planet.linuxaudio.org

Suil 0.10.22 has been released. Suil is a library for loading and wrapping LV2 plugin UIs. It provides wrappers that allow Gtk and Qt hosts to load, and potentially embed, plugin GUIs that use the "native" windowing API (Coca, WIN32, or X11).

Changes:

• Add support for X11 in Qt6
• Fix library current_version on MacOS
• Monitor size hints and window resizes for X11 in Gtk3

Lilv 0.24.26 has been released. Lilv is a C library to make the use of LV2 plugins as simple as possible for applications.

Changes:

• Add lint option with project metadata and code quality tests
• Avoid use of VLAs in lv2apply
• Clean up and isolate platform-specific code
• Fix C++ test build on MacOS
• Fix library current_version on MacOS
• Fix test suite when TMPDIR has no trailing slash
• Fully separate library code from programs
• Improve const correctness
• Replace more platform-specific code with use of zix

Week highlights: new releases of Scribus and Qtractor; GIMP 3.0rc3 is on the way; great new features coming to Inkscape; Graphite is kicking some serious ass.

GIMP

The team started planning a third release candidate for v3.0. Jehan listed the following changes that require additional testing:

• Successive layer effects now use a higher bit-depth, so the image graph has changed.
• The multi-threading code for painting has changed to fix a crasher bug that occurs during layer auto-expansion.
• The main plug-in API implementation has changed (again).

Jehan and Aryeom are also going to FOSDEM and will do two sessions in the main room on Sunday morning (February 2). The first one will cover GIMP 3.0, and the other one will be an early screening of ZeMarmot animated film produced with GIMP.

Inkscape

Perhaps the most interesting conversation about UX/UI happening in the project is likely the one in the proposal by Henrique T. M. Perticarati. I think he has some really good points there, and I frigging love his object panel proposal:

Some really nice things have been cooking on the stove lately, as in “some code available”.

Mike Kowalski is moving the document origin setting from Preferences to Document Properties:

Kaixo Gamorra has been working on multiple patches at the same time. The first one appears to provide an option to merge the menu into the titlebar. I guess it’s similar to the option that GIMP 3.0rc has.

The second patch improves the workflow for tweaking page size when starting from a template. At the moment, a quick and dirty mockup is available; more work needs to be done, but it’s ongoing.

Aman Gupta is adding a way to set the polygon’s side length from the tool properties toolbar:

Graphite’s year in review

This is the project people have been telling me about the most: Graphite is a general 2D graphics editor that started as a vector graphics editor. It’s node-based, so it’s procedural, and the graph is easily accessible. All that works directly in the browser and can be installed as a PWA.

I’ve been checking up on it for a couple of years, but never quite got to use it to its full potential (which keeps growing). I guess it’s probably time to do so because Graphite has become much more stable.

A few days ago, project founder Keavon Chambers published an annual recap and a preview of 2025. The project actually got three GSoC students last year, and all three did great work: adjustment layers and nested graphs, a new Rust library for decoding and processing .arw files from Sony digital cameras, performance improvements, and the integration of Vello, a high-performance vector graphics renderer (which probably makes Raph Levien very happy).

The plans for 2025 include building a desktop app, developing a basic animation feature set, some bitmap editing features, and some advanced procedural editing features.

Do check out the blog post. I think it’s time to give the project some serious attention.

Scribus 1.6.3

While work on v1.7.0 is still underway, the team published a bugfix release, v1.6.3. This version mainly fixes crashes and various minor annoyances and improves CMYK image importing. Upgrading makes a lot of sense to me. If you are still on v1.4 for some reason, you really should get the latest version.

Blender

The team published a preview of the work they have planned for 2025:

• A better integration of the node systems across different workflows
• New production tools aimed at small and medium-sized studios
• Faster EEVEE material shader compilation
• Non-destructive sculpting with layers and better keyboard-less workflow
• Storyboarding and basic camera editing from the VSE

There’s also various ongoing work such as the Vulkan port, layered Animation, HDR support in all the editors, etc.

The team also launched a community platform for educators.

FreeCAD

Most changes lately have been bugfixes and small improvements. The thing that stands out is a new Transform task panel, contributed by Kacper Donat as part of his grant work:

Ardour

The team spent some time tweaking the layout of the main window (the right sidebar now extends to the bottom) and making small improvements to the piano roll window introduced last week. They will also be shipping an updated General MIDI soundfont with v9.0. It should sound better but also slightly differently, so Robin has been asking for feedback.

Qtractor 1.5.2

This is a bugfix release of the audio/MIDI sequencer. The one change I would highlight is that immediate and consecutive plugin parameter changes are now merged into a single undoable command.

Artworks

Eastern Zone Designs by Terraform Studios, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Purifiers by Lera Krat, made with Blender, 3DCoat, and Substance 3D Painter:

废土区域 (Wasteland Area) by LCZ, made with Blender and Photoshop

Canyon Lands by Josh Norman, made with Blender and Photoshop

The Heart of the Street by Samet Dereli, made with Blender, Photoshop, and Quixel Megascans

Am I Lost? By Heider Ali, made with Blender and Photoshop

Earlier today I have updated the soundfont that is used by Ardour’s General MIDI Synth.

The upside is that some voices now sound better, the downside is that it existing sessions may sound different. If you have an ear to lend please test (it will be shipped with Ardour 9, once that’s ready):

–

Kudos to Chris Collins for creating and maintaining the soundfont that we use. He also published a video showcasing some highlights of the long list of changes (previously gmsynth.lv2 used v1.52):

https://www.youtube.com/embed/AtXvMz22y-M

3 posts - 3 participants

Read full topic

When it comes to hacking niches, breathing new life into vintage devices is always an exciting challenge. [t0mg]’s recent project exemplifies this with his 1978 Sony FX-300 ‘Jackal’ radio. He’d already upgraded the radio in 2021 and turned it into a feature-packed marvel, but there’s always room for improvement.

[t0mg]’s initial 2021 build had its quirks: noisy sound, a subpar display, and a non-functional radio module. Determined to enhance these aspects, he sourced an IPS version of the original 3.2″ ILI9431 LCD, significantly improving viewing angles. To tackle the audio issues, he integrated an M5Stack Atom microcontroller, utilizing its Bluetooth A2DP capabilities to deliver cleaner digital sound via I2S to the Teensy audio board. The Teensy itself got a complete wire overhaul just for the sake of good craftmanship.

The new setup also enabled the display of song metadata. Additionally, [t0mg] incorporated a dedicated Arduino Nano clone to manage inputs, streamlining the overall design. The revamped ‘Jackal’ now boasts a bunch of impressive features such as displaying RDS data for FM stations, voice recording, and an NFC reader for personalized playlists.

If you’re into radio makeovers, look into this post for a real golden oldie, or start out with the basics. For [t0mg]’s earlier improved version of this Jackal, read our article on it here.

The GStreamer team is pleased to announce the first development release in the unstable 1.25 release series.

The unstable 1.25 release series is for testing and development purposes in the lead-up to the stable 1.26 series which is scheduled for release ASAP. Any newly-added API can still change until that point.

This development release is primarily for developers and early adopters.

The plan is to get 1.26 out of the door as quickly as possible.

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:

• gstreamer-1.25.1.tar.xz
• gst-plugins-base-1.25.1.tar.xz
• gst-plugins-good-1.25.1.tar.xz
• gst-plugins-ugly-1.25.1.tar.xz
• gst-plugins-bad-1.25.1.tar.xz
• gst-libav-1.25.1.tar.xz
• gst-rtsp-server-1.25.1.tar.xz
• gst-python-1.25.1.tar.xz
• gst-editing-services-1.25.1.tar.xz
• gst-devtools-1.25.1.tar.xz,
• gstreamer-vaapi-1.25.1.tar.xz
• gstreamer-docs-1.25.1.tar.xz

As always, please give it a spin and let us know of any issues you run into by filing an issue in GitLab.

Week highlights: new releases of HDRView, LibreCAD, and cabbage; new features in GIMP and Ardour; FreeCAD’s alternative Ribbon UI gets an update.

GIMP

The DDS plugin now support loading files with BC7 compression. CmykStudent read the docs, looked up the implementation in ImageMagick, and wrote the code. This is a new feature, which seems counter-intuitive for something that has had two release candidates, but there you go.

HDRView 2.1.0

Wojciech Jarosz made a new release of HDRView.

Here are some of the changes:

• Restored support for writing OpenEXR images.
• Added reading/writing support for Ultra HDR JPEG images.
• Improved the Images and the Info panels.
• Three mouse modes/tools: 1) Pan and zoom, 2) Rectangular selection, and 3) Pixel/color selector
• New Pixel inspector panel for editing selections and showing color info for the hovered pixel.

Builds are available for Windows and macOS.

FreeCAD

Developers are slowly getting back after the winter holidays. There’s some new work on defeaturing in FEM and some much welcome improvements in BIM. But overall, things are a bit on the slow side, especially compared to the PR merging rush in December.

Meanwhile, Paul Ebbers released Ribbon UI v1.6.0, an addon that changes the regular UI of the program to Ribbon-like UI. It still has some rough edges, but it’s all coming together, one release at a time:

• It is now possible to set the tabs to “Icons only”.
• Layouts for specific workbenches can now be imported.
• The application button is redesigned and simplified and now has Alt+A for shortcut.
• The size for quick access toolbar buttons, tab bar and right toolbar buttons are now set by one setting.
• Text for medium and large button can now be shown on two lines
• With drop down buttons: when text is enabled, the click area for showing menus is increased by including the text

There doesn’t seem to be any agreement that this could become either default or optional UI. So if you are in the anti-ribbon camp, fear not.

LibreCAD 2.2.1

It’s been two years in the making. The release also marks the return of Dongxu Li to development after a 7 years long hiatus.

What’s new:

• Native builds for Win64 and SnapCraft.
• Experimental support for the parabola geometry primitive.
• Support for RTL text (unfinished for numbers).
• Hatching area now displayed in the dialog for existing hatches.
• Layer tree, pen pallet, and many new drawing methods.
• Hovering effect for entities.
• Rendering implementation cleanup for performance and consistent appearance.
• More GUI and command line improvements.

You can get your downloads here.

Ardour

In a semi-expected turn of events, there is now alpha-quality code for opening MIDI regions in a pianoroll window. There’s literally just the window that shows nothing except the pianoroll, the timeline, and some controls. You can’t even see MIDI events. But if you’ve been around long enough and you know about Paul’s reluctancy to implement this feature, you know how much it means.

On a related note, the team recently backported the New/Recent/Open dialog from LiveTrax to provide a better UX for users. The dialog has some resizing issues, but those will be ironed out long before v9.0 knocks at your door.

alphaOsc

Gordon JC Pearce, who was among readers of an long-running thread at KVRAudio about Alpha Juno oscillators, took matters into his owns hands and wrote an open-source (ISC License) implementation with DPF for UI.

As Gordon says, it has no antialiasing or anything, it’s literally just the oscillator. Enjoy!

Cabbage 2.10

Rory Walsh published the end-of-life release of Cabbage, a framework for audio software development based on Csound. The decision to drop Cabbage was apprently made in response to EULA changes by JUCE developers last year, there is a forum thread about that where Rory discusses the future JUCE-free direction for the project. Cabbage was good for ya, but for now, this is the end of the Cabbage.

Artworks

ASC Nexus - Vana Subcity by Ludvík Koutný, made with Blender and Unreal Engine for the Nexus project by Aaron Sims Creative:

The King of The Sea by Bruna Queiroz, made with Blender:

Speedpainting 01122024 by Sylvia Ritter, made with Krita:

Bubble Planet with Electric Ramps by Artem Katalkin, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Neon Tears by Haider Ali, made with Blender:

We have always strived to give our users the best support options. After asking the community via a thread on Ubuntu Discourse and being given positive feedback, we have decided to move our primary support channel from Ask Ubuntu to Ubuntu Discourse.

Ask Ubuntu, which was run outside of the Ubuntu Governance, was a great idea in its time, but as time has gone on, it has become difficult for the moderators to moderate as its host, StackExchange, has made questionable decisions, including shutting-down OpenSSO, which effectively disabled many accounts which were exclusively linked to Launchpad without recovery. StackExchange has been uncooperative with re-enabling this link to Launchpad, leaving many users, who had higher privileges due to their participation, having to start over.

Additionally, as stated long before, the Ubuntu Forums section for Ubuntu Studio has long been dead. Additionally, the Ubuntu Forums, which is officially under the Ubuntu Governance, have found themselves in a position where the software Ubuntu Forum is unable to upgrade any further. As a result, on Thursday, January 9, 2025, they have officially shut-down. Over the two months prior, support has transitioned to Ubuntu Discourse with much success.

As such, with the community feedback, Ubuntu Studio’s primary support will be changing to Ubuntu Discourse. The support links will be changing over in the menu for all supported versions of Ubuntu Studio (as of this writing, 22.04 LTS, 24.04 LTS, and 24.10), and the Ask Ubuntu section on the website will change to Ubuntu Discourse.

Special Non-Support/Help Community Section

A new icon appearing in the Ubuntu Studio Information menu is “Connect with Community”. This will take you to the special Ubuntu Studio section of the Ubuntu Discourse where, while support and help questions aren’t allowed, other discussions are. This is also where you will find future release notes along with the newest LTS Backports Megathread for any application backport requests you may have.

Overall, this will be a great place to connect with other members of the community and interact with developers.

---

Small update on 22.04 LTS to 24.04 LTS upgrades

It has been confirmed that a “quirk” needs to be added to ubuntu-release-upgrader that forces an installation of pipewire-audio during the upgrade calculation. A member of the team that works on this has taken this on and is working on a fix. Please stay tuned for further updates.

The GStreamer team is pleased to announce another bug fix release in the new stable 1.24 release series of your favourite cross-platform multimedia framework!

This release only contains bugfixes and it should be safe to update from 1.24.x.

Highlighted bugfixes:

• playback: Fix SSA/ASS subtitles with embedded fonts
• decklink: add missing video modes and fix 8K video modes
• matroskamux: spec compliance fixes for audio-only files
• onnx: disable onnxruntime telemetry
• qtdemux: Fix base offset update when doing segment seeks
• srtpdec: Fix a use-after-free issue
• (uri)decodebin3: Fix stream change scenarios, possible deadlock on shutdown
• video: fix missing alpha flag in AV12 format description
• avcodecmap: Add some more channel position mappings
• cerbero bootstrap fixes for Windows 11
• Various bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

See the GStreamer 1.24.11 release notes for more details.

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

It's "yo dawg"/Inception time to the max. Not to be outdone by 4ms MetaModule, Autodafe has put all of VCV Rack (specifically its Cardinal fork) into a Eurorack module. Along the way, you'll learn how to set up Cardinal on Raspberry Pi for any hardware project you might imagine.

The post Maker Monday: Autodafe put VCV Rack in a Eurorack module, via RasPi appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

The Ubuntu Studio team has investigated a conflict involving upgrades from Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04 failing. This has been confirmed to be reproducible.

We are currently following multiple bug reports (Launchpad bugs 2078639, 2078608, and 2079817) with most of them being duplicates of the first in that list.

If you have attempted to upgrade and ran into this problem, feel free to click on the first link in that list and click on “Does this bug affect you?”. Filing additional bug reports is unnecessary.

In most flavors of Ubuntu in 24.04 LTS, the idea was to have PipeWire completely replace PulseAudio as the primary sound server and would force the installation of PipeWire. However, with Ubuntu Studio, we went with a different approach of having PipeWire be the default, but be replaced by PulseAudio if the user wished to switch back to the classic, albiet unsupported, setup. This meant PipeWire had to be a “soft” dependency rather than a “hard” one so that it could be uninstalled by our metapackages without breaking the entire desktop metapackage.

However, this also made it so that the upgrade resolver (ubuntu-release-upgrader) would get confused when calculating how to perform the upgrade. This is where we are hitting the problem.

Currently, we are working with the Ubuntu Foundations Team at Canonical on how to have ubuntu-release-upgrader force an installation of PipeWire for Ubuntu Studio without Ubuntu Studio requiring a hard dependency on PipeWire.

Unfortunately, if we cannot resolve this issue, we may have to do one of two things:

• Not support direct, in-place upgrades of Ubuntu Studio 22.04 LTS to 24.04 LTS and remove the upgrade notifier.
• Create a hard dependency on PipeWire, effectively removing the ability to switch back to the classic PulseAudio/JACK bridged setup with Studio Controls.

We don’t want either of these solutions, which is why we are hoping we can find a solution with ubuntu-release-upgrader soon.

Oneiroi from Befaco is a mythical variety chocolate box where every flavor is delicious. It's an experimental slash drone slash sound design treasure box. And now it's in VCV Rack.

The post Befaco Oneiroi, all-in-one soundscape module, now in VCV Rack appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

The last months Malte Steiner expanded his knowledge of analog electronics, researched and build a modular synthesizer system. The idea is to create a cheap, repairable system which one would check in during a flight and drag onto stage. The most expensive is actually the suitcase, the whole system is around 500.-€ instead of the 2000.- to 3000.- € a comparable Eurorack suitcase would cost.

    

You might think that visualizing music with lasers would be a complicated and difficult affair. In fact, it’s remarkably simple if you want it to be, and [byte_thrasher] shows us just how easy it can be.

At heart, what you’re trying to do is make a laser trace out waveforms of the music you’re listening to, right? So you just need a way to move the laser’s beam along with the sound waves from whatever you’re listening to. You might be thinking about putting a laser on the head of a servo-operated platform fed movement instructions from a digital music file, but you’d be way over-complicating things. You already have something that moves with the music you play — a speaker!

[byte_thrasher’s] concept is simple. Get a Bluetooth speaker, and stick it in a bowl. Cover the bowl with a flexible membrane, like plastic wrap. Stick a small piece of mirror on the plastic. When you play music with the speaker, the mirror will vibrate and move in turn. All you then have to do is aim a safe laser in a safe direction such that it bounces off the mirror and projects on to a surface. Then, the laser will dance with your tunes, and it’ll probably look pretty cool!

We’ve seen some beautiful laser visual effects before, too. Just be careful and keep your power levels safe and your beams pointing where they should be.

put a bluetooth speaker in a bowl, cover the bowl with plastic wrap pulled taut, glue a shard of mirror to the plastic wrap, point a laser beam at the mirror so that it bounces off towards the ceiling, play music, enjoy pic.twitter.com/Vs6lBJihCg

— avi (@byte_thrasher) November 9, 2024

JJ-FZF is a TUI (Terminal-based User Interface) for Jujutsu, built on top of fzf. It centers around the jj log view, providing key bindings for common operations on JJ/Git repositories. About six months ago, I revisited JJ, drawn in by its promise of Automatic rebase and conflict resolution. I have…