planet.linuxaudio.org

We get it. After years of DAWs leapfrogging in similar directions, the new generation of music tools made it easier to start projects, get inspiration, and improvise. But sometimes they played catchup on editing and automation. Bitwig Studio 6's details are here, and it feels like editing automation, clips, and more are looking as fresh as those other tools, all in an updated UI. The beta is out now.

The post Bitwig Studio 6 details revealed, and editing gets a big boost appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

Composers Desktop Project has been producing secret sauce of sound spelunkers since the cooperative began in 1986. But it's receiving newfound attention -- partly because of the revelation Aphex Twin used it, but mostly because we finally get a usable GUI. Here's your guide to how to install this on Mac, Windows, or Linux, and how to dive into the rabbit hole.

The post How to get started with SoundThread and CDP: wild free sound tools appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

The GStreamer project is thrilled to announce that this year's GStreamer Conference is now confirmed to take place on Thursday and Friday 23-24 October 2025 in London, UK, followed by a 2-3 day hackfests.

You can find more details about the conference on the GStreamer Conference 2025 web site.

A Call for Presentations will be sent out shortly.

Registration is expected to open soon as well.

We will announce those and any further updates on the gstreamer-announce mailing list, the conference website, on Bluesky, on Mastodon, and on our Discourse forum.

Talk slots will be available in varying durations from 20 minutes up to 45 minutes. Whatever you're doing or planning to do with GStreamer, we'd like to hear from you!

We also plan to have sessions with short lightning talks / demos / showcase talks for those who just want to show what they've been working on or do a mini-talk instead of a full-length talk. Lightning talk slots will be allocated on a first-come-first-serve basis, so make sure to reserve your slot if you plan on giving a lightning talk.

A GStreamer hackfest will take place right after the conference.

We hope to see you in London!

Please spread the word!

To anyone who remembers Y2K, Sony’s MiniDisc format will probably always feel futuristic. That goes double for Sony’s MZ-RH1, the last MiniDisk recorder ever released, back in 2006. It’s barely larger than the diminutive disks, and its styling is impeccable. There’s a reason they’ve become highly collectible and sell for insane sums on e-Bay.

Unfortunately, they come with a ticking time-bomb of an Achilles heel: the first-generation OLED screens. Failure is not a question of if, but when, and many units have already succumbed. Fortunately enterprising hacker [Sir68k] has come up with replacement screen to keep these two-decade old bits of the future alive.

Previous revisions required some light surgery to get the twin OLED replacement screens to fit, but as of the latest incarnation (revision F+), it’s now a 100% drop-in replacement for the original Sony part. While it is a drop-in, don’t expect it to be easy. The internals are very densely packed, and fairly delicate — both in the name of miniaturization. You’ll need to break out the micro-screwdrivers for this one, and maybe some magnifiers if your eyes are as old as ours. At least Sony wasn’t gluing cases together back in 2006, and [Sir68k] does provide a very comprehensive repair guide.

He’s even working on new firmware, to make what many considered best MD recorder better than ever. It’s not ready yet, but when it is [Sir68k] promises to open-source the upgrade. The replacement screens are sadly not open source hardware, but they’re a fine hack nonetheless.

We may see more MiniDisc hacks as the format’s apparent revival continues. Things like adding Bluetooth to the famously-cramped internals, or allowing full data transfer — something Sony was unwilling to allow until the RH1, which is one of the reasons these units are so desirable.

Despite the regularly proclaimed death of physical media, new audio albums are still being published on CD and vinyl. There’s something particularly interesting about Lorde’s new album Virgin however — the CD is a completely clear disc. Unfortunately there have been many reports of folks struggling to get the unique disc to actually play, and some sharp-eyed commentators have noted that the CD doesn’t claim to be Red Book compliant by the absence of the Compact CD logo.

To see what CD players see, [Adrian] of Adrian’s Digital Basement got out some tools and multiple CD players to dig into the issue. These players range from a 2003 Samsung, a 1987 NEC, and a cheap portable Coby player. But as all audio CDs are supposed to adhere to the Red Book standard, a 2025 CD should play just as happily on a 1980s CD player as vice versa.

The first step in testing was to identify the laser pickup (RF) signal test point on the PCB of each respective player. With this hooked up to a capable oscilloscope, you can begin to see the eye pattern forming. In addition to being useful with tuning the CD player, it’s also an indication of the signal quality that the rest of the CD player has to work with. Incidentally, this is also a factor when it comes to CD-R compatibility.

While the NEC player was happy with regular and CD-R discs, its laser pickup failed to get any solid signal off the clear Lorde disc. With the much newer Samsung player (see top image), the clear CD does play, but as the oscilloscope shot shows, it only barely gets a usable signal from the pickup. Likewise, the very generic Coby player also plays the audio CD, which indicates that any somewhat modern CD player with its generally much stronger laser and automatic gain control ought to be able to play it.

That said, it seems that very little of the laser’s light actually makes it back to the pickup’s sensor, which means that along with the gain the laser output gets probably cranked up to 11, and with that its remaining lifespan will be significantly shortened. Ergo it’s probably best to just burn that CD-R copy of the album and listen to that instead.

Week highlights: new releases of RapidRaw, Gradia, Friction, and Handbrake; new features in GIMP.

GIMP

Recent changes are mainly various under-the-hood improvements and fixes. CmykStudent also restored support for HRZ Slow Scan Television Images and added support for JPEG-based file formats by Seattle FilmWorks (designed for digitized film).

Another WIP patch by CmykStudent is bringing support for the LCMS2 Fast Float plug-in. This will speed up 8-bit and 16-bit conversions and floating point precision operations.

RapidRAW

It’s a bit scary (but also impressive) how many changes have accumulated in RapidRaw in the past three weeks since I last mentioned it:

• Fuji RAF X-Trans Support (confirmed to work)
• Image importer
• Batch renaming
• Automatic image tagging with CLIP by OpenAI
• Color labels for images (plus a corresponding filter)
• Image straightening tool + reworked crop & transforms tool
• Grow, shrink, and feather AI-generated masks
• Simple OpenCV-based panorama stitcher
• Non-destructive eraser tool
• Better preset organization
• More realistic exposure adjustments and better highlights control
• Auto-crop when rotating to remove black areas

I think that the program would benefit from greater emphasis on processing quality. You can see the infamous pink tones where the image is overexposed:

You can fetch the latest build from GitHub.

Gradia 1.9.0

Alexander Vanhee made two new major releases of Gradia, a screenshot annotation tool. Here are the most interesting changes:

• New on-screen display design
• Support for zooming in and out (Shift and Alt work as modifiers for scrolling horizontally and vertically)
• Background gradient changes: redesigned color selector, up to 5 movable steps in a gradient, radial and conic gradients now possible
• Improved drag-and-drop support for loading from URLs

Get the latest code here or install from Flathub.

Friction 1.0.0rc2

Ole-André Rodlie published the second release candidate for the Friction animation editor.

Here are the major changes:

• New horizontal toolbar for tool settings (similar to what you know from e.g. Inkscape, see below fpr a screenshot)
• SVG can now by copy-pasted into your Friction project
• PNG images now have proper unassociated alpha, and TIFF images now have proper associated alpha
• 19 various UX/UI improvements and fixes

See here for the full release notes and download links.

Handbrake 1.10

The popular video transcoder got a new update:

• New “Social 10MB” presets
• Improved metadata passthru, preserving additional metadata including creation date, cover art, and location
• New option to choose the encoder color range
• SubRip/UTF-8 subtitles are now passed through to MKV without conversion to SSA
• Various OS-specific fixes and improvements for Windows, Linux, and macOS

Full release notes and downloads are on GitHub.

Artworks

New Arkandis by Deltakosh, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Ruined Mountain Pass by Doosan, made with Blender, Photoshop, Quixel Megascans, and Unreal Engine:

Hangar E by Mauger Baptiste, made with Blender and Photoshop:

The Station by Brendon Bauman, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Deep in Poison Forest by Andrew Andreev, made with Blender and Photoshop:

The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu Studio 24.04.3 LTS. This is a minor release which wraps-up the security and bug fixes into one .iso image, available for download now.

The biggest change is the lowlatency kernel has been officially retired, replaced by the generic Ubuntu kernel. Those that have been using Ubuntu Studio 24.04 and upgraded may have already noticed this change.

With that said, much like Ubuntu Studio 24.10 and higher, the generic kernel includes kernel parameters added upon boot that allow the kernel to act in a lowlatency mode, so you now can enjoy the benefits of the lowlatency kernel while using the generic kernel.

We realize this may come as a shock, but when 24.04 was released, we knew this day would eventually come. However, there is no difference between the lowlatency kernel and the generic kernel with these boot parameters. They are:

• preempt=full: Makes the kernel fully preemptible
• rcu_nocbs=all Offloads Read-Copy Update (RCU) callbacks from all CPUs dedicated to kernel threads, improves real-time performance
• threadirqs Forces interrupt handlers to run in a threaded context, reducing buffer xruns

These kernel parameters can be found in the files in /etc/defaults/grub.d

Please give financially to Ubuntu Studio!

Giving is down. We understand that some people may no longer be able to give financially to this project, and that’s OK. However, if you have never given to Ubuntu Studio for the hard work and dedication we put into this project, please consider a monetary contribution.

Additionally, we would love to see more monthly contributions to this project. You can do so via PayPal, Liberapay, or Patreon. We would love to see more contributions!

So don’t wait, and don’t wait for someone else to do it! Thank you in advance!

Donate using PayPal Donations are Monthly or One-Time

Donate using Liberapay Donations are Weekly, Monthly, or Annually

Donate using Patreon Become a Patron!Donations are Monthly

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:

• audioconvert: Fix caps negotiation regression when using a mix matrix
• aws: Add support for brevity in awstranslate and add option to partition speakers in the transcription output of awstranscriber2
• speechmatics speech-to-text: Expose mask-profanities property
• cea708mux: Add support for discarding select services on each input
• cea608overlay, cea708overlay: Accept GPU memory buffers if downstream supports the overlay composition meta
• d3d12screencapture source element and device provider fixes
• decodebin3: Don't error on an incoming ONVIF metadata stream
• uridecodebin3: Fix potential crash when adding URIs to messages, e.g. if no decoder is available
• v4l2: Fix memory leak for dynamic resolution change
• VA encoder fixes
• videorate, imagefreeze: Add support for JPEG XS
• Vulkan integration fixes
• wasapi2 audio device monitor improvements
• webrtc: Add WHEP client signaller and add whepclientsrc element on top of webrtcsrc using that
• threadshare: Many improvements and fixes to the generic threadshare and RTP threadshare elements
• rtpbin2 improvements and fixes
• gst-device-monitor-1.0 command line tool improvements
• Various bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

See the GStreamer 1.26.5 release notes for more details.

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

Week highlights: new major releases of PixiEditor and Flameshot, new features in GIMP, FreeCAD, OpenSCAD, and Ardour.

GIMP

There were two user-visible changes this past week:

• The newly added GEGL API browser by Ondřej Míchal (GSoC2025 student) will help developers use GEGL operations in their own plugins.
• The initial support for importing PAA textures by CmykStudent will help game developers who need to open texture files in this format developed by the Bohemia Interactive game studio.

PixiEditor 2.0

Krzysztof Krysiński announced the release of PixiEditor 2.0. This image editor was originally designed for pixel art, but that’s in the past now. The new release brings general image editing features and some vector graphics tools.

Here are some of the major changes:

• Node graph compositing
• Bezier curves, lines, and vector shapes
• Text tool
• Frame-by-frame animations
• Brush with a pixel-perfect option
• Transformation tools: scale, move, skew, rotate, perspective

The developers released a quick overview video (below) and a much more detailed walkthrough.

They are building a business model where the software is free (both LGPLv3 and gratis), and extensions are paid.

Downloads are available for all major desktop platforms.

Flameshot 13

This is a major new release with Qt6 support and various quality-of-life improvements, including these:

• Support for more Wayland compositors.
• Symmetric resize with Shift is now possible.
• JPEG quality can now be selected.
• Saving WebP is now available on Windows.

Downloads are here.

FreeCAD

Ryan Kembrey submitted a pretty exciting patch for TechDraw, that replaces the old static view frames with new dynamic ones that autoresize when you tweak the position of dimensions or add new ones, and hide technical details like the frame caption until you hover over the frame. Here is the demonstration:

captain0xff created a draft PR for the project he’s been working on as part of the GSoC program this year: interactive controls for the Part Design workbench. So far, the patch covers the Pad, Additive and Subtractive Loft/Pipe/Helix, Pocket, Fillet, Chamfer, and Thickness commands. Here is an excerpt from his video demonstration:

Meanwhile, drwho495 started working on a new 3rd-party workbench called Constraint Design. His intention is to create a more stable version of the Part Design workbench that uses custom elements rather than OpenCascade elements and thus has fewer toponaming issues.

OpenSCAD

The OpenSCAD team started posting on Fediverse about the recently added new features. One of them is support for navigation presets, similar to what you can find in e.g. FreeCAD:

Ardour

Paul merged the initial code for displaying the audio editor on the Cue page. This will help with audio clips on live sessions. The implementation still has some issues to be ironed out.

Artworks

Aurora Settlement by Pedro Arnaut (Colapso studio), made with Blender and Photoshop:

Athens by Lucas M. Molina, made with Blender and Photoshop:

The Caelus Station by alex_liangbo, made with Blender and Photoshop:

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.

As of July 10, 2025, all flavors of Ubuntu 24.10, including Ubuntu Studio 24.10, codenamed “Oracular Oriole”, have reached end-of-life (EOL). There will be no more updates of any kind, including security updates, for this release of Ubuntu.

If you have not already done so, please upgrade to Ubuntu Studio 25.10 via the instructions provided here. If you do not do so as soon as possible, you will lose the ability without additional advanced configuration.

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

Regular Ubuntu releases, meaning those that are between the Long-Term Support releases, are supported for 9 months and users are expected to upgrade after every release with a 3-month buffer following each release.

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

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!