planet.linuxaudio.org

Sonic Pi creator Sam Aaron is building something new. It's early days, but Tau5 promises to be a "next-gen" creative coding environment. You can use it with your favorite tools, including Ableton Live, hardware, TidalCycles, Hydra, and others. And you never have to feel alone: you can jam with others, code with friends, and even code with AI -- or keep it all-human if you prefer. Let's explain.

The post Tau5 will be a hub for live coding music, visuals, and art with friends – or bots appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

‘Hearing voices’ doesn’t have to be worrisome, for instance when software-defined radio (SDR) happens to be your hobby. It can take quite some of your time and attention to pull voices from the ether and decode them. Therefore, [theckid] came up with a nifty solution: RadioTranscriptor. It’s a homebrew Python script that captures SDR audio and transcribes it using OpenAI’s Whisper model, running on your GPU if available. It’s lean and geeky, and helps you hear ‘the voice in the noise’ without actively listening to it yourself.

This tool goes beyond the basic listening and recording. RadioTranscriptor combines SDR, voice activity detection (VAD), and deep learning. It resamples 48kHz audio to 16kHz in real time. It keeps a rolling buffer, and only transcribes actual voice detected from the air. It continuously writes to a daily log, so you can comb through yesterday’s signal hauntings while new findings are being logged. It offers GPU support with CUDA, with fallback to CPU.

It sure has its quirks, too: ghost logs, duplicate words – but it’s dead useful and hackable to your liking. Want to change the model, tweak the threshold, add speaker detection: the code is here to fork and extend. And why not go the extra mile, and turn it into art?

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.

Students from the ECE4760 program at Cornell have been working on a spatial audio system built into a hat. The project from [Anishka Raina], [Arnav Shah], and [Yoon Kang], enables the wearer to get a sense of the direction and proximity of objects in the immediate vicinity with the aid of audio feedback.

The heart of the build is a Raspberry Pi Pico. It’s paired with a TF-Luna LiDAR sensor which is used to identify the range to objects around the wearer. The sensor is mounted on a hat, so the wearer can pan the sensor from side to side to scan the immediate area for obstacles. Head tracking wasn’t implemented in the project, so instead, the wearer uses a potentiometer to indicate to the microcontroller the direction they are facing as they scan. The Pi Pico then takes the LIDAR scan data, determines the range and location of any objects nearby, and creates a stereo audio signal which indicates to the wearer how close those objects are and their relative direction using a spatial audio technique called interaural time difference (ITD).

It’s a neat build that provides some physical sensory augmentation via the human auditory system. We’ve featured similar projects before, too.

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!

AirWindows, if you aren't already in the know, is a planetary treasure. Developer Chris Johnson has built a massive playground of DSP, available for free/Patreon donationware. And this time, he's created something he says is "not normal." What was supposed to be a brutal guitar sound went off the rails. But don't let that stop you from getting onboard.

The post AirWindows’ free PointyDeluxe is dangerous, unstable, and wonderful appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

Week highlights: new releases of Shotcut and Qtractor, the Blender team starts working on an iPad port.

Flameshot 13 release candidates

The Flameshot team started making release candidates for the upcoming v13 of this screen capture and annotation tool. The next big release will ship with Qt6-based builds, better Wayland support, and various other changes. You can help the team test the builds and discover bugs.

Blender on iPad

Dalai Felinto announced that Blender is coming to iPad users, with later versions arriving for users of other touch devices (the post mentions Microsoft Surface, Huawei MatePad, and the Wacom MovinkPad).

The team is planning to release a tech demo in time for SIGGRAPH 2025. Although one might argue that the teaser is already out 🙂

You can follow the project’s progress here.

askNK did a pretty decent coverage of the news, check it out:

Shotcut 25.07

The new version of the editor no longer ships Whisper speech-to-text models inside the build to reduce download sizes. Instead, you should now use the built-in downloader.

Here are some of the other changes:

• Various UI theme improvements, mostly to make the UI look more native on Windows and macOS.
• A new Outline video filter, mostly useful in conjunction with the rich text filter and images that have an alpha channel.
• A new Soft Focus filter set (Mask: From file > Blur: Gaussian > Opacity > Mask: Apply).
• The Channels toggle buttons have been added to many audio filters.

For the full list of changes, please see the release notes.

On a related matter, Shotcut seems important enough for Filmora to spend money on the ads targeting (potential) Shotcut users:

Qtractor 1.5.7

Here are some of the new features in this release:

• The Aux Send bus now has an I/O matrix (see below for a screenshot).
• The waveform is now rendered correctly for audio clips with more than two channels.
• All audio clip peaks+rms waveforms are now rendered slightly compressed to make the low-level signal more visible.

Downloads are here.

Ardour

Some websites recently reported that Ardour dropped GTK2 support entirely in favor of its vendored version called YTK. This led to a number of discussions where people became severely confused (sometimes aggressively so) about why Ardour relies on a vendored GTK2 and which parts of GTK the team had to replace with custom solutions.

So, Paul wrote a detailed explanation in a thread on Phoronix. Check it out if you are puzzled too.

Artworks

Realm of Specters: Buried in permafrost by Eugeny Romanov, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Haunted Forest by Mattias Lind, made with Blender and Krita:

European City by Jaechan Gwon, made with Blender and Photoshop:

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.

The GStreamer team is pleased to announce another bug fix release in the new stable 1.26 release series of your favourite cross-platform multimedia framework!

This release only contains bugfixes as well, and it should be safe to update from 1.26.x.

Highlighted bugfixes:

• adaptivedemux2: Fixed reverse playback
• d3d12screencapture: Add support for monitor add/remove in device provider
• rtmp2src: various fixes to make it play back AWS medialive streams
• rtph265pay: add profile-id, tier-flag, and level-id to output rtp caps
• vp9parse: Fix handling of spatial SVC decoding
• vtenc: Fix negotiation failure with `profile=main-422-10`
• gtk4paintablesink: Add YCbCr memory texture formats and other improvements
• livekit: add room-timeout
• mp4mux: add TAI timestamp muxing support
• rtpbin2: fix various race conditions, plus other bug fixes and performance improvements
• threadshare: add a `ts-rtpdtmfsrc` element, implement run-time input switching in `ts-intersrc`
• webrtcsink: fix deadlock on error setting remote description and other fixes
• cerbero: WiX installer: fix missing props files in the MSI packages
• smaller macOS/iOS package sizes
• Various bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

See the GStreamer 1.26.4 release notes for more details.

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

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!