended” hacks extra powers for Ableton Move, free appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

by Peter Kirn at May 30, 2025 03:39 PM

May 29, 2025

GStreamer News

GStreamer 1.26.2 stable bug fix release

The GStreamer team is pleased to announce another bug fix release in the new stable 1.26 release series of your favourite cross-platform multimedia framework!

This release only contains bugfixes as well as a number of security fixes and important playback fixes, and it should be safe to update from 1.26.x.

Highlighted bugfixes:

  • Various security fixes and playback fixes
  • aggregator base class fixes to not produce buffers too early in live mode
  • AWS translate element improvements
  • D3D12 video decoder workarounds for crashes on NVIDIA cards on resolution changes
  • dav1d AV1-decoder performance improvements
  • fmp4mux: tfdt and composition time offset fixes, plus AC-3 / EAC-3 audio support
  • GStreamer editing services fixes for sources with non-1:1 aspect ratios
  • MIDI parser improvements for tempo changes
  • MP4 demuxer atom parsing improvements and security fixes
  • New skia-based video compositor element
  • Subtitle parser security fixes
  • Subtitle rendering and seeking fixes
  • Playbin3 and uridecodebin3 stability fixes
  • GstPlay stream selection improvements
  • WAV playback regression fix
  • GTK4 paintable sink colorimetry support and other improvements
  • WebRTC: allow webrtcsrc to wait for a webrtcsink producer to initiate the connection
  • WebRTC: new Janus Video Room WebRTC source element
  • vah264enc profile decision making logic fixes
  • Python bindings gained support for handling mini object writability (buffers, caps, etc.)
  • Various bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

See the GStreamer 1.26.2 release notes for more details.

Binaries for Android, iOS, Mac OS X and Windows will be available shortly.

May 29, 2025 11:55 PM

News – Ubuntu Studio

Ubuntu Studio 22.04 LTS has reached End-Of-Life (EOL)

Ubuntu Studio 22.04 LTS has reached the end of its three years of supported life provided by the Ubuntu Studio team. All users are urged to upgrade to 24.04 LTS at this time.

This means that the KDE Plasma, audio, video, graphics, photography, and publishing components of your system will no longer receive updates, plus we at Ubuntu Studio won’t support it after 29-May-2025, though your base packages from Ubuntu will continue to receive security updates from Ubuntu until 2027 since Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Cloud and Ubuntu Core continue to receive updates.

See the Ubuntu Studio 24.04 LTS Release Notes for upgrade instructions.

No single release of any operating system can be supported indefinitely, and Ubuntu Studio has no exception to this rule.

Long-Term Support releases are identified by an even numbered year-of-release and a month-of-release of April (04). Hence, the most recent Long-Term Support release is 24.04 (YY.MM = 2024.April), and the next Long-Term Support release will be 26.04 (2026.April). LTS releases for official Ubuntu flavors (not Desktop or Server which are supported for five years) are three years, meaning LTS users are expected to upgrade after every LTS release with a one-year buffer.

by eeickmeyer at May 29, 2025 04:50 PM

Home on Libre Arts

Odin 2 synth gets a UI revamp

Odin 2 is a free (GPLv3+) 24-voice polyphonic semi-modular synth with a modulation matrix and microtuning support (imports Scala files). The initial release happened almost 5 years ago. Everyone got pretty excited, and for a good reason: it was a good synth.

Not just that—it also came a few years after the initial release of Surge, which kinda solidified the feeling that things are really getting better for musicians who stick with Linux.

TheWaveWarden kept releasing updates until three years ago when he started working on another synth (Spline), and it felt like this was the last update of Odin. I mean, we’ve seen it with Helm and Vital before, right? But no, here we are with a brand new version of Odin 2.

The main change is a full revamp of the user interface.

Odin 2.4.0

The old one was a bit clunky, scaling didn’t work properly, various other things would sometimes go *boing*. So while working on Spline, TheWaveWarden developed a whole new UI engine. Once he fleshed it out, he moved it to Odin and got a dedicated team to do the new design:

It was a costly investment, as the UI assets were created by Voger Design team. I hope Spline will bring back those costs at least. Even if not, I always wanted to give the Odin UI the love it deserves, since it’s still a community favourite. Lets see! :)

The scaling does work much better now, and redrawing after selecting a different zoom factor doesn’t take much time.

One caveat I’ve noticed so far is that the developer has swapped the modulation wheel and the pitch bend wheel in the UI to accommodate for the pitch bend range widget. But that means that the position of controls now doesn’t match what you typically get on a physical MIDI keyboard. Messes up my brain a little. The developer replied (#474) that he’ll listen to more feedback and then decide if he changes things back.

Apart from that, it’s still the good old Odin with its warm sound. The new version is available for Linux, Windows, and macOS. The Linux version is available in LV2, VST3, and CLAP.

If you want to support the developer, I can’t think of any better way than buying Spline. It’s his new baby, a wavetable synth with spectral wave morphing and spline modulators. Not free/libre, but then again, if the stories of Vital and VCV Rack 2 have taught me anything, it’s not like there are business models for FOSS plugins that work for everyone.

May 29, 2025 12:00 AM

May 26, 2025

blog4

Pictures from Elektronengehirn Berlin concert

The Elektronengehirn concert 19. April 2025 at Noiseberg, Berlin (DE). Pictures by Orange 'Ear.
Equipment was Linux computer with custom Pure Data patch for sound, custom software created with the Godot game engine for visuals, a digital synthesizer Malte Steiner developed 2 years ago and the new modular synthesizer he developed in the last couple of months.






by herrsteiner (noreply@blogger.com) at May 26, 2025 06:23 PM

May 21, 2025

rncbc.org - a.k.a. Rui Nuno Capela

Qtractor 1.5.5 - A Mid-Spring'25 Release

Qtractor 1.5.5 - A Mid-Spring'25 Release

Hi everyone,

Qtractor 1.5.5 (mid-spring'25) is out!

Change-log:

  • Fixed negative time values displayed in tool-tips, when dragging the rubber-band (lasso) to the left, over the absolute beginning of the timeline.
  • A warning is now issued when an audio self connection is made eg. connecting an output bus (or insert send) directly into an input bus (or insert return).
  • Files item selection mode switching corrected.
  • Mitigate or postpone a 'too many open files' condition as much as possible.
  • Let muted clips show the "[Mute]" tag as the name label prefix, so that it's visible even on small clips.
  • Stepping up next development cycle (Qt >= 6.9)

Description:

Qtractor is an audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer application written in C++ with the Qt framework. Target platform is Linux, where the Jack Audio Connection Kit (JACK) for audio and the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) for MIDI are the main infrastructures to evolve as a fairly-featured Linux desktop audio workstation GUI, specially dedicated to the personal home-studio.

Website:

https://qtractor.org

Project page:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/qtractor

Downloads:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/qtractor/files

Git repos:

https://git.code.sf.net/p/qtractor/code
https://github.com/rncbc/qtractor.git
https://gitlab.com/rncbc/qtractor.git
https://codeberg.org/rncbc/qtractor.git

Wiki:

https://sourceforge.net/p/qtractor/wiki/

License:

Qtractor is free, open-source Linux Audio software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 or later.

Enjoy && Keep the fun!

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by rncbc at May 21, 2025 05:00 PM

May 02, 2025

digital audio hacks – Hackaday

Smart Speaker Gets Brain Surgery, Line-Out

A Yamaha smart speaker, now with external DAC.

Sometimes you find a commercial product that is almost, but not exactly perfect for your needs. Your choices become: hack together a DIY replacement, or hack the commercial product to do what you need. [Daniel] chose door number two when he realized his Yamaha MusicCast smart speaker was perfect for his particular use case, except for its tragic lack of line out. A little surgery and a Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC) breakout board solved that problem.

You can’t hear it in this image, but the headphones work.

[Daniel] first went diving into the datasheet of the Yamaha amplifier chip inside of the speaker, before realizing it did too much DSP for his taste. He did learn that the chip was getting i2s signals from the speaker’s wifi module. That’s a lucky break, since i2s is an open, well-known protocol. [Daniel] had an Adafruit DAC; he only needed to get the i2s signals from the smart speaker’s board to his breakout. That proved to be an adventure, but we’ll let [Daniel] tell the tale on his blog.

After a quick bit of OpenSCAD and 3D printing, the DAC was firmly mounted in its new home. Now [Daniel] has the exact audio-streaming-solution he wanted: Yamaha’s MusicCast, with line out to his own hi-fi.

[Daniel] and hackaday go way back: we featured his robot lawnmower in 2013. It’s great to see he’s still hacking. If you’d rather see what’s behind door number one, this roll-your-own smart speaker may whet your appetite.

by Tyler August at May 02, 2025 08:00 PM

April 24, 2025

GStreamer News

GStreamer 1.26.1 stable bug fix release

The GStreamer team is pleased to announce another bug fix release in the new stable 1.26 release series of your favourite cross-platform multimedia framework!

This release only contains bugfixes and security fixes, and it should be safe to update from 1.26.0.

Highlighted bugfixes:

  • awstranslate and speechmatics plugin improvements
  • decodebin3 fixes and urisourcebin/playbin3 stability improvements
  • Closed captions: CEA-708 generation and muxing fixes, and H.264/H.265 caption extractor fixes
  • dav1d AV1 decoder: RGB support, plus colorimetry, renegotiation and buffer pool handling fixes
  • Fix regression when rendering VP9 with alpha
  • H.265 decoder base class and caption inserter SPS/PPS handling fixes
  • hlssink3 and hlsmultivariantsink feature enhancements
  • Matroska v4 support in muxer, seeking fixes in demuxer
  • macOS: framerate guessing for cameras or capture devices where the OS reports silly framerates
  • MP4 demuxer uncompressed video handling improvements and sample table handling fixes
  • oggdemux: seeking improvements in streaming mode
  • unixfdsrc: fix gst_memory_resize warnings
  • Plugin loader fixes, especially for Windows
  • QML6 GL source renegotiation fixes
  • RTP and RTSP stability fixes
  • Thread-safety improvements for the Media Source Extension (MSE) library
  • v4l2videodec: fix A/V sync issues after decoding errors
  • Various improvements and fixes for the fragmented and non-fragmented MP4 muxers
  • Video encoder base class segment and buffer timestamp handling fixes
  • Video time code support for 119.88 fps and drop-frames-related conversion fixes
  • WebRTC: Retransmission entry creation fixes and better audio level header extension compatibility
  • YUV4MPEG encoder improvments
  • dots-viewer: make work locally without network access
  • gst-python: fix compatibility with PyGObject >= 3.52.0
  • Cerbero: recipe updates, compatibility fixes for Python < 3.10; Windows Android cross-build improvements
  • Various bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

See the GStreamer 1.26.1 release notes for more details.

Binaries for Android, iOS, Mac OS X and Windows will be available shortly.

April 24, 2025 11:30 PM

April 17, 2025

News – Ubuntu Studio

Ubuntu Studio 25.04 Released

The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu Studio 25.04 code-named “Plucky Puffin”. This marks Ubuntu Studio’s 36th release. This release is a Regular release and as such, it is supported for 9 months, until January 2026.

Since it’s just out, you may experience some issues, so you might want to wait a bit before upgrading. Please see the release notes for a more complete list of changes and known issues. Listed here are some of the major highlights.

This release is dedicated to the memory of Steve Langasek. Without Steve, Ubuntu Studio would not be where it is today. He provided invaluable guidance, insight, and instruction to our leader, Erich Eickmeyer, who not only learned how to package applications but learned how to do it properly. We owe him an eternal debt of gratitude.

You can download Ubuntu Studio 25.04 from our download page.

Special Notes

The Ubuntu Studio 25.04 disk image (ISO) exceeds 4 GB and cannot be downloaded to some file systems such as FAT32 and may not be readable when burned to a standard DVD. For this reason, we recommend downloading to a compatible file system. When creating a boot medium, we recommend creating a bootable USB stick with the ISO image or burning to a Dual-Layer DVD.

Minimum installation media requirements: Dual-Layer DVD or 8GB USB drive.

Images can be obtained from this link: https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/25.04/release/

Full updated information, including Upgrade Instructions, are available in the Release Notes.

Upgrades from 24.10 should be enabled within a month after release, so we appreciate your patience. Upgrades from 25.04 LTS will be enabled after 24.10 reaches End-Of-Life in July 2025.

New This Release

GIMP 3.0: Wilber logo by Aryeom

GIMP 3.0!

The long-awaited GIMP 3.0 is included by default. GIMP is now capable of non-destructive editing with filters, better Photoshop PSD export, and so very much more! Check out the GIMP 3.0 release announcement for more information.

Pencil2D Icon

Pencil2D

Ubuntu Studio now includes Pencil2D! This is a 2D animation and drawing application that is sure to be helpful to animators. You can use basic clipart to make animations!

The basic features of Pencil2D are:

  • layers support (separated layer for bitmap, vector and soud part)
  • bitmap drawing
  • vector drawing
  • sound support

LibreOffice No Longer in Minimal Install

The LibreOffice suite is now part of the full desktop install. This will save space for those wishing for a minimalistic setup for their needs.

Invada Studio Plugins

Beginning this release we are including the Invada Studio Plugins first created by Invada Records Australia. This includes distortion, delay, dynamics, filter, phaser, reverb, and utility audio plugins.

PipeWire 1.2.7

This release contains PipeWire 1.2.7. One major feature this has over 1.2.4 is that v4l2loopback support is available via the pipewire-v4l2 package which is not installed by default.

PipeWire’s JACK compatibility is configured to use out-of-the-box and is zero-latency internally. System latency is configurable via Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuration.

However, if you would rather use straight JACK 2 instead, that’s also possible. Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuration can disable and enable PipeWire’s JACK compatibility on-the-fly. From there, you can simply use JACK via QJackCtl.

Ardour 8.12

This is, as of this writing, the latest release of Ardour, packed with the latest bugfixes.

To help support Ardour’s funding, you may obtain later versions directly from ardour.org. To do so, please one-time purchase or subscribe to Ardour from their website. If you wish to get later versions of Ardour from us, you will have to wait until the next regular release of Ubuntu Studio, due in October 2025.

Deprecation of Mailing Lists

Our mailing lists are getting inundated with spam and there is no proper way to fix the filtering. It uses an outdated version of MailMan, so this release announcement will be the last release announcement we send out via email. To get support, we encourage using Ubuntu Discourse for support, and for community clicking the notification bell in the Ubuntu Studio category there.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Does Ubuntu Studio contain snaps?
A: Yes. Mozilla’s distribution agreement with Canonical changed, and Ubuntu was forced to no longer distribute Firefox in a native .deb package. We have found that, after numerous improvements, Firefox now performs just as well as the native .deb package did.

Thunderbird also became a snap so that the maintainers can get security patches delivered faster.

Additionally, Freeshow is an Electron-based application. Electron-based applications cannot be packaged in the Ubuntu repositories in that they cannot be packaged in a traditional Debian source package. While such apps do have a build system to create a .deb binary package, it circumvents the source package build system in Launchpad, which is required when packaging for Ubuntu. However, Electron apps also have a facility for creating snaps, which can be uploaded and included. Therefore, for Freeshow to be included in Ubuntu Studio, it had to be packaged as a snap.

We have additional snaps that are Ubuntu-specific, such as the Firmware Updater and the Security Center. Contrary to popular myth, Ubuntu does not have any plans to switch all packages to snaps, nor do we.

Q: Will you make an ISO with {my favorite desktop environment}?
A: To do so would require creating an entirely new flavor of Ubuntu, which would require going through the Official Ubuntu Flavor application process. Since we’re completely volunteer-run, we don’t have the time or resources to do this. Instead, we recommend you download the official flavor for the desktop environment of your choice and use Ubuntu Studio Installer to get Ubuntu Studio – which does *not* convert that flavor to Ubuntu Studio but adds its benefits.

Q: What if I don’t want all these packages installed on my machine?
A: Simply use the Ubuntu Studio Installer to remove the features of Ubuntu Studio you don’t want or need!

Get Involved!

A wonderful way to contribute is to get involved with the project directly! We’re always looking for new volunteers to help with packaging, documentation, tutorials, user support, and MORE! Check out all the ways you can contribute!

Our project leader, Erich Eickmeyer, is now working on Ubuntu Studio at least part-time, and is hoping that the users of Ubuntu Studio can give enough to generate a monthly part-time income. We’re not there, but if every Ubuntu Studio user donated monthly, we’d be there! Your donations are appreciated! If other distributions can do it, surely we can! See the sidebar for ways to give!

Special Thanks

Huge special thanks for this release go to:

  • Eylul Dogruel: Artwork, Graphics Design
  • Ross Gammon: Upstream Debian Developer, Testing, Email Support
  • Sebastien Ramacher: Upstream Debian Developer
  • Dennis Braun: Upstream Debian Developer
  • Rik Mills: Kubuntu Council Member, help with Plasma desktop
  • Scarlett Moore: Kubuntu Project Lead, help with Plasma desktop
  • Len Ovens: Testing, insight
  • Mauro Gaspari: Tutorials, Promotion, and Documentation, Testing, keeping Erich sane
  • Simon Quigley: Qt6 Megastuff
  • Erich Eickmeyer: Project Leader, Packaging, Development, Direction, Treasurer
  • Steve Langasek: You are missed.

by eeickmeyer at April 17, 2025 05:08 PM

April 06, 2025

What's coming in Ardour 9.0

Although we did a couple of hot-fix releases, it’s been quite a long time since the last planned release of Ardour. We’ve also not been responding particularly effectively to bug reports and user suggestions. This has all been because of a mountain of work going on to get 9.0 ready for release, and I wanted to just outline what we think will be in that version so that people can understand the relative “silence” from the project.

There’s still a lot of work to do before we release 9.0, but the following is a list of things we think will likely be there Some of them may not quite make it, and its possible there might be other things added.

GUI Rearrangement

We can’t say much about this yet, because the work here is not really finished. The main elements of this are that every page (editor/mixer/cue/record) in the GUI now has 5 areas: the transport bar (now always visible), the “main area” (e.g. the editor), 2 sidebars (left and right) and a lower pane that can show a variety of things. You’ll see more about this as we get closer to a 9.0 pre-release.

Multi-touch GUI

On Linux and Windows, Ardour now supports multi-touch interaction as provided by the operating system. This may come for macOS eventually, but the way multi-touch works there is significantly different and will need more work.

Pianoroll window(s)

Double click on a MIDI region to edit it in its own dedicated window, or in a pane at the bottom of the main window. Editing in that window will work almost identically to the way it does in the main timeline, but without the distractions of the timeline. You can also see MIDI automation (velocity, CC parameters etc.) overlaid (or not).

MIDI Cue Editing

The Cue page now allows direct editing of the contents of MIDI cues (“clips” for Live & Bitwig users).

Audio Cue Editing

This may or may not make it in time for 9.0. If it does, you’ll be able to edit audio cues directly on the cue page, setting loop points and more.

Cue Recording

You can now record directly into cue slots, making Ardour a “looper” in the same sense that Live, Bitwig and several other contemporary DAWs are. You can pre-specificy the recording duration (e.g. “Record 4 bars”) or you can record until you think you’re done. Whatever you recorded will start playing at the next quantization point (e.g. bar/beat).

Region FX

Is the answer to the question “how do I add some delay to just this part of my vocal?” Similar to region gain it allows to apply any plugin a given audio region only. The effect and its automation remains with the region, even when it is moved around on the timeline. While the same result can be achieved with channels-strip plugins in the mixer (using bypass automation) applying effects directly to regions on the timeline is convenient for many workflows. The given effect is applied offline, when reading the region from disk and does not add any additional DSP load.

Real Time Analyzer

A dedicated perceptual analyzer window is the works which allows one to visualize the live spectrum of multiple signals. A key feature is that one can overlay individual sources (tracks and busses) on top of each other. This allows one to see which track contributes a given of frequency range to the overall mix, find conflicting ranges or holes in the spectrum.

Faster GUI drawing on macOS

Without telling anyone, Apple have subtly changed the way their drawing APIs work for graphical applications over the last 5-10 years. The result has been that a naive graphical app would end up redrawing its entire window even if only a few pixels needed updating. We’re far from the only application to be affected by this. In Ardour 9.0 the GUI drawing speed will be significantly faster, at least on very dense pages like the mixer.

Bug Fixes

We’ve accumulated a long list of bug fixes during the significant reorganization that has taken place for 9.0. We’ll document them once we get to the release.

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by Paul Davis at April 06, 2025 05:50 PM

March 30, 2025

digital audio hacks – Hackaday

Can Hackers Bring Jooki Back to Life?

Another day, another Internet-connected gadget that gets abandoned by its creators. This time it’s Jooki — a screen-free audio player that let kids listen to music and stories by placing specific tokens on top of it. Parents would use a smartphone application to program what each token would do, and that way even very young children could independently select what they wanted to hear.

Well, until the company went bankrupt and shutdown their servers down, anyway. Security researcher [nuit] wrote into share the impressive work they’ve done so far to identify flaws in the Jooki’s firmware, in the hopes that it will inspire others in the community to start poking around inside these devices. While there’s unfortunately not enough here to return these devices to a fully-functional state today, there’s several promising leads.

It probably won’t surprise you to learn the device is running some kind of stripped down Linux, and [nuit] spends the first part of the write-up going over the partitions and peeking around inside the filesystem. From there the post briefly covers how over-the-air (OTA) updates were supposed to work when everything was still online, which may become useful in the future when the community has a new firmware to flash these things with.

Where things really start getting interesting is when the Jooki starts up and exposes its HTTP API to other devices on the local network. There are some promising endpoints such as /flags which let’s you control various aspects of the device, but the real prize is /ll, which is a built-in backdoor that runs whatever command you pass it with root-level permissions! It’s such a ridiculous thing to include in a commercial product that we’d like to think they originally meant to call it /lol, but in any event, it’s a huge boon to anyone looking to dig deeper in to the device.

The inside of a second-generation Jooki

But wait, there’s more! The Jooki runs a heartbeat script that regularly attempts to check in with the mothership. The expected response when the box pings the server is your standard HTTP 200 OK, but in what appears to be some kind of hacky attempt at implementing a secondary OTA mechanism, any commands sent back in place of the HTTP status code will be executed as root.

Now as any accomplished penguin wrangler will know, if you can run commands as root, it doesn’t take long to fire up an SSH server and get yourself an interactive login. Either of these methods can be used to get into the speaker’s OS, and as [nuit] points out, the second method means that whoever can buy up the Jooki domain name would have remote root access to every speaker out there.

Long story short, it’s horrifyingly easy to get root access on a Jooki speaker. The trick now is figuring out how this access can be used to restore these devices to full functionality. We just recently covered a project which offered a new firmware and self-hosted backend for an abandoned smart display, hopefully something similar for the Jooki isn’t far off.

by Tom Nardi at March 30, 2025 02:00 PM

March 27, 2025

blog4

concerts spring 2025

The next live concerts of Malte Steiner's soloprojects:

Elektronengehirn will play 19. April at Noiseberg Berlin, Germany

Notstandskomitee will play 17. May Object Permanence Festival at Caisa Culture Centre Helsinki, Finland

by herrsteiner (noreply@blogger.com) at March 27, 2025 05:28 PM

March 11, 2025

Ardour 8.12 released

Ardour 8.12 is now available.

This is a hot-fix release, intended to fix two issues.

  1. the bug fix introduced in 8.11 turned out to be incorrect, and broke several other things in subtle ways. 8.12 is a completely new approach to fixing the problem with region lengths after certain operations could cause sessions to be unloadable.

  2. for several previous versions, the packaging of translation files on macOS was broken. This has been corrected, and translations should work again on that platform.

Note that 8.12 will also correctly load sessions suffering from the problem referred to in #1 above.

All users of earlier 8.x versions should plan to upgrade as soon as possible. Apologies for the problems the bug in #1 has caused people - we hope this is a permanent, correct fix this time.

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by Paul Davis at March 11, 2025 11:06 PM

February 17, 2025

Internet Archive - Collection: osmpodcast

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February 17, 2025 06:56 PM

February 16, 2025

drobilla.net - LAD

Software Pages Removed

I haven't been sure what to do about the software pages here for quite a while. Most of them were essentially just stale versions of the README files from their projects, and for better and worse, most of the projects I maintain are libraries that don't have as much of a need for a homepage as user-facing software. It's easy to just ignore things that don't really matter in day-to-day work, but the embarrassingly bad state of things became really clear when I sat down to actually poke through this site.

Since it's much more important for me right now to streamline maintenance duties and eliminate as much overhead as possible, I've simply removed all of the software pages, and redirected those addresses to the corresponding Gitlab projects where possible. I might bring them back at some point, but for now, no pages are better than stale pages that really only serve to make things look bad. I don't have traffic metrics here, but I seriously doubt anyone will either notice or care.

I'm not sure about the utility of the software release posts or tarballs either. Ideally, the effort required to make a release could be reduced to simply pushing a git tag, and cross-domain posting hugely complicates that. Besides, the tarballs are made manually on my personal machine, so they're absolutely less trustworthy than the signed tags in git anyway, and, I assume, not reproducible. At the same time, for many reasons I'm wary of fully investing in some git forge or another, the automatic tarballs provided by all of them leave much to be desired (the silly "v" names for example), and I don't want to disrupt things for packagers. We'll see, but for now I'll leave the mechanics of actual releases as they are.

Ultimately, pages and posts are largely a waste of time for libraries and similar things that only support other projects anyway. So, a more radical simplification of the release process would be a good idea, but for now I'll just take out the trash and reduce the amount of things I need to consider in that process.

by drobilla at February 16, 2025 04:32 PM

February 06, 2025

Abstraction Leakage

(This post is geekery of, if not the highest order, then fairly high order. It doesn’t contain any useful information about Ardour itself, but might be interesting for … people interested in such arcana)

The packaging issue that broke translations in our initial release of 8.11 for Linux and macOS was almost a cool bug. I thought I’d quickly describe it here for the geeks among us.

The problem came from a combination of two things: an actual error in our packaging scripts, and the subtle and generally not-considered behavior of the Unix find command.

Our wonderful translators work on files that end in “.po” and connect the original english strings in the source code with their translated versions. During the build process, tools from the GNU translation system are used to convert the .po files into .mo files (aka “message catalogs”), which contain the same information but in a binary format that can be more efficiently used by the program when it is running.

During packaging Ardour for distributions, we copy all the .mo files into a new location in preparation for “bundling” (e.g. as a DMG file for macOS or a .run file for Linux). The copy also requires a renaming, because the organization of the message catalogs for use by the program needs to be fairly different than the way they are organized in our source code.

So the first bug was that we used find(1) to locate all the .mo files and copy/rename them. We start in several locations within the source code, including the directory that holds the GUI source code (gtk2_ardour). The files we’re looking for are in the po folder, and we use find because we don’t want to hard-code the languages that have translations. However, it turns out that there are another set of message catalogs associated with the RedHat/Fedora “appdata” system, and these files not only also are somewhere under gtk2_ardour but also, because of the way the translation software works, they have the same name.

So, if find finds the “real” message catalogs first and copies/renames them during packaging, and then later finds the “appdata” message catalogs, the latter will overwrite the former in the package being built. This is a bug - the appdata message catalogs are placed in the packaging at a separate step of the process, and we should not have been using a command that was so generic. This was easy to fix (and has been).

But wait a minute … didn’t this work just fine for Ardour 8.10 and other releases? It did. How could that be? Well, recall that at the beginning of the previous paragraph I wrote “if find …”. It turns out that that the order in which find will find files, unless told otherwise, depends on the filesystem the files are located on. Consequently, if you use two different types of filesystem (e.g. on Linux the ext4 or xfs filesystems), find may very well return files in a different order on each.

However, it does deeper than this. Certain directory operations can also cause the filesystem to change its state in a way that will change the order in which find finds files. It turns out that this had happened within the build systems we use for macOS and Linux. At the time we released 8.10, find would locate the (unintended) appdata message catalogs first, copy/rename them into the package and then later repeat this for the real message catalaogs. Result? The package has the correct translation files and everything works. When we released 8.11, the ordering had changed, and the real message catalogs were found first, and then overwritten by the “appdata” ones. Result – translations do not work.

I thought this was an example of a fairly cool and unusual category of bug. There was an error in our packaging scripts - we used an unnecessarily generic command to find message catalogs that needed installing, which found files it should not have. But this mistake by itself did not matter on systems where the unintended files were found first. It only caused problems when the unintended files were found second.

This is not a perfect example of what programmers called “Abstraction Leakage”, but it’s not a bad one. We generally like to think of filesystems as things where the details of their internal organization do not really matter, and for the most part that is possible. But combine the fact that their internal organization does affect the order that a program like find will list files in, and the bug in our packaging script, and all of a sudden the internal details of how filesystems work becomes a thing we have to think about.

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by Paul Davis at February 06, 2025 04:13 PM

February 04, 2025

drobilla.net - LAD

Intermission

I don't suppose inactivity from me will be terribly surprising to anyone after the past several years. Still, since I was working on emptying my bug-fix and maintenance queue, making releases, and finally getting to some significant forward progress again, an update:

Unfortunately I got violently ill last week with some horrible flu-like thing, the worst I've ever had (and I'm a COVID casualty, so that's saying quite a lot). Somehow, it's still going strong. So, aside from maybe a few minutes a day of idle tinkering, everything I was doing is on pause for a while. Hopefully a short while, but so far so not good, so we'll see.

As an added bonus, Google just bricked my phone with a botched forced update, so I'm locked out of 2FA and many other things besides (I suppose I had to learn the hard way that I've gotten lazy and too dependent on that horrible device). So, yeah, things aren't going great, to put it lightly.

On the bright side, I do have some exciting things in the queue, but since I don't do vapourware or hype (to a fault, really), and have a huge amount of "infrastructure" work to do first anyway, you'll have to stay tuned for that. Assuming I don't die first, anyway.

... if I do, it would be pretty funny that this was my last post though, so I've got that going for me, which is nice.

[Edited on 2025-02-16 to remove broken link]

by drobilla at February 04, 2025 07:40 PM