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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.

Bose SoundTouch speakers were introduced in 2013, offering the ability to connect to online streaming services and play back audio on multiple speakers simultaneously using the accompanying mobile app. Now these features are about to be removed, including the mobile app, as Bose is set to discontinue support on February 18, 2026. From that point onwards, you can only use them via Bluetooth or physical connectors that may be present, like an audio jack or HDMI port. This includes fancy home theater system hardware like the above SoundTouch 520.

That is the official line, at least. We have seen the SoundTouch on Hackaday previously, when it was discovered how to gain root shell access to the Linux OS that powers the original SoundTouch system with Telnet access on port 17,000 to pass the listening service the remote_services on command before connecting with Telnet as usual, with root and no password. A quick glance at the comments to that post suggests that this is still a valid approach for at least certain SoundTouch devices.

The fallout from this announcement appears to be twofold: most of all that ‘smart’ features like WiFi-based streaming can be dropped at any time. But it also makes us realize that hardware hackers like us will never run out of new and suddenly obsolete hardware that need our rescue.

Ewan Bristow and CRQL have created pure, manic magic with this one. UZU mangles sounds through a wormhole, via what is technically a spectral Frequency Domain Filter. And yes, FL Studio fans may recognize some of the characteristics of the phaser in Image-Line’s wonderful Harmor synth.

The post UZU is a new rubbery spectral smearing phaser effect from CRQL, Ewan Bristow appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

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.

It’s been a while since the last installment in our Know Audio series, in which we investigated distortion as it applies to Hi-Fi audio. Now it’s time to return with part two of our look at distortion, and attempt some real-world distortion measurements on the bench.

Last time, we examined distortion from a theoretical perspective, as the introduction of unwanted harmonics as a result of non-linearities in the signal path. Sometimes that’s a desired result, as with a guitar pedal, but in a Hi-Fi system where the intention is to reproduce as faithfully as possible a piece of music from a recording, the aim is to make any signal path components as linear as possible. When we measure the distortion, usually expressed as THD, for Total Harmonic Distortion, of a piece of equipment we are measuring the ratio of those unwanted harmonics in the output to the frequencies we want,  and the resulting figure is commonly expressed in dB, or as a percentage.

The Cheapest Of Audio Kits, Analysed

Having explained what we are trying to do, it’s on to the device in question and the instruments required. On the bench in front of me I have my tube headphone amplifier project, a Chinese 6J1 preamp kit modified with transformers on its output for impedance matching. I’ve investigated the unmodified version of this kit here in the past, and measured a THD of 0.03% when it’s not driven into distortion, quite an acceptable figure.

To measure the distortion I’m using my audio signal generator, a Levell TG200DMP that I was lucky enough to obtain through a friend. It’s not the youngest of devices, but it’s generally reckoned to be a pretty low distortion oscillator. It’s set to 1 KHz and a 1 V peak-to-peak line level audio output, which feeds the headphone amplifier input. The output from the amplifier is feeding a set of headphones, and my trusty HP334A distortion analyser is monitoring the result.

How Does A Distortion Analyser Work Then?

A distortion analyser is two instruments in one, a sensitive audio level meter, and an extremely high quality notch filter. In an instrument as old as this one everything is analogue, while in a modern audio analyser everything including the signal source is computer controlled.

The idea is that the analyser is first calibrated against the incoming audio using the voltmeter, and then the filter is switched into the circuit. The filter is then adjusted to reject the fundamental frequency, in this case 1 kHz, leaving behind only the harmonic distortion. The audio level meter can then be used to read the distortion. If you’re interested in how these work in greater detail I made one a few years ago in GNU Radio for an April Fool post about gold cables.

Using the HP offers an experience that’s all too rare in 2025, that of tuning an analogue circuit. It settles down over time, so when you first tune it for minimum 1kHz level it will retune to a lower level after a while. So mine has been running but idle for the last few hours, in order to reach maximum stability. I’m measuring 0.2% THD for the headphone amplifier, which is entirely expected given that the transformers it uses are not of high quality at all.

An Instrument Too Expensive For A Hackaday Expense Claim

It’s important to state that I’ve measured the THD at only one frequency, namely 1 kHz. This is the frequency at which most THD figures are measured, so it’s an easy comparison, but a high-end audio lab will demand measurements across a range of frequencies. That’s entirely possible with the Levell and the HP, but it becomes a tedious manual process of repetitive calibration and measurement.

As you might expect, a modern audio analyser has all these steps computerised, having in place of the oscillator and meter a super-high-quality DAC and ADC, and instead of the 334A’s filter tuning dial, a computer controlled switched filter array. Unsurprisingly these instruments can be eye-wateringly expensive.

So there in a nutshell is a basic set-up to measure audio distortion. It’s extremely out of date, but in its simplicity I hope you find an understanding of the topic. Keep an eye out for a 334A and snap it up if you see one for not a lot. I did, and it’s by far the most beautifully-made piece of test equipment I own.

Audacity always had some appealing features, not least of which being free and open source. But a glimpse inside the design work being done on Audacity 4 suggests it could become something else: a slick, efficient wave editor that just happens to be free. This UI breakdown will be of interest to anyone pondering UI/UX in creative tools.

The post Audacity 4: a glimpse of a new, more modern UI for the free audio editor appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

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.

Week highlights: new releases of Krita, RapidRAW, and Gradia; MIDI strumming in Ardour.

Krita 5.2.13

The Krita team released a bugfix update. Some of the notable fixes are targeted at users of Android and devices with touch input:

• Background saving has been revamped
• Devices running Android v15 with a lot of memory are now supported.
• The Transform tool now works with touch input.

See here for a more complete list of changes.

RapidRAW 1.4.x

New RapidRAW releases now take longer, but the pace is still impressive. This version features several notable enhancements. I’ll take a deeper dive in a separate post, so here is the list of changes:

• Auto-culling to help you detect similar photos and discard blurry ones (in the screenshot below).
• Collage maker that distributes a selection of photos over a configurable grid.
• New color calibration panel hidden by default, for tweaking hue and saturation of primary RGB channels.
• Preset importer (says “other common photo editors”, but I don’t see any in the list, just the ones by RapidRAW).
• New section in Settings to select which functionality to show in the UI (this is where you enable the color calibration panel).
• Sorting by Exif data: a small selection of Exif fields is available (Date taken, ISO, Focus length, etc.).
• Major improvement ot local contrast tools.

As usual, downloads and the full list of changes are on GitHub.

Gradia 1.11

Alexander Vanhee released an update to his screenshot annotation tool that is growing into something larger, it seems.

Release highlights:

• At 100% zoom, scrolling the mouse wheel now changes the tool size.
• Highlighter colors are now more transparent.
• Images on the home page now have drop shadows.
• Additional resizing options for tools like Arrow and Rectangle.
• Color and width can now be changed for annotations you already added.
• Image background got some new presets.
• Angle selector on the gradient background tab has been improved.
• Tesseract-based OCR is now available.

I’d love to include a screenshot of the OCR feature and some of the other new features. Alas, the Flatpak build hasn’t been updated yet, and my custom build is faulty and doesn’t really work. Sorry about that!

Ardour

There’s a lot of under-the-hood work happening, but the team recently merged a patch that adds a simplistic MIDI note strumming feature. It’s nowhere as sophisticated as the MIDI Strum filter by Robin Gareus, but it can be enhanced in the future.

Artworks

Coral Ship Wreck by Jan Rozanski, made with Photoshop, 3DCoat, and Blender:

The Gladiators by Ken Li, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Spirit Hollow by Ignacio Bruno, made with GIMP:

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!

The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the beta release of Ubuntu Studio 25.10, codenamed “Questing Quokka”.

While this beta is reasonably free of any showstopper installer bugs, you will find some bugs within. This image is, however, mostly representative of what you will find when Ubuntu Studio 25.10 is released on October 9, 2025.

We encourage everyone to try this image and report bugs to improve our final release. Pay specific attention to apps that might need to be forced to run inside Xwayland so we can patch their launchers.

Special Notes

The Ubuntu Studio 25.10 beta 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 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.

Images can be obtained from this link: https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/25.10/beta/

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

New Features This Release

This release is more evolutionary rather than revolutionary. While we work hard to bring new features, this one was not one where we had anything major to report. Here are a few highlights:

• Plasma 6.4 is now the default desktop environment, an upgrade from Plasma 6.1.
• PipeWire continues to improve with every release.. Version 1.4.7
• We now include an optional “macOS-like” layout for our users migrating from macOS, which features a dock at the bottom and a global menu. Do note that the global menu doesn’t work with all applications.
• More fine-tuning of options available in Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuraiton
• Many options in Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuration are now at the user level as opposed to the system level.
• JackTrip has been added for those needing a GUI way to network audio between computers or collaborate remotely. version 2.7.1

Major Package Upgrades

• Qtractor version 1.5.8
• Audacity version 3.7.5
• digiKam version 8.7.0
• Kdenlive version 25.08.1
• Krita version 5.2.11
• GIMP version 3.0.4

There are many other improvements, too numerous to list here. We encourage you to look around the freely-downloadable ISO image.

Known Issues

• You will be prompted, upon first login of any new user, to reboot to apply proper audio configurations for audio production. This is intentional and is a workaround for the installer’s inability to configure the first user as part of the “audio” group or for new users to be added to the audio group automatically.
  
• Official Ubuntu Studio release notes can be found at https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-studio-25-10-release-notes/

Further known issues, mostly pertaining to the desktop environment, can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QuestingQuokka/ReleaseNotes/Kubuntu

Additionally, the main Ubuntu release notes contain more generic issues: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/questing-quokka-release-notes/

How You Can Help

Please test using the test cases on https://iso.qa.ubuntu.com. All you need is a Launchpad account to get started.

Additionally, we need financial contributions. Our project lead, Erich Eickmeyer, is working long hours on this project and trying to generate a part-time income. Go here to see how you can contribute financially (options are also here in the sidebar).

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 is also a snap in order for the maintainers to get security patches delivered faster. This is done by the Thunderbird team in cooperation with Canonical.

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.

Also, to keep theming consistent, all included themes are snapped in addition to the included .deb versions so that snaps stay consistent with out themes.

We are working with Canonical to make sure that the quality of snaps goes up with each release, so we please ask that you give snaps a chance instead of writing them off completely.

Q: If I install this Beta release, will I have to reinstall when the final release comes out?
A: No. If you keep it updated, your installation will automatically become the final release.

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: We now include a minimal install option. Install using the minimal install option, then use Ubuntu Studio Installer to install what you need for your very own content creation studio.

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:

• analytics GstTensorMeta handling changes (see release notes)
• closed caption combiner and transcriberbin stability fixes
• decklinkvideosrc: fix unrecoverable state after failing to start streaming because device is busy
• decodebin3 tag handling improvements
• fallbacksrc: Fix sources only being restarted once, as well as some deadlocks and race conditions on shutdown
• gtk4paintablesink: Try importing dmabufs withouth DMA_DRM caps
• hlsdemux2: Fix parsing of byterange and init map directives
• rtpmp4gdepay2: allow only constantduration with neither constantsize nor sizelength set
• spotifysrc: update to librespot 0.7 to make work after recent Spotify changes
• threadshare: new blocking adapter element for use in front of block elements such as sinks that sync to the clock
• threadshare: various other threadshare element fixes and improvements
• v4l2: Add support for WVC1 and WMV3
• videorate: possible performance improvements when operating in drop-only mode
• GstBaseParse fixes
• Vulkan video decoder fixes
• Fix gst-device-monitor-1.0 tool device-path regression on Windows
• Python bindings: Handle buffer PTS, DTS, duration, offset, and offset-end as unsigned long long (regression fix)
• Cerbero: Reduce recipe parallelism in various cases and dump cerbero and recipe versions into datadir during packaging
• Various bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

See the GStreamer 1.26.6 release notes for more details.

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

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.

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!