It's time again for that trip-to-the-candy-store feeling with VCV Rack: the Eurorack rush without spending anything at all. Since our last episode, we've gotten new 4ms Roland-style drums, some unique stuff from Venom, a trio of chaotic oscillators, and a sequencer inspired by the legendary HP 8006A Word Generator. Hands-on with these open-source creations -- let's go!
The post New free VCV Rack modules: chaotic oscillators, HP word generator, drums appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.
Week highlights: new Blender, RapidRAW, Gradia, Sigil, and Hydrogen releases; new darktable UI prototypes.
I last looked at this new screenshot annotation app about a month ago. Alexander has introduced quite a few changes since then:
That’s not even the complete list of changes. You can grab the latest release here or install it from Flathub.
RapidRAW is a new digital photography workflow application similar to darktable, Lightroom, et al. CyberTimon, the developer behind it, says he’s just 18, and it’s his personal software development challenge, aided by AI.
The developer made four releases, mostly with new features just this week, so I guess the AI part is real. Here is a quick overview of what’s new since v1.2.5 released, oh, just last week:
My own quick test hasn’t been very successful, mainly because I cannot develop RAF files in the program. You can tell it even from the screenshot:
One more concern I’ve seen discussed on Pixls is that if this is an Electron app, it’s unclear whether color management is functional.
Either way, you can download RapidRAW and see for yourself if it works for you. I’m giving you a general downloads link intentionally, because by the time you read this, there may already be 10 newer versions available.
Pixls user rudantu continues to develop prototypes for darktable’s updated user interface. The latest proposal covers the UI of modules.
Personally, I quite like rudantu’s work and really hope the team will implement at least some of the proposed changes
The new version of the EPUB authoring tool has a few minor new features, but it’s mostly a bugfix release. So if you rely on this program, absolutely do upgrade.
This is a long-term support release of Blender, which will receive bugfix updates for the next two years. Here are some of the release highlights:
For a vastly more detailed list of changes, please see here. As usual, there’s a video recap:
The new version of this drum machine features Qt6 support, the deprecation of LASH, the venerable session manager for audio applications on Linux. The rest of the changes are bugfixes.
The Mouldering by Josh Norman, made with Blender and Photoshop:
The Bazaar Beneath the Academy by Deltakosh, made with Blender and Photoshop:
Viking Village by ELEVEN TRIS, made with Blender and Unreal Engine:
Song of Alcazar by Max Bedulenko, made with Blender and Unreal Engine:
APOLLO- A.P.H.X by Ta Cheng Lin, made with Blender and Photoshop:
And for an entirely different mood, I’m giving you Anti-Light Pollution Commando by Corentin, made with Krita and a great sense of humour:
Hi all,
Change-log:
Description:
Website:
Project page:
Downloads:
Git repos:
Wiki:
License:
Enjoy && Keep the fun!
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, and it should be safe to update from 1.26.x.
Highlighted bugfixes:
See the GStreamer 1.26.4 release notes for more details.
Binaries for Android, iOS, Mac OS X and Windows will be available shortly.
Week highlights: new releases of Krita, Bonsai, OBS Studio, and Kdenlive; new features in GIMP, FontForge, and Ardour.
Here are some of the latest changes in the development branch:
This is a bugfix release (with another one likely coming within a week). You can find the list of fixes in this announcement. The team also mentioned that they are now focusing on upcoming releases of Krita 5.3.0 (new features) and Krita 6.0.0 (Qt6 port, initial Wayland support).
I haven’t followed FontForge development for some years. So it’s good to know (thanks to Nathan Willis) that the program now renders previews in the Metrics view with HarfBuzz. The same contributor has been working on a GTK3 port for a while, too.
If you’ve been around long enough, you probably recall that there already was an attempt to create a GTK-based UI years ago when the original developer was still around. That didn’t work the last time, so maybe this time it will.
The new version of Bonsai (formerly BlenderBIM) comes with 770 new features and fixes. Here are some of the changes:
See here for the announcement.
This release of OBS Studio brings various new features:
See here for the full list of changes.
This update brings half a dozen minor bugfixes. Meanwhile, contributor balooii balooii has been steadily submitting various cosmetic user interface fixes, improving UI contrast and HiDPI support. Recently, they also contributed a patch (currently in review) that adds a draggable rotation anchor to do non-centered rotation of clips.
Paul continued working on pianoroll windows and related functionality, then switched back to implementing recording audio in the Cue sequencer. He also began extending recently added support for keyboard control for automation points. Now when you press Enter to add a new automation point, you automatically get an input box to type the new value. This isn’t finished yet, though.
Alive by Muhammad Fahad, made with Blender and Photoshop:
The Pact by Sravan NCS, made with Blender, Zbrush, and Photoshop Elements:
As of July 10, 2025, all flavors of Ubuntu 24.10, including Ubuntu Studio 24.10, codenamed “Oracular Oriole”, have reached end-of-life (EOL). There will be no more updates of any kind, including security updates, for this release of Ubuntu.
If you have not already done so, please upgrade to Ubuntu Studio 25.10 via the instructions provided here. If you do not do so as soon as possible, you will lose the ability without additional advanced configuration.
No single release of any operating system can be supported indefinitely, and Ubuntu Studio has no exception to this rule.
Regular Ubuntu releases, meaning those that are between the Long-Term Support releases, are supported for 9 months and users are expected to upgrade after every release with a 3-month buffer following each release.
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.
The volume slider on our virtual desktops is a skeuomorphic callback to the volume sliders on professional audio equipment on actual, physical desktops. [Maker Vibe] decided that this skeuomorphism was so last century, and made himself a physical audio control box for his PC.
Since he has three audio outputs he needs to consider, the peripheral he creates could conceivably be called a fader. It certainly has that look, anyway: each output is controlled by a volume slider — connected to a linear potentiometer — and a mute button. Seeing a linear potentiometer used for volume control threw us for a second, until we remembered this was for the computer’s volume control, not an actual volume control circuit. The computer’s volume slider already does the logarithmic conversion. A Seeed Studio Xiao ESP32S3 lives at the heart of this thing, emulating a Bluetooth gamepad using a library by LemmingDev. A trio of LEDs round out the electronics to provide an indicator for which audio channels are muted or active.
Those Bluetooth signals are interpreted by a Python script feeding a software called Voicmeeter Banana, because [Maker Vibe] uses Windows, and Redmond’s finest operating system doesn’t expose audio controls in an easily-accessible way. Voicmeeter Banana (and its attendant Python script) takes care of telling Windows what to do.
The whole setup lives on [Maker Vibe]’s desk in a handsome 3D printed box. He used a Circuit vinyl cutter to cut out masks so he could airbrush different colours onto the print after sanding down the layer lines. That’s another one for the archive of how to make front panels.
If volume sliders aren’t doing it for you, perhaps you’d prefer to control your audio with a conductor’s baton.
The GStreamer team is pleased to announce the first development release in the API/ABI-unstable 1.27 release series.
The API/ABI-unstable 1.27 release series is for testing and development purposes in the lead-up to the stable 1.28 series which is scheduled for release in late 2025. Any newly-added API can still change until that point.
This development release is primarily for developers and early adopters, and distros should probably not package it.
Highlighted changes:
Binaries for Android, iOS, Mac OS X and Windows will be made available shortly at the usual location.
Release tarballs can be downloaded directly here:
As always, please give it a spin and let us know of any issues you run into by filing an issue in GitLab.
Has that DAW grid got you down? Do you feel like you're caught in the 1980s looking at a multitrack editor? Have your friends stopped talking to you because they want more breaks and intelligent rhythms so they can put those new sneakers to proper dancing use? Renoise is back with features like a phrase scripting engine powered by the new open-source pattrns (with Tidal notation support), full tuning support, sub-signal effects splitting, and more. $88 new. Holy mother of God, it's nerd Christmas in July.
The post Renoise 3.5 is huge: phrase scripting, tuning support, splitter effect, more appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.
Hello all, it has been a while since the last project update/news.
Life has been very chaotic and I was not able to pay too much attention to "optional" projects, other things needed priority.
Now with work and housing situation sorted and also some holidays, it is the right time to give some general project update.
That said, I always have trouble writing these kind of updates, taking me quite some time to go through each individual thing that happened, giving it an explanation/reason, plans for future, etc.
So starting this month, KXStudio project updates will be more formal and generic so I can mostly copy & paste between each one, keeping the same format but just changing the content.
Some applications in the KXStudio repositories do not run on new systems and have also been abandoned by their official upstream authors, I will soon remove some of them.
That is all for now, see you next month!
Hello all,
Change-log:
Description:
Project page:
Downloads:
Git repos:
License:
Enjoy!
USB audio is great, but what if you needed to use it and had no budget? Well, depending on the contents of your parts bin, you might be able to use [Veyniac]’s Pico-Audio-Interface as a free (and libre! It’s GPL3.0) sound capture device.
In the project’s Reddit thread, [Veyniac] describes needing audio input for his homemade synth, but having no budget. Necessity being the mother of invention, rather than beg borrow or steal a device with a working sound card, he hacked together this lovely device. It shows up as a USB Audio Class 2.0 device so should work with just about anything, and offers 12-bit resolution and 4x oversampling to try and deal with USB noise with its 2-channel, 44.1 kHz sample rate.
Aside from the Pico, all you need is an LM324 op-amp IC and a handful of resistors and capacitors — [Veyniac] estimates about $10 to purchase the whole BOM. He claims that the captured audio sounds okay in his use, but can’t guarantee it will be for anyone else, noise being the fickle beast that it is. We figure that sounding “Okay” has got to be pretty good, given that you usually get what you pay for — and again, [Veyniac] did build this in a cave with a box of scraps. Well, except for the cave part. Probably.
While the goal here was not to rival a commercial USB sound card, we have seen projects to do that. We’re quite grateful to [Omadeira] for the tip, because this really is a hack. If you, too, want a share of our undying gratitude (which is still worth its weight in gold, despite fluctuations in the spot price of precious metals), send in a tip of your own.
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 herrsteiner (noreply@blogger.com) at May 26, 2025 06:23 PM
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.
45 posts - 25 participants
by herrsteiner (noreply@blogger.com) at March 27, 2025 05:28 PM
Ardour 8.12 is now available.
This is a hot-fix release, intended to fix two issues.
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.
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.
6 posts - 6 participants
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.
(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.
3 posts - 3 participants
A touch of music
Audio – Stefan Westerfeld's blog
Audio, Linux and the combination
Blog - Ardour
FreqRush - experiences with shared audiosoftware
GStreamer News
Home on Libre Arts
Hometracked
Internet Archive - Collection: osmpodcast
JACK Audio Connection Kit News
KXStudio News
Linux Archives - CDM Create Digital Music
Linux Audio Conference 2018
Linux Recording
LinuxMuso
MOD Audio website
Musings on maintaining Ubuntu
News – Ubuntu Studio
Nothing Special
OpenAV
PipeManMusic
Robin Gareus
SFZ Format news
Testbit
Thorwil's
Using Open Source Software For Creative Purposes
aubio
blog4
digital audio hacks – Hackaday
drobilla.net - LAD
fundamental code
harryhaaren
joebutton.co.uk
linux-audio « WordPress.com Tag Feed
linux_audio – autostatic.com
m3ga blog
process();
rncbc.org - a.k.a. Rui Nuno Capela
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