planet.linuxaudio.org

Hello all, this is the monthly report for all software things related to KXStudio, DISTRHO & falkTX projects.

Repository updates

• NEW! added hamburger 0.5
• fabla updated to 1.4.0
• helio-workstation updated to 3.16
• infamous-plugins updated to 0.3.2
• lsp-plugins updated to 1.2.24
• moony.lv2 updated to 0.40.0
• sorcer updated to 1.1.3

That is all for now, see you next month!

Tired of Big Tech scanning your online data? Why not make your own deep scan of all the lost sound files on your own hard drive, producing an entirely local result? No sooner than Envion wowed us with its beautiful esoteric sonic landscapes, its developer Emiliano drops a killer second act.

The post Free Envion Deepscan turns your hard drive’s lost files into a soundscape appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

An issue has been identified

The Ubuntu Release team has now enabled upgrades from 25.04 to 25.10! This is great news! In fact, you may have noticed this icon on your toolbar and a notification to upgrade.

However, upon doing so, you may have noticed something a little more unfortunate:

Yep, we know. This tells you nothing about what is wrong. What is wrong is slightly more technical. As it turns out, the backend application that actually performs the upgrade removed an argument from its command line unannounced during the Plucky Puffin release cycle, approximately a year ago.

As our project leader, Erich Eickmeyer, maintains the upgrade notifier widget for both Ubuntu Studio and Kubuntu, he woke up and immediately got to work identifying what’s wrong and how to patch the Plasma widget in question to correctly execute the upgrade process. He has uploaded the fix, and it was accepted by a member of the Ubuntu Stable Release Updates team.

At the moment, the fix needs to be tested and verified. In order to test it, one must install the fix from the plucky-proposed repository. In order for it to be available, it must build for all architectures and, as of this writing, is awaiting building on riscv64 which has a 40-hour backlog.

The Workaround

If you wish to begin the upgrade process manually rather than waiting on the upgrade notifier fix to be implemented, feel free to make sure you are fully updated, type alt-space to execute Krunner, and paste this:

do-release-upgrade -f DistUpgradeViewKDE

This is the exact command that will be executed by the notifier widget as soon as it is updated.

Of course, if you’re in no hurry, feel free to wait until the notifier is updated and use that method. Do bear in mind, though, that as of this writing, you have exactly 90 days to perform the upgrade to 25.10 before your system will no longer be supported. At that time, you’ll risk being unable to upgrade at all unless certain procedures for End-Of-Life Upgrades are done, which can be tedious for those uncomfortable in a command line as it will require modifying system files.

Mea Culpa

We do apologize for the inconvenience. Testing upgrade paths like this are hard to do and things go missed, especially when teams don’t communicate with each other. We’re try to identify things before they happen but, unfortunately, certain items cannot be foreseen.

This issue has now been added to the Ubuntu Studio 25.10 Release Notes.

Open licensing for proprietary audio and plug-in standards could enable the entire industry to move forward on some critical work. So it's great news that Steinberg this month announced not one but two big licensing announcements: first, a dual-licensing model for their ASIO audio driver protocol for Windows (including an OBS collaboration), and now a permissive MIT license for the mighty VST3 plug-in spec.

The post Open Steinberg: VST3 and ASIO SDKs now have open source licenses appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

In previous episodes of this long-running series looking at the world of high-quality audio, at every point we’ve stayed in the real world of physical audio hardware. From the human ear to the loudspeaker, from the DAC to measuring distortion, this is all stuff that can happen on your bench or in your Hi-Fi rack.

We’re now going for the first time to diverge from the practical world of hardware into the theoretical world of mathematics, as we consider a very contentious topic in the world of audio. We live in a world in which it is now normal for audio to have some form of digital compression applied to it, some of which has an effect on what is played back through our speakers and headphones. When a compression algorithm changes what we hear, it’s distortion in audio terms, but how much is it distorted and how do we even measure that? It’s time to dive in and play with some audio files.

How Good A Copy Does A Copy Have To Be?

Were we to record some music with a good quality microphone and analogue tape recorder, we know that what came out of the speakers at playback would be a copy of what was heard by the microphone, subject to distortion from whatever non-linearities it has encountered in the audio path. But despite that distortion, the tape recorder is doing its best to faithfully record an exact copy of what it hears. It’s the same with a compression-free digital recording; record those musicians with a DAT machine or listen to them on a CD, and you’ll get back as good a copy as those media are capable of returning.

The trouble is that uncompressed audio takes up a lot of bandwidth, particularly when streaming over the Internet. Thus just as with any other data format, it makes sense to compress it such that it takes up less space. There are plenty of compression algorithms to choose from, but with analogue sources there are more choices than there are with text, or software. A Linux ISO has to uncompress as a perfect copy of its original otherwise it won’t run, while an image or an audio file simply has to uncompress to something that looks or sounds like the original to our meaty brains.

Those extra compression options for analogue data take advantage of this; they use so-called lossy compression in that what you get out sounds just like what you put in, but isn’t the same. This difference can be viewed as distortion, and if you have ever saved an image containing text as a JPEG file, you’ll probably have seen it as artifacts around sharply defined edges.

So if lossy compression algorithms such as MP3 introduce distortion, how can we measure this? The analogue distortion analyser featured in our last installment is of little use, because the pure sine wave it uses is very easy for the compression algorithm to encode faithfully. Compression based on Fourier analysis is always going to do a good job on a single frequency. Another solution is required, and here the Internet is of little help. It’s time to set out on my own and figure out a way to measure the distortion inherent to an MP3 file.

Math Will Give Us The Right Answer!

At moments like these it’s great to be surrounded by other engineers, because you can mull it over and reach a solution. This distortion can’t be measured through my analogue instrumentation with a sine wave for the reasons discussed above, so it must instead be measured on a real world sample. We came up with a plan: measure the difference between two samples, compute the RMS value for that difference, then calculate the ratio between that and the RMS of the uncompressed sample.

As is so often the case with this type of task, it’s a relatively straightforward task using GNU Radio as a DSP workshop. I created a GNU Radio project to do the job, and fed it an uncompressed and compressed version of the same sample. I used a freely available recording of some bongo drums, and to make my compressed file I encoded it as a 128kbit MP3, then decoded it back to a WAV file. You can find it in my GitHub account, should you wish to play with it yourself.

Math Will Give Us The Wrong Answer!

The result it gives for my two bongo samples varies a little around 0.03, or 3%, depending upon where you are in the sample. What that in effect means is that the MP3 encoded version is around 3% different from the uncompressed one. If that were a figure measured on an analogue circuit using my trusty HP analyser I would say it wasn’t a very good quality circuit at all, and I would definitely be able to hear the distortion when listening to the audio. The fact that I can’t hear it raises a fundamental question as to what distortion really is, and the effect it has upon listeners.

What I would understand as distortion due to non-linearities in the audio path, is in reality harmonic distortion. Harmonics of the input signal are being created; if my audio path is a guitar pedal they are harmonics I want, while if it’s merely a very low quality piece of audio gear they’re unwelcome degradation of the listening experience. This MP3 file has a measurable 3% distortion, yet I am not hearing it as such when I listen. The answer to why that is the case is that this is not harmonic distortion, instead it’s a very similar version of the same sound, which differs by only 3% from the original. People with an acute ear can hear it, but most listeners will not notice the difference.

So In Summary: This Distortion Isn’t Distortion Like The Others

So in very simple terms, I’ve measured distortion, but not distortion in the same sense of the word. I’ve proven that an MP3 encoded audio source has a significant loss of information over its uncompressed ancestor, but noted that it is nowhere near as noticable in the finished product as for example a 3% harmonic distortion would be. It’s thus safe to say that this exercise, while interesting, is a little bit pointless because it produces a misleading figure. I think I have achieved something though, by shining some light on the matter of audio compression and subsequent quality loss. In short: for most of you it won’t matter, while the rest of you are probably using a lossless algorithm such as FLAC anyway.

The super talented [Switch Angel] is an electronic music artist, with a few cool YouTube videos to show off their absolute nailing of how to live code with Strudel. For us mere mortals, Strudel is a JavaScript port of TidalCycles, which is an algorithmic music generator which supports live coding, i.e. the music that is passed down to the synthesizer changes on-the-fly as you manipulate the code. It’s magical to watch (and listen!) to how you can adapt and distort the music to your whims just by tweaking a few lines of code: no compilation steps, hardly any debugging and instant results.

The traditional view of music generators like this is to create lists of note/instrument pairs with appropriate modifiers. Each sound is specified in sequence — adding a sound extends the sequence a little. Strudel / Tidalcycles works a little differently and is based on the idea of repeating patterns over a fixed time. Adding an extra sound or breaking down one sound slot into multiple sounds squeezes all the remaining slots down, causing the whole pattern to repeat in the same period, with the sounds individually taking up less space. This simple change makes it really easy to add layer upon layer of interest within a sequence with a few extra characters, without recalculating everything else to fit. On top of this base, multiple effects can be layered—more than we can mention here—and all can be adjusted with pop-in sliders directly in the code.

You see, the code is also the visualizer. As the sequence runs, the notes and time periods are highlighted, with piano rolls and oscilloscope views adding to the visuals to help guide you. Tweaking the various components of the sound composition in real time with embedded sliders is a quick and easy way to smoothly hear the impact of settings. It just makes sense. Additionally, since Strudel is written in JavaScript, you can pull in external libraries of customized functions to make your code more straightforward to read, like this short library from [Switch Angel].

On the back end, the built-in web-based synthesizer is basic but functional for roughing out. Still, for absolute control, you’re going to want to send the notes over to something like SuperCollider or Sonic Pi. This is easy because Strudel supports OSC, making it a simple, configurable item.

If you were thinking that you’ve seen a JavaScript-based generative music thing before, you’d be right. Whilst we’re thinking about generative music and generative art in general, what about having a look at this neat sound-and-light sculpture?

Thanks to [JohnU] for sending this in!

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 it should be safe to update from 1.26.x.

Highlighted bugfixes:

• cea608overlay: improve handling of non-system memory
• cuda: Fix runtime kernel compile with CUDA 13.0
• d3d12: Fix crop meta support in converter and passthrough handling in deinterlacer
• fallbacksrc: source handling improvements; no-more-pads signal for streams-unaware parents
• inter: add properties to fine tune the inner elements
• qtdemux: surround sound channel layout handling fixes and performance improvements for GoPro videos
• rtp: Add linear audio (L8, L16, L24) RTP payloaders / depayloaders
• rtspsrc: Send RTSP keepalives in TCP/interleaved modes
• rtpamrpay2: frame quality indicator flag related fixes
• rtpbasepay2: reuse last PTS when possible, to work around problems with NVIDIA Jetson AV1 encoder
• mpegtsmux, tsdemux: Opus audio handling fixes
• threadshare: latency related improvements and many other fixes
• matroskamux, tsmux, flvmux, cea608mux: Best pad determination fixes at EOS
• unixfd: support buffers with a big payload
• videorate unknown buffer duration assertion failure with variable framerates
• editing services: Make GESTimeline respect `SELECT_ELEMENT_TRACK` signal discard decision; memory leak fixes
• gobject-introspection annotation fixes
• cerbero: Update meson to 1.9.0 to enable Xcode 26 compatibility
• Various bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

See the GStreamer 1.26.7 release notes for more details.

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

The GStreamer Conference team is pleased to announce that the full conference schedule including talk abstracts and speaker biographies is now available for this year's lineup of talks and speakers, covering again an exciting range of topics!

The GStreamer Conference 2025 will take place on 23-24 October 2025 in London, UK, followed by a hackfest.

Details about the conference, hackfest and how to register can be found on the conference website.

This year's topics and speakers:

• GStreamer State of the Union
  Tim-Philipp Müller, Centricular
• Region-Based Compression in GStreamer
  Axel Tobieson, Spiideo
• Rusty Pipes and Oxidized Wires
  Arun Raghavan, Valve Corporation
• The Quest for Low-Latency Desktop Audio
  Nirbheek Chauhan, Centricular
• Rebuilding Our Video Server Engine on GStreamer
  Ray Tiley, Tightrope Media Systems
• Enabling I-frame playlists with HLS CMAF
  Sanchayan Maity, Centricular
• From Streams to Insights: Advancing GstAnalytics
  Daniel Morin, Collabora
• Brief history of GStreamer adoption at Twilio
  Jeff Foster and Andrey Kovalenko, Twilio
• Threadshare, a plugin collection to increase scalability
  François Laignel, Centricular
• Costly Speech: an introduction
  Mathieu Duponchelle, Centricular
• GstWebRTC in WebKit, current status & plans
  Philippe Normand, Igalia
• Lessons Learned - Transforming Our Video Management System with GStreamer
  Bumi̇n Kaan Aydin, HAVELSAN
• VVC/H.266 Alpha Channel support in GStreamer
  Andoni Morales Alastruey, Fluendo
• librice: the TURNing point
  Matthew Waters, Centricular
• Virtual Hardware: Emulating a Video4linux Hardware Decoder
  Jan Schmidt, Centricular
• A Global Crisis => Global Leadership - WildCamera
  Will Robertson
• Tools to profile a video encoder
  Diego Nieto Munoz, Fluendo
• A new era for GStreamer C++ bindings
  Sebastian Dröge, Centricular
• Auxiliary Stream Wrangling in playbin3
  Jan Schmidt, Centricular
• VVC/H.266 in GStreamer
  Carlos Bentzen, Igalia
• GStreamer in the Medical Simulation Environment
  Thomas Goodwin and Jeff Wilson, Laerdal Labs
• What’s New in GStreamer D3D12
  Seungha Yang, Centricular
• Fluster news
  Rubén Gonzalez, Fluendo
• dcSCTP in GStreamer
  Tulio Beloqui, Pexip
• The road to Enhanced FLV and RTMP in GStreamer
  Taruntej Kanakamalla, Centricular
• Improving WebRTC datachannel performance
  Emil Ljungdahl, Axis Communications
• Cutting audio latency with bidirectional WebRTC
  Albert Sjölund, Axis Communications
• GStreamer in VR devices manufacturing
  Ivan Loskutov, Meta
• GStreamer for audio distribution at Sveriges Radio
  Karl Johannes Jondell and Christofer Bustad, Sveriges Radio
• GStreamer at Scale: Recent Lessons from Real-World Video Conferencing
  Håvard Graff, Pexip
• Gst.wasm season 3
  Jorge Zapata and Fabián Orccón, Fluendo
• Time Remapping and GES: Implementation Details and Latest Updates
  Thibault Saunier, Igalia
• PipeWire’s pipeline operation vs GStreamer’s explained
  George Kiagiadakis, Collabora
• Why Keep a Thread Running? Meet GstBaseIdleSrc
  Camilo Celis Guzman, Pexip
• Bringing AMD HIP into GStreamer
  Max Campbell, Veo Technologies; Seungha Yang, Centricular
• WirePlumber, present challenges and future directions
  Julian Bouzas, Collabora
• Hardware-Accelerated Live Broadcasting of Uncompressed ST 2110 Streams with GStreamer leveraging NVIDIA GPUs and NICs
  Johan Jino, Nvidia
• The Art of Debugging GStreamer Software
  Nicolas Dufresne, Collabora
• Making GStreamer Go!
  Wilhelm Bartel

Lightning Talks:

• Showing the invisible: Analysing buffer flow with tracers
  François Laignel, Centricular

• Video Frame Scheduler Plugin for Improving WebRTC Playback Quality
  Haejung Hwang, LG Electronics

• Audio source separation using snakes, crabs and torches
  Sebastian Dröge, Centricular
• soothe: a proposal for encoder testing
  Victor Manuel Jáquez Leal, Igalia
• burn: a little case study on using GstAnalytics from Rust
  Sebastian Dröge, Centricular
• GstVA and GStreamer-VAAPI updates
  Victor Manuel Jáquez Leal, Igalia
• Vulkan Video: pipeline update
  Stéphane Cerveau, Igalia
• Fallback Streaming for RTSP Server
  Axel Tobieson, Spiideo
• Fast and dirty: vibe coding use case plugging the NVIDIA kernel into GStreamer streams
  Jesús Luque, Mediapro
• What's up with Video4Linux support
  Nicolas Dufresne, Collabora
• pexLGPL bundle
  Tulio Beloqui, Pexip
• Reading v4l2 data from MR813 devices in a way that doesn't suck
  Vivia Nikolaidou
• Rewriting CoreAudio-based elements on macOS
  Piotr Brzeziński, Centricular
• fallbacksrc, now with more streams
  Piotr Brzeziński, Centricular
• State of MPEG-TS in GStreamer
  Edward Hervey, Centricular
• Full GPU driven AI workloads with GStreamer and Raven
  Andoni Morales Alastruey, Fluendo
• ...and more to come
• Submit your lightning talk now!

Many thanks to our amazing sponsors ‒ Platinum sponsors Centricular, Collabora, Igalia, and Pexip, Gold sponsors Axis Communications and Fluendo, and Silver sponsors MediaScribe and Veo, without whom the conference would not be possible in this form.

We hope to see you all in London soon! Don't forget to register as soon as possible if you're planning on joining us, so we can order enough food and drinks!

There's also a hackfest after the conference. If you're planning on joining us for the hackfest you must register separately for that, by 21 October 2025 at the latest.

Week highlights: new releases of GIMP and RapidRAW, new features in darktable and Ardour.

GIMP 3.0.6

This is purely a bugfix release, don’t expect anything new. The release notes are here.

darktable and AgX

The team recently merged a patch by Kofa that adds AgX, a new tonemapper originally seen in Blender. This is not the first photography app to use AgX (Saulala is likely the first one), but definitely the most prominent one so far.

There have been several general tonemapper modules before AgX: base curve, followed by several variations of filmic (later renamed to filmic rgb), followed by sigmoid. I specifically do not mention other tonemappers here, as they were intended for use elsewhere in the processing pipeline.

Rather than emulating the film look, AgX aims for colorimetric accuracy and better chromatic consistency across the dynamic range. Kofa explained the mechanics of AgX in darktable early on in a thread on Pixls, I think you should read it if you are interested.

The module has controls for the input data, base and advanced curve parameters, and the look (slope offset, power, saturation, hue preservation).

My personal impression so far is that while AgX provides a lot of control, just like with other tonemappers, the defaults are not great.

On scenes with a wide dynamic range, details in highlights get flat, shadows/blacks get even darker, and hues change regardless of how much hue preservation you apply in AgX settings. Sigmoid and filmic rgb do a similar thing, but at least they don’t touch hues as much.

So, I guess, we’ll have to continue tweaking tonemapping settings quite a bit for the foreseeable future to get to a decent baseline.

RapidRAW 1.4.2

Timon Käch released an update of RapidRAW with several quite useful improvements:

• The Highlights slider doesn’t dull the image as much as it used to
• The Exposure slider doesn’t oversaturate and overexpose as much as it used to
• Exports now can have optional controllable watermarks

Unfortunately, as you can see, the recent fixes have not improved the situation with pink in overblown highlights.

Nevertheless, here are the usual downloads and release notes.

FreeCAD

A year ago, Paul Ebbers picked up the SearchBar addon, originally created by Suzanne Soy, and started improving it. This is what you know from applications like Blender, GIMP, Olive and probably many others. Paul now proposes to include it in FreeCAD 1.2.

There’s also a pretty substantial patch by tarman3, adding numerous Array command improvements in CAM. It’s currently in draft and will likely be merged for v1.2 as well.

The release blocker needle is slowly moving towards zero and is currently at 27 remaining blockers. It may take a few more months to go all the way left.

Ardour

Robin Gareus investigated the StaffPad’s audio stretcher now used by Audacity, found that it works better than Rubberband in some cases, and added it as an “Any” option in the Time Stretch tool.

Mixer channels now have an RTA (real-time analyzer) toggle:

Finally, Ardour now has support for the iCON V1-M controller, contributed by one of the Mixbus developers.

MIDI CC & NRPN database

This is a recent find of a not-too-recent project. Ben Fox started working on a database for MIDI CC & NRPN of various hardware synths, samplers, etc., and 24 contributors joined over the years. If you have one of the supported devices and need to control it from the DAW, this may come in handy.

All the information lives in CSV files on GitHub and is available under the terms of the CC-BY-SA-4.0 license. You can contribute new descriptions to help make the information more discoverable for other users.

Artworks

Silent Sunday artwork by Sylvia Ritter, made with Krita:

The Old Tibetan monastery by Maxim Petrov, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Tale’s Edge - Snowy Woodland Village by Andy Walsh, made with Blender, 3DCoat, and Photoshop:

The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu Studio 25.10 code-named “Questing Quokka”. This marks Ubuntu Studio’s 37th release. This release is a Regular release and as such, it is supported for 9 months, until July 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.

You can download Ubuntu Studio 25.10 from our download page.

Special Notes

The Ubuntu Studio 25.10 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/25.10/release/

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

Upgrades from 25.04 should be enabled within a month after release, so we appreciate your patience. Upgrades from 24.04 LTS will be enabled after 25.04 reaches End-Of-Life in January 2026.

New This Release

The Return of Internet DJ Console (IDJC)!

After a long hiatus, Internet DJ Console (IDJC) has returned. This package for creating and running Internet-based radio stations had been removed from Debian, but has returned, and therefore, returned to Ubuntu Studio!

JackTrip

Ubuntu Studio now includes JackTrip! JackTrip serves two purposes: low-latency networked JACK audio within your network, and low-latency Internet audio collaboration. Bands are even known to jam remotely using JackTrip’s services!

It supports any number of channels (as many as the computer/network can handle) of bidirectional, high quality, uncompressed audio signal streaming.

More Musical Plugins

We came to the realization that we needed to support musicians a little better, so we added a few instrument and musical plugins to assist with that:

• din
• drumkv1
• freewheeling
• gxtuner
• Hydrogen Drumkit Effects
• kmetronome
• padthv1
• polyphone
• samplv1
• synthv1

More Photography Tools

• PhotoCollage – allows you to create photo collage phosters
• PicPlanner – Calculates and displays the positions of the Sun, Moon, and Milky Way for any time and location on earth, to help you get those perfect astronomical photos or for taking pictures during the Golden or Blue hours.

PipeWire 1.4.7

This release contains PipeWire 1.4.7.

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 and can now be configured on a per-user basis instead of globally.

Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuration

Speaking of Audio Configuration, we have added a number of options for configuring the PipeWire JACK compatibility, as can be seen in the image below. Additionally, buffer size can now be configured from within any JACK application that supports it, such as Patchance, Carla, Ardour, and more!

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 release of Ubuntu Studio, due in April 2026.

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! Additionally, we include a Minimal Install option that, when used with Ubuntu Studio Installer, will give you the Ubuntu Studio experience for whatever your desktop studio needs!

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!

Contact the Team

The best way to contact the Ubuntu Studio team is via the Ubuntu Discourse.

Special Thanks

Huge special thanks for this release go to:

• Eylul Dogruel: Artwork, Graphics Design
• Ross Gammon: Upstream Debian Developer, Testing
• 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
• Erich Eickmeyer: Project Leader, Packaging, Development, Direction, Treasurer
• Steve Langasek: You are missed.

Week highlights: new features in GIMP and Inkscape; new release of MuseScore Studio, first alpha release of Audacity 4.

GIMP

Here is some of the ongoing work:

• Jehan is reorganizing the Align/Distribute tool options. Probably not a final implementation, as the discussion about UX keeps going.
• Jasper is adding new text orientation options: 90° clockwise and counterclockwise rotation.

Additionally, Gabriele contributed a new Preferences option to disable the use of the TAB key to switch all dockable windows on and off. This is one of the maddening aspects of using GIMP for new users who press the key by accident and then struggle to figure out why all the docks have suddenly disappeared and how to bring them back.

Personally, I think the proposed patch is more of a workaround. All shortcuts should be configurable; singling one of them out and adding a dedicated switch in Preferences doesn’t seem like a consistent solution to me. Plus, bringing docks back should not be puzzling in the first place. On the flip side, I’m definitely biased here.

All of the above are unmerge patches at the moment.

Inkscape

Some fun things are happening in Inkscape:

• Martin Owens is enhancing the rendering engine so it can work with floating pixel data and a greater number of color channels (think support for CMYKA).
• Mike Kowalski is adding a character viewer to the font dock.

BCON 2025

The Blender Foundation has published all the videos from the Blender Conference 2025 on YouTube and Peertube. With over 80 videos in the playlist, there’s something for everyone: architectural visualization, production of animated TV series, simulating real-world camera lenses, recreating historical and cultural legacy, and so much more.

FreeCAD

You know how much I love digging into arcane pull requests and showing exciting new features and quality-of-life improvements. So believe me when I tell you that there is nothing more exciting right now than seeing the number of v1.1 release blockers go down. If the trend continues, a release candidate in November would not be entirely unrealistic.

At the same time, the pile of post-1.1 work just keeps growing. 229 out of 256 submitted pull requests are now scheduled for inclusion in version 1.2. Sure, some of them are in Draft, but I can absolutely see the team pulling double code review shifts shortly after the v1.1 release again.

Among other “fun” things, the team recently had to discuss how they should deal with AI-generated patches.

MuseScore Studio 4.6

The new version comes with many improvements and new features. Many of them are already covered in the release video:

Release highlights:

• A metric ton of engraving improvements and fixes.
• You can now use any SMuFL-compliant music font.
• Localised control over showing and hiding empty staves.
• Duration and velocity control in real-time note preview is now available.
• Numerous guitar-specific improvements, such as engraving support for hammer-on, pull-off, and tapping techniques.
• Brand-new Handbells palette and playback with MuseSounds.
• VST3 support on Linux.

A bit silly to use OpenStrings (Rhapsody) when you have MuseSounds around, but just to show a VST3 plugin actually working:

See here for a more complete list of changes and download links.

Audacity 4 alpha1 and the video

Muse Group also released a technical preview of Audacity 4, the upcoming new release with the user interface completely reimagined and rebuilt with Qt. The important thing is not to expect this version to be production-ready yet. Or the project files to be backward-compatible.

Things like importing/exporting audio, cutting, and applying real-time effects already work. Here is the list of v3 features that are not there yet:

• Nyquist, LADSPA, VAMP, and the OpenVINO plugins.
• Preferences from Audacity 3 are not carried over.
• Envelopes and label tracks.
• Spectrogram view and the spectral editing mode.
• Most built-in effects, including generators and analyzers.
• Opening multiple projects at the same time.

You should also probably expects the mixer to be available in v4. Automation is planned but won’t happen in the first v4 release though.

Notably, some of the missing features from the list above will likely not function exactly as they do in v3 today. My gut feeling is that envelopes and spectral editing are likely to undergo redesign. Martin specifically mentioned envelopes in the video he published several days ahead of the release:

The video focused on the various types of debt that the team inherited from the original team and how they addressed them. That list of debt includes the logo, and it’s a topic of its own.

Over the last 25 years, I witnessed dozens, if not hundreds, of logo proposals, because many people were not happy with the original one. I’ve seen symbolic logos, photorealistic logos, and just about everything in between.

Some contributors were adamant that only they have the right vision for the project’s branding. Others were very much self-aware (“Here’s yet another unsolicited logo redesign to add to the pile“). So it’s very tempting to smirk when you read things like “just deliver a logo people like” in the comments section at The Verge.

All in all, I feel it’s somewhat premature to comment on the new Audacity. There are aspects that I absolutely love. There are things I’m just not too sure about. Like the lack of grid lines above waveform visualization in tracks. Or some of the user interface being bloody enormous, like this built-in compressor plugin window:

So let’s wait for the final version to arrive. The current estimation is sometime in 2026.

Artworks

Cyberpunk 2077 fan art by 長門ゆき, made with Unreal Engine, Blender, and Photoshop:

Echo City by UE班的小学生_Cgerjia, made with Substance 3D Designer/Painter, Unreal Engine, and Blender:

Skyshade: La Saga LightLark by Ferdinand Ladera (for Alex Aster’s recent bestseller), made with Blender and Photoshop:

LV2 plugins (and other data, like presets) are discovered by parsing Turtle files installed in various bundle directories. If the host only needs to know which things are installed, then only manifest.ttl files need to be loaded. That takes only a fraction of a second (60 ms on this machine, which has 897 plugins installed), but if the host needs more information (like the plugin's label or what ports it has), then the data files need to be loaded as well, which can take several seconds. The parser (from serd) is very fast, so the overwhelming majority of this time is spent inserting data into a model.

I was recently doing some work on lilv related to discovery, and got sidetracked into investigating how much of this overhead could be eliminated. Quite a bit, as it turns out, but before explaining how, I'll give a brief summary of the relevant fundamentals so people who don't spend their days in the triple mines can understand what I'm talking about.

LV2 data is written in the Turtle syntax, which can have a lot of structure, but is ultimately just a shorthand for data that is simply a “flat” series of triples. For example, the abbreviated Turtle

<http://example.org/amp>
    a lv2:Plugin ;
    doap:name "Amplifier" .

represents the two triples

<http://example.org/amp> rdf:type  lv2:Plugin .
<http://example.org/amp> doap:name "Amplifier" .

which describe a plugin with the name “Amplifier”.

Two implications of this format are important to understand here:

• All data is a set of triples which can be stored in some lexicographical order to be quickly searchable (for example, a set ordered subject-first can be used to quickly find triples that start with a given subject).

• All data can be streamed via a simple “flat” interface (for example a function with three parameters), and is trivial to inspect and/or filter on the fly (much like line-based text in POSIX pipelines).

The data may not be stored as a “literal” ordered set of triples (they're actually quads in memory for one thing), but this simplified way of thinking about it is good enough for this explanation.

Which order is best depends on the query. For example (borrowing a bit of syntax from SPARQL where ?name represents a query variable), if the host asks something like “what's the name of this plugin” or

<http://example.org/amp> doap:name ?name .

then it needs to find triples that start with the given subject and predicate (<http://example.org/amp> and doap:name) to see what object (?name) they have. So, a subject-predicate-object or “SPO” index will work well. If, however, the host asks something like “which things are plugins” or

?plugin rdf:type lv2:Plugin .

then an SPO index doesn't help because there's no known subject to search for. Most queries are like this, with either a subject or object wildcard (querying relatively “fixed” predicates is rare), so lilv has always had both an SPO and OPS index to support them.

This is convenient, but twice the indexing means roughly twice the overhead. The SPO index is the natural order used in the syntax, and supports most code (which mainly looks up properties of known things), but the OPS index isn't used so much. Can it be removed entirely to speed things up? It is used for many important things, but conveniently, there's only a few fixed cases of those (like finding plugins as above). So, we can take advantage of the streaming nature of the data to record this information while it's being read, instead of inserting it into an index only to query it out later.

To do this in the implementation, I introduced the concept of a “skimmer”. A skimmer inserts triples into a model as usual, but first "skims" them and records items of interest for later use. For example, a skimmer checks whether a triple has rdf:type lv2:Plugin, and if so, records the subject in a result set that stores only plugin URIs. Some cases are a bit trickier, and actually pulling this off cleanly took quite an overhaul, but details aside, it turns out that this approach can be used to eliminate the OPS index entirely without losing any functionality.

How much of an improvement does this make? On this machine, using lv2ls -n as a crude benchmark, the time goes from 3.11 to 1.72 seconds, or about a 45% improvement. The memory consumption goes down a bit as well, from (even more crudely) a max-RSS of about 138 to 112 MiB, or about a 19% improvement (everything here is an average of three runs). The improvement will vary dramatically based on what's installed, for example in some earlier tests with a different configuration I saw drops from around 7 to 4 seconds, but in general, not bad!

Are there any downsides to this? Yes, primarily two:

1. As with any significant change, there is the possibility of regression. Discovery is a little more restricted than before, so although I've done my best to test things, there is a possibility of things not being discovered anymore. Usually the fix for this is adding information to the manifest that should have been there anyway.

2. Though the implementation itself doesn't make queries that require the OPS index, hosts themselves can since lilv provides generic query functions. To support this, there's a new boolean option, LILV_OPTION_OBJECT_INDEX, which can be used to enable or disable the OPS index. Since most hosts don't need it, I decided to disable this by default. That will be a regression for hosts that do, however, who need to explicitly opt in to the old behaviour by enabling this option. A warning is printed if a query will be slow because of the missing index, so it should at least be obvious if this happens.

These changes are now in the main branch in git, which will be released soon, probably as version 0.26.0.

Demonstration of the b4Modular synthesizer Series 7 by Malte Steiner. The system features 2 analog Oscillators / LFO, one digital oscillator with 6 different modes, oscillator bank with 6 square waves, triple clock module, 3 slew limiters, a lowpass filter, tone control filter, wave folder, one ring mod / wave folder thingy, 5 VCAs, crossfader, mixer, 2 pressure sensors, a trigger button, unity and gates mixer.

"My diy modular synthesizer in a suitcase which I developed between 2024 and 2025. The goal was to develop a cheap modular system mainly for live concerts which is repairable and can go into Checkin Luggage without much worries (I would never do that with my Eurorack). So far I used that system for several concerts of my projects Elektronengehirn and Notstandskomitee in Berlin and Helsinki, and local Jam sessions here in Aalborg. It is build in a Nanuk 923 case which can remove the lid, the rails are made of wood and wood screws, the front plates are 3D printed. Everything works fine and the concerts were great, but learnings so far:

- the frame is rigidly attached to the case so any shock impacts directly the system. So far one of my 3D printed brackets broke which didn't hinder a concert. I redesigned it to be more sturdy and it never happened since. But the rigid design is a bit questionable and I rethink the approach.

- the PCBs have been fixed to the frontplates with common metal screws and nuts. From the travel one nut unscrewed itself because of the vibration. I replaced it with nylon screws and nuts which have more grip. It remembers of a story from a Berlin company which created custom modular synths for Tangerine Dream back then. They tested the sturdiness against vibration by dragging those flight cases over a copplestone street at night until police stopped them asking what the hell they were doing.

- I hit a limit with my power supply design with a self made voltage splitter and an additional 7805 on the positive rail. It can't handle many microcontroller based modules before it collapses. In future systems I use another approach for the power supply which is much more stabile."

This post is to celebrate a few things despite the events that are clouding our feelings. 😠

Another thing to not celebrate is the slaughtering by Sourceforge of my developer web site, which they are calling "sunsetting", by October. I've already migrated it. 

On the other, brighter hand, I'm celebrating this week La Mercè, which is the local festivity of Barcelona.

You may download it from GitHub (source code and APK), or you may get it from the IzzyOnDroid repository which is available in the F-Droid app, but also on Neo-Store, Droid-ify,  and the unofficial IzzyOnDroid app.

If you already have the F-Droid app, you only need to add the IzzyOnDroid repository in Settings>Repositories and install it today, or you may prefer to use the official F-Droid repo.

I would like to add to the celebration a video live streaming concerto, but I am too lazy and odd playing for that. Better use this wonderful rendering of the Tchaikovsky Violin concerto by TwoSet Violin, with Brett Yang playing the soloist and Eddy Chen the rest of the orchestra. Enjoy!

Hello all, this is the monthly report for all software things related to KXStudio, DISTRHO & falkTX projects.

New releases

• NEW! J2SC project first release which supersedes Cadence
• Carla updated to 2.5.10
• WineASIO updated to 1.3.0

Repository updates

• NEW! added j2sc 0.0.1
• carla updated to 2.5.10
• wineasio updated to 1.3.0

Final notes

Some applications in the KXStudio Website repositories' pages have been hidden and some plugins have been marked as "abandoned".
Everything is still available to install through "apt-get" though.

That is all for now, see you next month!

The problem

London is very well served for independent cinemas, often showing classics, obscura and independent films that mainstream cinemas don’t have.

But, it’s not trivial to find or keep track of the films you’re interested in. There’s no way to search for a film across all the cinemas, or even to see what’s on today, without painstakingly checking all the individual cinema sites. It’s very easy to miss a rare theatrical showing of a beloved film.

filmhose.uk

So, I made filmhose.uk.

FilmHose lets you browse each day’s listings for the next couple of months. You can choose between the full listings or the “distilled” listings, which have less noise from the big current releases that you can see “anywhere”. You can also select only the cinemas you’re interested in, if you don’t think you’ll ever make it to Romford or whatever (although the Lumiere Romford is cool, you should make the effort). You can also search by title if you want to know where and when a specific film will be showing.

A few wrinkles

A more commercially focused post would probably skip this section, but I’m not that so I’ll share some caveats:

• Some cinemas’ websites are not easy to scrape. In fact broadly speaking I’d say, the cooler the cinema, the more likely it is they do their website in some ad-hoc way that’s difficult to scrape automatically. At the moment I don’t have these, which is a pity:
  • The Nickel
  • David Lean Cinema
  • Cinema Museum, Kennington
  • Theatreship, Canary Wharf
  • Sands Films

  At some point maybe I’ll just ask them if I can have their listings, like it’s the twentieth century or something. Or some of them have few enough that I could enter them manually. But for now I’m just doing the lazy thing and omitting them.

• There’s a quite narrow focus on independent / arts cinemas. I’m not necessarily against adding the big chains (Odeon, Vue etc), but for nerds like me the indies’ listings will be more interesting. Maybe one day.
• I’m relying on the scraped titles, which aren’t necessarily very consistent. Eg. some cinemas will have “Lilo and Stitch”, others will have “Lilo & Stitch”. There’s a lot of titles like “Amadeus [40th Anniversary]”. I’ve tried to normalize these a bit for sorting and matching purposes, but it’s far from perfect. This means 1) the stats above are a bit unreliable, because they’re based on the scraped titles 2) It’s not easy to do things like automatically get interesting data like directors, release years etc. Although I might still see if I can figure out a way that mostly works well enough.
• I’m automatically generating the film thumbnails from images found on the cinemas’ websites. Because these could have any dimensions, I’m cropping them to be square. I’m trying to be slightly clever when doing the cropping, but sometimes it makes suboptimal choices. I think it’s mostly good enough. Originally I was quite hesitant to have the thumbnails at all, but people told me the site looked too boring.

But overall

So far it seems to be working out pretty well. I’m able to get data for 27 cinemas, currently covering about 700 separate films, 2500 showtimes, with an average of 36 film options and 67 showtimes per day. Film lovers in London are pretty blessed, especially when you consider that’s not including the big chains.

The site loads very quickly and has very little extraneous nonsense, for me it’s easily the best way to see what’s on that’s interesting. I hope other people will find that too.

Where do I sign up?

You can’t, it’s a free website with no login. Just go to filmhose.uk.

But if you really want to sign up for something you can follow on X / Twitter or Bluesky.