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This post consolidates events of the last two weeks. Highlights: new releases of GIMP, darktable, Cardinal; new features in FreeCAD and Ardour.

GIMP 3.1.2

This is the first release in the series leading up to v3.2 expected, oh well, frankly I don’t know when! This year, hopefully?

Here is what’s new:

• A switch on Brush, Font, and Palette docks to render the background in the theme’s background color (should be always on, IMO).
• New paint mode, Overwrite, to replace pixels without blending source and target transparency values.
• The position of the text outline can now be set to outer, inner, and centered. It was always centered before that.
• Non-destructive filters can now be attached to separate channels.
• The CMYK Color Selector now displays the total ink coverage of the selected color.
• Improved support for Photoshop files: GIMP now loads patterns, as well as presets for curves and levels, and exports PSB files.
• Loading multi-layer OpenEXR images is available now.

See here for a more detailed list of changes.

darktable 5.2

Main changes this new version:

• Side-by-side comparison between snapshots (on the screenshot below)
• The metadata module is now fully configurable and allows to add and maintain any tags which are supported by exiv2
• New “raster mask import” module to use PFM files and raster masks.
• The Sigmoid module is now the default tone-mapper.
• You can now export with multiple exporting presets in one go (think full-res and lower-res exports).
• OM System 14-bit high-resolution ORFs are now supported.

Here are the release notes.

FreeCAD

There’s a lot going on in the community regarding Werner’s recent public post in the forum, where he voiced various concerns about the project’s operation, including things like the merging of breaking changes. Apparently, there are some behind-the-scenes conversations going on, so I’d rather not elaborate until the dust settles.

In development news, perhaps the most interesting upcoming change is a long-anticipated text tool in Sketcher. Here is a quick demo by Pierre:

This has not been merged yet, there are still fixes to be done based on code reviews.

Also, Kacper Donat is working on transparent previews again (FPA grant from late 2024). Here is one of the recent screenshots illustrating a transparent preview for the Helix tool:

Cardinal 25.06

Felipe Coelho released an update of Cardinal, his fork on VCV Rack. Changes:

• Replaced SVModular DrumKit with WSTD-Drums fork (the original developer requested it).
• Added the eightfold module, an eight-voice algorithmic sequence generator.
• Updated 10 other existing modules.

You can grab the latest release here on GitHub.

Ardour

Paul Davis added a basic implementation of keyboard shortcuts for automation editing seen in Ableton Live 12.2 (e.g., on this video):

• Enter adds a new automation point
• Right and Left arrow keys move the created point on the timeline
• Up and Down arrow keys raise and lower the point

The implementation is not a 1:1 copy, some things are missing. For example, typing a new value directly is not yet available, nor is jumping between prev/next automation points.

Another recent change is the direct response to a user’s request on Reddit for guidance on aligning multiple regions from different tracks on the timeline. There are keyboard shortcuts for that, but they weren’t exposed in the UI and thus weren’t quite discoverable. So Paul fixed that:

There are a few more options than that, they may show up in the menu at a later time.

Artworks

Before the Void by Vadim Sadovski, made with Blender and Photoshop

Nurgle by Coffee Time, made with Krita:

Arches & Ruins by ABluSkittle, made with fixme:

Sea by Philipp A. Urlich, made with fixme:

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.

New releases

• NEW! lv2-gtk-ui-bridge project first release - LV2 Gtk2/3 UIs as LV2 X11 UIs
• NEW! podcast-plugins project first release - speech enhancement audio plugins for podcasters
• Cardinal updated to 25.06
• master_me updated to 1.3.0

Repository updates

• NEW! added lv2-gtk-ui-bridge 0.1
• NEW! added odin2 2.4.1
• NEW! added podcast-plugins 1.0.0
• NEW! added tunefish4 4.3.0
• NEW! added vitling-crypt 0.3.0
• cardinal updated to 25.06
• jalv updated to 1.6.8
• master-me updated to 1.3.0
• zam-plugins updated to 4.4

Final notes

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!

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
• Security fix for the H.266 video parser
• Fix regression for WAV files with acid chunks
• Fix high memory consumption caused by a text handling regression in uridecodebin3 and playbin3
• Fix panic on late GOP in fragmented MP4 muxer
• Closed caption conversion, rendering and muxing improvements
• Decklink video sink preroll frame rendering and clock drift handling fixes
• MPEG-TS demuxing and muxing fixes
• MP4 muxer fixes for creating very large files with faststart support
• New thread-sharing 1:N inter source and sink elements, and a ts-rtpdtmfsrc
• New speech synthesis element around ElevenLabs API
• RTP H.265 depayloader fixes and improvements, as well as TWCC and GCC congestion control fixes
• Seeking improvements in DASH client for streams with gaps
• WebRTC sink and source fixes and enhancements, including to LiveKit and WHIP signallers
• The macOS osxvideosink now posts navigation messages
• QtQML6GL video sink input event handling improvements
• Overhaul detection of hardware-accelerated video codecs on Android
• Video4Linux capture source fixes and support for BT.2100 PQ and 1:4:5:3 colorimetry
• Vulkan buffer upload and memory handling regression fixes
• Python bindings: fix various regressions introduced in 1.26.2
• cerbero: fix text relocation issues on 32-bit Android and fix broken VisualStudio VC templates
• packages: ship pbtypes plugin and update openssl to 3.5.0 LTS
• Various bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

See the GStreamer 1.26.3 release notes for more details.

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

cables.gl, the stunning, free, and open-source media creation environment for visuals and sound, is back with its June update. The Web-powered, Web-or-offline tool is faster, editing is easier, it's more future-proof and reliable, and they've updated their roadmap for what they envision this to be. Even alongside other tools, it's great to patch like this on the Web.

The post cables, free visual creation patcher on Web and app, gets big updates appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

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.

When [Ben Eater] talks, hackers everywhere listen. In his latest video [Ben] shows us how to make computer noises using square waves and a 6502 microprocessor.

[Ben] uses the timer in the W65C22 Versatile Interface Adapter to generate the square waves which generate a tone. He then adds support for a new BEEP command into his MS BASIC interpreter. We covered [Ben Eater]’s MS BASIC here at Hackaday back in April, so definitely check that out if you missed it.

After checking the frequency of oscillation using his Keysight oscilloscope he then wires in an 8Ω 2W speaker via a LM386 audio amplifier. We can’t use the W65C22 output pin directly because that can only output a few milliwatts of power. [Ben] implements the typical circuit application from the LM386 datasheet to drive the speaker. To complete his video [Ben] writes a program for his BASIC interpreter which plays a tune.

Thanks to [Mark Stevens] for writing in to let us know about this one. If you’re planning to play along at home a good place to start is to build your own 6502, like [Ben] did!

Barry Vercoe, composer and music scientist, founded MIT's electronic music efforts and helped shape the Lab's efforts in digital synthesis and machine listening and learning. But his biggest impact came outside the academy: as the inventor of Csound, he took the original innovations of Max Mathews and made them accessible to everyone. The live coding scene that followed has transformed the practice of coding sound into a new form of musical performance.

The post Barry Vercoe, who made coding sound accessible to all, has died appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

Week highlights: new release of Audacity and Kdenlive, new features in GIMP, Inkscape, and Ardour.

GIMP

Jehan created a tag for GIMP 3.1.2 in the desktop files, so the first unstable release in the 3.1 series is likely coming soon. This will lead up to a stable v3.2 release sometime in this decade.

Meanwhile, here are some recent changes in git:

• Daniel Novomesly added AVCI loading and HEJ2 exporting, which requires a recent version of libheif.
• CmykStudent removed the restriction on applying NDE filters to channels in the GUI. Layer masks are still restricted, though, until UX/UI is figured out.
• CmykStudent implemented a check for whether the alpha channel should be added when you merge a layer with a filter that requires it into a layer below.
• Jacob Boerema implemented the loading of Photoshop patterns, currently limited to RGB and greyscale.
• Gabriele patched the Histogram dock to show the number of unique colors. Previously, the way to get this number was from the now obsoleted Colorcube Analysis plugin.

A few more things in merge requests:

• Exporting to PSB, a modification of PSD that supports 300,000x300,000px large images (CmykStudent).
• Repositioning the on-canvas text formatting toolbar (Gabriele). Way overdue and very much welcome!
• An early patch to load EXIF and XMP metadata from PSP v8 files (CmykStudent).

Inkscape

Charlotte Curtis proposed a patch that adds configurable grouping of items when importing PDF files: by XObject (current behavior), by optional content groups (OCGs), by page, or necessary only (ignores XObjects and OCGs).

Anunay submitted a patch for review that adds (configurable) zooming with middle-click/drag. That’s actually really nice!

Kdenlive 25.04.2

This is a bugfix release without any new features. Over 20 issues have been resolved since the previous update. Here is the full list of changes.

Audacity 3.7.4

This is mostly a bugfix release, but with some nice additions:

• A new welcome/what’s new screen.
• A bunch of changes in OpenVINO effects: availability on macOS, their own category in the Effects menu, anddiscoverability through the Get Effects button.

Ardour

The team is still very far from v9, but there’ve been some neat fixes and improvements. Here are some of the recent ones:

• Various pianoroll window improvements and the seemingly never-ending saga of tweaking the rendering of MIDI note lines and the scroomer.
• New command to search for tracks and busses in the session, with automatic scrolling to get the found item to the top of the timeline.
• Icon colors are now themable.
• The real-time analyzer is now available in regular nightly builds.

Artworks

Fantasy Tree by Facundo Mileo, made with Blender and Photoshop:

“Solstice” Concept Art by MauFlores, made with Krita:

The GStreamer team is pleased to announce another bug fix release in the new old stable 1.24 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 1.24.x.

Please note that the 1.24 old-stable series is no longer actively maintained and has been superseded by the GStreamer 1.26 stable series now.

Highlighted bugfixes:

• Various security fixes and playback fixes
• MP4 demuxer atom parsing improvements and security fixes
• H.265 decoder base class and caption inserter SPS/PPS handling fixes
• Subtitle parser security fixes
• Subtitle rendering and seeking fixes
• Closed caption fixes
• Matroska rotation tag support and v4 muxing support
• Ogg seeking improvements in streaming mode
• Windows plugin loading fixes
• MIDI parser improvements for tempo changes
• Video time code support for 119.88 fps and drop-frames-related conversion fixes
• GStreamer editing services fixes for sources with non-1:1 aspect ratios
• RTP session handling and RTSP server fixes
• Thread-safety improvements for the Media Source Extension (MSE) library
• macOS video capture improvements for external devices
• Python bindings: Fix compatibility with PyGObject >= 3.52.0
• cerbero: bootstrapping fixes on Windows, improved support for RHEL, and openh264 recipe update
• Various bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

See the GStreamer 1.24.13 release notes for more details.

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

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.

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!

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

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.

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.