planet.linuxaudio.org

April 24, 2025

Home on Libre Arts

Meet Anagram, a Linux-powered bass FX processor

Darkglass Electronics, a popular maker of bass-centric equipment (pedals, amps, cabinets), announced their first multi-effects box earlier this week. Anagram is a relatively compact pedal with a touch screen for setting up the signal chain, six endless encoders, and three footswitches.

Inside, it packs a curation of effects, as well as amp and cabinet simulations—through neural models and IRs. Oh, and it’s running embedded Linux.

The UI seems to be well thought-out. FX controls are easy to access. You can even do things like splitting the signal chain, although the narrow display can only show one row at a time.

If punching footswitches and tweaking encoders is not your thing, Anagram is supported by Darkglass Suite, a desktop librarian for other company’s gear (no Linux version, but Android/iOS versions are available).

Anagram’s neural amp can load both NAM and AIDA-X models—both open-source projects, both with various UIs available as plugins for desktop DAWs.

Neural Amp

The focus on neural modeling shouldn’t surprise you. It’s the latest tech that people are really excited about, and for a good reason.

Coincidentally, Darkglass and Neural DSP Technologies, the maker of Quad Cortex and Nano Cortex, share a co-founder, Douglas Castro (no longer around at Darkglass). You could probably think of Anagram as a bass-focused sibling in the Cortex family. Well, a cousin twice removed, maybe? At a price point exactly in the middle between the Quad and the Nano.

If you dig a little deeper, there’s a lot of fun trivia there. Yes, Darkglass and Neural DSP Technologies have the same co-founder. Darkglass was acquired by Korg several years ago, but Neural DSP Technologies remains independent. However, Korg also owns Aguilar—another bass equipment household name. An Aguilar DB amp makes a cameo appearance in one of the Anagram product videos. I wouldn’t be too surprised if there was some cross-pollination between the two companies.

There’s already at least a dozen reviews on YouTube. If you feel brave enough, you can start with the official deep dive video (1h+ long).

Anyway, Linux-based?

Ay. It’s running on Linux (Buildroot-based if you care, with the MOD Build System layer on top of it), uses JACK2 for audio server together with mod-host, and relies on LV2 plugins for effects—I’ll get back to that in a minute. Darkglass published extensive information on licenses and source code modifications.

If you’ve been around Linux audio long enough, it shouldn’t surprise you that the latency is really good. With Anagram, you can go as low as 1.3ms of total i/o roundtrip latency at 16 frames / 48kHz with “static” effects like the global EQ, mixer, and looper, and a bunch of extra plugins.

Internal signal routing

The setup on the screenshot above (courtesy of Filipe Coelho) isn’t exactly telling because you don’t get to see what plugins those are. But that preset runs with around 30% CPU load.

Apart from running proprietary plugins (mostly LV2 versions of Darkglass’s own pedals), Anagram has some open-source ones. The global EQ is fil4.lv2 by Robin Gareus, but you probably wouldn’t recognize it.

Global EQ based on fil4.lv2

The spectrum analyzer is actually modmeter.lv2, also by Robin, together with Filipe.

The built-in looper is based on the sooperlooper by Jesse Chappell, and you wouldn’t recognize it either.

SooperLooper-based looper in Anagram

That’s the power of LV2: you can separate the logic from the UI and build entirely new interfaces. And since you are here for the gory penguin details, Anagram’s UI is built with LVGL.

How good is it for 1K EUR?

I don’t have any hands-on experience with it, and gear channels on YouTube are not necessarily a great indicator. But they seem to be loving it so far.

Based on several demos I listened to, the processing quality is convincing. You can check out this video by Nate Navaro; he doesn’t cover the cons much (if at all), but he plays at least as much as he talks:

And because you can load neural profiles for whatever gear, people are already starting to use Anagram for instruments other than the bass. Here is a video by Leo Gibson:

Will this be an open platform?

That remains to be seen. It kinda makes sense that Darkglass would at least try to create a marketplace and thus open the platform to 3rd-party developers. But there is no word on that yet.

Korg, as a parent company, does have experience creating an open platform for plugin developers. You can get 3rd-party plugins for their Prologue, Minilogue XD, NTS-1, NTS-1 mkII, and NTS-3 synths and effect kits. Or develop your own ones. There are some very nice ones available.

MOD Devices, where much of the tech is coming from (I’ll get to that in a minute, too), has a lot of experience building an open platform as well. They developed their own web-based toolkit for LV2 plugins and a toolchain for developers.

Where is this all coming from?

The Anagram team has drawn directly from MOD Devices, a startup company by Gianfranco Ceccolini et al. MOD built several multi-FX boxes, most recently Dwarf, targeted primarily at guitar players but also used by other musicians (Peter Kirn of CDM fame is one of the fans).

MOD Devices came up with the idea that you can build an open platform for loading effects and do it all in a browser. They used embedded Linux, a custom LV2 host application, and a metric crapton of LV2 plugins to build a strong platform. All in all, it was a great concept and a decent implementation (although not without its flaws).

Alas, the company wasn’t very successful. COVID-19 messed up the supply chain really badly, which triggered a multi-year crisis from which the company hasn’t recovered yet and probably never will.

In September 2024, Gianfranco announced on the forum: “We’ve sold some of our software assets to industry peers and our staff is now working part-time on these collaborations”. We now know what he meant by that, exactly.

In fact, you can see both Gianfranco Ceccolini and Filipe Coelho (MOD employee and developer of Carla, DPF, and Cardinal, among other things) in the Anagram back story video.

What do we, as Linux users, get out of all this? Darkglass has already given the code modifications back to the community. But can I interest you in a completely misplaced sense of pride? I mean, Jordan Rudess plays Linux-powered keyboards by Korg. John Petrucci plays a Linux-powered Quad Cortex. So maybe get John Myung to play Anagram, and you could claim that Dream Theater is an all-penguin band. Or not.

April 24, 2025 12:00 AM

April 21, 2025

Linux Archives - CDM Create Digital Music

Nasko’s completely free N-IRIS is a spectrum disperser – why that’s cool

Nasko, the prolific and imaginative software developer, is back with a new one - and it's completely free, running in Plug Data (Pd) on Mac, Windows, and Linux. It's a convolution-based spectrum disperser. Say what? Well, you get a powerful, precise, fairly rare method for generating impulse responses for convolution tools, like Kilohearts Convolution (now on sale), the one just added to Serum 2, and more. Or just play it live, because that also sounds kind of awesome.

The post Nasko’s completely free N-IRIS is a spectrum disperser – why that’s cool appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

by Peter Kirn at April 21, 2025 04:13 PM

April 20, 2025

Home on Libre Arts

Weekly recap — 20 April 2025

Week highlights: cool new features for GIMP, Inkscape, and Ardour in the works; new releases of Scribus and Bonsai BIM.

GIMP

The team is currently working on bugfixes for 3.0 and new features, and they are getting some useful contributions currently undergoing review:

Inkscape

The team is preparing for the v1.4.2 release. Meanwhile, there are two notable patches under review:

This implementation is not complete yet and is not even in the development branch. Chances are, it will be part of v1.5/1.6.

Scribus 1.6.4

This is a bugfix update of Scribus, fixes are mainly for the importing and exporting of PDF files. See the announcement for details.

Blender Subtitle Editor

If you haven’t tried tin2tin’s subtitle editor addon for Blender, check it out. Most recently, it got faster automatic transcribing with Whisper. The addon is somewhat simplistic, but seems capable enough. Apart from automatic transcribing, it has importing/exporting (naturally), translations, line breaks, and more.

Blender Subtitle Editor

Bonsai 0.8.2

The new version of the BIM authoring addon for Blender comes with 654 new features and fixes. I don’t know how they manage it, but it’s impressive.

Layered walls visualization in Bonsai 0.8.2

Here are some of the release highlights:

  • Visualization of composite layered walls is now possible in both 3D and 2D (see the screenshot above)
  • Blender 4.4 support has been added
  • Drawing and snapping have been improved in a million ways
  • Clicking on a face now displays its area estimation
  • Zones, ports, and systems got UI polish
  • The experimental cutting tool got a new bisect faces mode
  • The addon got a workaround for loading TIN surfaces made with Revit 2025

See here for details. There’s also a video review by BIMvoice.

Ardour

Paul Davis published a post about the ongoing work and what’s likely coming in Ardour 9.0. Here’s what’s cooking:

  • Various UI changes
  • Multi-touch support on Windows and Linux
  • Region effects
  • Pianoroll windows
  • Clip recording and editing in Cue (WIP for MIDI, audio editing could be a post-9.0 feature)
  • Real-time analyzer, with code from Fons Adriaensens’s JAPA

All of the above items except UI changes are already in the main development branch. However, only the multi-touch support is more or less complete and even now Robin keeps adding some code. So expect a lot more polish. Also, for clip recording, Novation Launchpad surface code will need to be updated.

The UI changes are a bit of a tough cookie to crack. It’s likely that Ardour will inherit at least some of the changes you can see in Mixbus 11:

Mixbus 11

The two most important changes you are looking at here are 1) the restructuring of the toolbar and 2) the newly added bottom panel in the editor window that displays either plugin controls (track/bus header is selected) or the MIDI region editor (MIDI region is selected).

Overall, it’s a nice batch of changes. However, it comes with some changes that could be annoying for some users. For example, you can’t disable the navigation timeline in the toolbar anymore, and you can only see the varispeed control if you enable the secondary clock. Personally, I’d expect some level of cherry-picking to happen when the team start merging the changes .

Audacity

Martin Keary recently posted some screenshots of what native plugins are going to look like in Audacity 4.

Native plugin UI in Audacity 4

I did some very quick testing of the latest Qt-based build from the main development branch. You can create a new project, import audio, play it back, and do things like trimming, cutting, and timestretching. However, it crashes a lot and still has bits of MuseScore all over the place.

Audacity 4 main UI

ConvertWithMoss 12.2.x

Didn’t even know this project existed, but Jürgen Moßgraber has been working on this for several years already. It’s a converter between sample file formats, with support for NKI (Native Instruments Kontakt v1-v7), SFZ, DecentSampler, and more.

The latest few releases improved support for Kontakt, Yamaha YSFC, and Ableton ADV files.

Seems like a project I’d love to use to convert some sample libraries from NKI to SFZ or DS. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much luck building and running it on Linux, and the developer only ships a DEB file.

Maybe you’ll have more luck? Here is the code.

Artworks

Nautilus Chamber by Quentin Stipp, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Nautilus Chamber by Quentin Stipp

Different Seasons (Autumn) by Reda Kan, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Different Seasons (Autumn) by Reda Kan

Fading Grace by Rene Gorecki, made with Blender, Photoshop, and Unreal Engine:

Fading Grace by Rene Gorecki

The Diesel Cat Pub - Part 1 by Nikita Gritsun, made with Blender and Photoshop:

The Diesel Cat Pub - Part 1 by Nikita Gritsun

The Node Tree by Einar Martinsen, made with Blender, Photoshop, and ZBrush:

The Node Tree by Einar Martinsen

Iceveil - Inside the Iceberg by Marvin Hillmann, made with Blender, Photoshop, 3DCoat, and Medium:

Iceveil - Inside the Iceberg by Marvin Hillmann

April 20, 2025 12:11 PM

April 17, 2025

News – Ubuntu Studio

Ubuntu Studio 25.04 Released

The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu Studio 25.04 code-named “Plucky Puffin”. This marks Ubuntu Studio’s 36th release. This release is a Regular release and as such, it is supported for 9 months, until January 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.

This release is dedicated to the memory of Steve Langasek. Without Steve, Ubuntu Studio would not be where it is today. He provided invaluable guidance, insight, and instruction to our leader, Erich Eickmeyer, who not only learned how to package applications but learned how to do it properly. We owe him an eternal debt of gratitude.

You can download Ubuntu Studio 25.04 from our download page.

Special Notes

The Ubuntu Studio 25.04 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/25.04/release/

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

Upgrades from 24.10 should be enabled within a month after release, so we appreciate your patience. Upgrades from 25.04 LTS will be enabled after 24.10 reaches End-Of-Life in July 2025.

New This Release

GIMP 3.0: Wilber logo by Aryeom

GIMP 3.0!

The long-awaited GIMP 3.0 is included by default. GIMP is now capable of non-destructive editing with filters, better Photoshop PSD export, and so very much more! Check out the GIMP 3.0 release announcement for more information.

Pencil2D Icon

Pencil2D

Ubuntu Studio now includes Pencil2D! This is a 2D animation and drawing application that is sure to be helpful to animators. You can use basic clipart to make animations!

The basic features of Pencil2D are:

  • layers support (separated layer for bitmap, vector and soud part)
  • bitmap drawing
  • vector drawing
  • sound support

LibreOffice No Longer in Minimal Install

The LibreOffice suite is now part of the full desktop install. This will save space for those wishing for a minimalistic setup for their needs.

Invada Studio Plugins

Beginning this release we are including the Invada Studio Plugins first created by Invada Records Australia. This includes distortion, delay, dynamics, filter, phaser, reverb, and utility audio plugins.

PipeWire 1.2.7

This release contains PipeWire 1.2.7. One major feature this has over 1.2.4 is that v4l2loopback support is available via the pipewire-v4l2 package which is not installed by default.

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.

However, if you would rather use straight JACK 2 instead, that’s also possible. Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuration can disable and enable PipeWire’s JACK compatibility on-the-fly. From there, you can simply use JACK via QJackCtl.

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 regular release of Ubuntu Studio, due in October 2025.

Deprecation of Mailing Lists

Our mailing lists are getting inundated with spam and there is no proper way to fix the filtering. It uses an outdated version of MailMan, so this release announcement will be the last release announcement we send out via email. To get support, we encourage using Ubuntu Discourse for support, and for community clicking the notification bell in the Ubuntu Studio category there.

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!

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!

Special Thanks

Huge special thanks for this release go to:

  • Eylul Dogruel: Artwork, Graphics Design
  • Ross Gammon: Upstream Debian Developer, Testing, Email Support
  • 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
  • Simon Quigley: Qt6 Megastuff
  • Erich Eickmeyer: Project Leader, Packaging, Development, Direction, Treasurer
  • Steve Langasek: You are missed.

by eeickmeyer at April 17, 2025 05:08 PM

April 08, 2025

Linux Archives - CDM Create Digital Music

Ardour, the free and open DAW, is better than ever – and Ardour 9 is coming

Ardour, the criminally underrated free and open source DAW for Mac, Windows, and Linux, has been a little quiet lately. Over the weekend, we learned what's coming in Ardour 9.0/9+, and why the devs have been busy. Not sure where to start? Check out how-to videos, including voice-activated recording(!)

The post Ardour, the free and open DAW, is better than ever – and Ardour 9 is coming appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

by Peter Kirn at April 08, 2025 08:42 PM

April 06, 2025

What's coming in Ardour 9.0

Although we did a couple of hot-fix releases, it’s been quite a long time since the last planned release of Ardour. We’ve also not been responding particularly effectively to bug reports and user suggestions. This has all been because of a mountain of work going on to get 9.0 ready for release, and I wanted to just outline what we think will be in that version so that people can understand the relative “silence” from the project.

There’s still a lot of work to do before we release 9.0, but the following is a list of things we think will likely be there Some of them may not quite make it, and its possible there might be other things added.

GUI Rearrangement

We can’t say much about this yet, because the work here is not really finished. The main elements of this are that every page (editor/mixer/cue/record) in the GUI now has 5 areas: the transport bar (now always visible), the “main area” (e.g. the editor), 2 sidebars (left and right) and a lower pane that can show a variety of things. You’ll see more about this as we get closer to a 9.0 pre-release.

Multi-touch GUI

On Linux and Windows, Ardour now supports multi-touch interaction as provided by the operating system. This may come for macOS eventually, but the way multi-touch works there is significantly different and will need more work.

Pianoroll window(s)

Double click on a MIDI region to edit it in its own dedicated window, or in a pane at the bottom of the main window. Editing in that window will work almost identically to the way it does in the main timeline, but without the distractions of the timeline. You can also see MIDI automation (velocity, CC parameters etc.) overlaid (or not).

MIDI Cue Editing

The Cue page now allows direct editing of the contents of MIDI cues (“clips” for Live & Bitwig users).

Audio Cue Editing

This may or may not make it in time for 9.0. If it does, you’ll be able to edit audio cues directly on the cue page, setting loop points and more.

Cue Recording

You can now record directly into cue slots, making Ardour a “looper” in the same sense that Live, Bitwig and several other contemporary DAWs are. You can pre-specificy the recording duration (e.g. “Record 4 bars”) or you can record until you think you’re done. Whatever you recorded will start playing at the next quantization point (e.g. bar/beat).

Region FX

Is the answer to the question “how do I add some delay to just this part of my vocal?” Similar to region gain it allows to apply any plugin a given audio region only. The effect and its automation remains with the region, even when it is moved around on the timeline. While the same result can be achieved with channels-strip plugins in the mixer (using bypass automation) applying effects directly to regions on the timeline is convenient for many workflows. The given effect is applied offline, when reading the region from disk and does not add any additional DSP load.

Real Time Analyzer

A dedicated perceptual analyzer window is the works which allows one to visualize the live spectrum of multiple signals. A key feature is that one can overlay individual sources (tracks and busses) on top of each other. This allows one to see which track contributes a given of frequency range to the overall mix, find conflicting ranges or holes in the spectrum.

Faster GUI drawing on macOS

Without telling anyone, Apple have subtly changed the way their drawing APIs work for graphical applications over the last 5-10 years. The result has been that a naive graphical app would end up redrawing its entire window even if only a few pixels needed updating. We’re far from the only application to be affected by this. In Ardour 9.0 the GUI drawing speed will be significantly faster, at least on very dense pages like the mixer.

Bug Fixes

We’ve accumulated a long list of bug fixes during the significant reorganization that has taken place for 9.0. We’ll document them once we get to the release.

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by Paul Davis at April 06, 2025 05:50 PM

April 04, 2025

rncbc.org - a.k.a. Rui Nuno Capela

Qtractor 1.5.4 - An Early Spring'25 Release

Qtractor 1.5.4 - An Early Spring'25 Release

Hi everyone,

Qtractor 1.5.4 (early-spring'25) released!

Change-log:

  • Fixed non-zero clip offset conversion on tempo(BPM) time-scale changes.
  • MIDI clip step input and overdubbing now aggregated and fully undo/redo-able.
  • Allow MIDI step input to extend the clip length automatically; also avoid step input event duplicates (eg. playing chords in quick succession) leading to potential double-free segfault or crash.
  • Fixed MIDI track state when clips under record/overdubbing are simply removed.
  • Fixed all empty/void audio clips that are created when aborting an armed recording session.
  • MIDI clip editor (aka. piano-roll): simply allow a MIDI track to be a ghost of itself.
  • In addition to clips and markers, automation curves and tempo-map nodes now also contribute to the total session length and status.
  • Fixed command line parsing (QCommandLineParser/Option) to not exiting the application with a segfault when showing help and version information.

Description:

Qtractor is an audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer application written in C++ with the Qt framework. Target platform is Linux, where the Jack Audio Connection Kit (JACK) for audio and the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) for MIDI are the main infrastructures to evolve as a fairly-featured Linux desktop audio workstation GUI, specially dedicated to the personal home-studio.

Website:

https://qtractor.org

Project page:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/qtractor

Downloads:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/qtractor/files

Git repos:

https://git.code.sf.net/p/qtractor/code
https://github.com/rncbc/qtractor.git
https://gitlab.com/rncbc/qtractor.git
https://codeberg.org/rncbc/qtractor.git

Wiki:

https://sourceforge.net/p/qtractor/wiki/

License:

Qtractor is free, open-source Linux Audio software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 or later.

Enjoy!

Donate to rncbc.org using PayPal Donate to rncbc.org using Liberapay

rncbc

Add new comment

by rncbc at April 04, 2025 05:00 PM

April 03, 2025

rncbc.org - a.k.a. Rui Nuno Capela

Vee One Suite 1.3.1 - An Early-Spring'25 Release

Vee One Suite 1.3.1 - An Early-Spring'25 Release

Greetings,

The Vee One Suite, the gang-of-four old-school software instruments,

  • synthv1 as a polyphonic subtractive synthesizer;
  • samplv1 a polyphonic sampler synthesizer;
  • drumkv1 as yet another drum-kit sampler;
  • padthv1 a polyphonic additive synthesizer.

Are here released for the New-Year'25 recycle...

All elivered in dual form, still:

  • a pure stand-alone JACK client with JACK-session, NSM (Non/New Session Management) and both JACK MIDI and ALSA MIDI input support;
  • a LV2 instrument plug-in.

Change-log:

  • Fixed command line parsing (QCommandLineParser/Option) to not exiting the application with a segfault when showing help and version information.

 

The Vee One Suite are free, open-source Linux Audio software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 or later.

 

synthv1 - an old-school polyphonic synthesizer

synthv1 1.3.1 (early-spring'25) is out!

synthv1 is an old-school all-digital 4-oscillator subtractive polyphonic synthesizer with stereo fx.

LV2 URI: http://synthv1.sourceforge.net/lv2

website:

https://synthv1.sourceforge.io
http://synthv1.sourceforge.net

project page:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/synthv1

downloads:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/synthv1/files

git repos:

https://git.code.sf.net/p/synthv1/code
https://github.com/rncbc/synthv1.git
https://gitlab.com/rncbc/synthv1.git
https://codeberg.org/rncbc/synthv1.git

 

samplv1 - an old-school polyphonic sampler

samplv1 1.3.1 (early-spring'25) is out!

samplv1 is an old-school polyphonic sampler synthesizer with stereo fx.

LV2 URI: http://samplv1.sourceforge.net/lv2

website:

https://samplv1.sourceforge.io
http://samplv1.sourceforge.net

project page:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/samplv1

downloads:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/samplv1/files

git repos:

https://git.code.sf.net/p/samplv1/code
https://github.com/rncbc/samplv1.git
https://gitlab.com/rncbc/samplv1.git
https://codeberg.org/rncbc/samplv1.git

 

drumkv1 - an old-school drum-kit sampler

drumkv1 1.3.1 (early-spring'25) is out!

drumkv1 is an old-school drum-kit sampler synthesizer with stereo fx.

LV2 URI: http://drumkv1.sourceforge.net/lv2

website:

https://drumkv1.sourceforge.io
http://drumkv1.sourceforge.net

project page:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/drumkv1

downloads:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/drumkv1/files

git repos:

https://git.code.sf.net/p/drumkv1/code
https://github.com/rncbc/drumkv1.git
https://gitlab.com/rncbc/drumkv1.git
https://codeberg.org/rncbc/drumkv1.git

 

padthv1 - an old-school polyphonic additive synthesizer

padthv1 1.3.1 (early-spring'25) is out!

padthv1 is an old-school polyphonic additive synthesizer with stereo fx

padthv1 is based on the PADsynth algorithm by Paul Nasca, as a special variant of additive synthesis.

LV2 URI: http://padthv1.sourceforge.net/lv2

website:

https://padthv1.sourceforge.io
http://padthv1.sourceforge.net

project page:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/padthv1

downloads:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/padthv1/files

git repos:

https://git.code.sf.net/p/padthv1/code
https://github.com/rncbc/padthv1.git
https://gitlab.com/rncbc/padthv1.git
https://codeberg.org/rncbc/padthv1.git

 

Enjoy.

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by rncbc at April 03, 2025 05:00 PM

March 30, 2025

digital audio hacks – Hackaday

Can Hackers Bring Jooki Back to Life?

Another day, another Internet-connected gadget that gets abandoned by its creators. This time it’s Jooki — a screen-free audio player that let kids listen to music and stories by placing specific tokens on top of it. Parents would use a smartphone application to program what each token would do, and that way even very young children could independently select what they wanted to hear.

Well, until the company went bankrupt and shutdown their servers down, anyway. Security researcher [nuit] wrote into share the impressive work they’ve done so far to identify flaws in the Jooki’s firmware, in the hopes that it will inspire others in the community to start poking around inside these devices. While there’s unfortunately not enough here to return these devices to a fully-functional state today, there’s several promising leads.

It probably won’t surprise you to learn the device is running some kind of stripped down Linux, and [nuit] spends the first part of the write-up going over the partitions and peeking around inside the filesystem. From there the post briefly covers how over-the-air (OTA) updates were supposed to work when everything was still online, which may become useful in the future when the community has a new firmware to flash these things with.

Where things really start getting interesting is when the Jooki starts up and exposes its HTTP API to other devices on the local network. There are some promising endpoints such as /flags which let’s you control various aspects of the device, but the real prize is /ll, which is a built-in backdoor that runs whatever command you pass it with root-level permissions! It’s such a ridiculous thing to include in a commercial product that we’d like to think they originally meant to call it /lol, but in any event, it’s a huge boon to anyone looking to dig deeper in to the device.

The inside of a second-generation Jooki

But wait, there’s more! The Jooki runs a heartbeat script that regularly attempts to check in with the mothership. The expected response when the box pings the server is your standard HTTP 200 OK, but in what appears to be some kind of hacky attempt at implementing a secondary OTA mechanism, any commands sent back in place of the HTTP status code will be executed as root.

Now as any accomplished penguin wrangler will know, if you can run commands as root, it doesn’t take long to fire up an SSH server and get yourself an interactive login. Either of these methods can be used to get into the speaker’s OS, and as [nuit] points out, the second method means that whoever can buy up the Jooki domain name would have remote root access to every speaker out there.

Long story short, it’s horrifyingly easy to get root access on a Jooki speaker. The trick now is figuring out how this access can be used to restore these devices to full functionality. We just recently covered a project which offered a new firmware and self-hosted backend for an abandoned smart display, hopefully something similar for the Jooki isn’t far off.

by Tom Nardi at March 30, 2025 02:00 PM

Yaydio, a Music Player For Kids

Music consumption has followed a trend over the last decade or more of abandoning physical media for online or streaming alternatives. This can present a problem for young children however, for whom a simpler physical interface may be an easier way to play those tunes. Maintaining a library of CDs is not entirely convenient either, so [JakesMD] has created the Yaydio. It’s a music player for kids, that plays music when a card is inserted in its slot.

As you might expect, the cards themselves do not contain the music. Instead they are NFC cards, and the player starts the corresponding album from its SD card when one is detected. The hardware is simple enough, an Arduino Nano with modules for MP3 playback, NFC reading, seven segment display, and rotary encoder. The whole thing lives in a kid-friendly 3D printed case.

Some thought has been given to easily adding albums and assigning cards to them, making it easy to keep up with the youngster’s tastes. This isn’t the first such kid-friendly music player we’ve seen, but it’s certainly pretty neat.

by Jenny List at March 30, 2025 05:00 AM

March 27, 2025

News – Ubuntu Studio

Ubuntu Studio 25.04 Beta Released

The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the beta release of Ubuntu Studio 25.04, codenamed “Plucky Puffin”.

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 25.04 is released on April 17, 2025.

We encourage everyone to try this image and report bugs to improve our final release.

Special Notes

The Ubuntu Studio 25.04 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/25.04/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 6.3 is now the default desktop environment, an upgrade from Plasma 6.1.
  • PipeWire continues to improve with every release.. Version 1.2.7
  • The Default Panel Icons are now back. The default panel now populates depending on which applications are available, so that there are never empty icons if you choose the minimal install, and then install one or more of our featured applications. This refresh to the default is done every reboot, so it’s not a live update. Additionally, it must be refreshed manually from the User side either by selecting the Global Theme or removing the panel and adding “Ubuntu Studio Default Panel”.
  • While not included in this Beta, Darktable will be upgraded to 5.0.0 before final release.

Major Package Upgrades

  • Ardour version 8.12.0
  • Qtractor version 1.5.3
  • Audacity version 3.7.3
  • digiKam version 8.5.0
  • Kdenlive version 24.12.3
  • Krita version 5.2.9
  • GIMP version 3.0.0

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

Known Issues

  • The installer was supposed to be able to keep the screen from locking, but this will still happen after 15 minutes. Please keep the screen active during installation. As a workaround if you know you will be keeping your machine unattended during installation, press Alt-Space to invoke Krunner (this even works from the Install Ubuntu Studio versus the Try Ubuntu Studio live environment) and type “System Settings”. From there, search for “Screen Locking” and deactivate “Lock automatically after…”.

    Another possible workaround is to click on “Switch User” and then re-login as “Live User” without a password if this happens.
  • 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.
  • The Installer background and slideshow still show the Oracular Oriole mascot. This is work in progress, to be fixed in a daily release sometime between now and final release.

Official Ubuntu Studio release notes can be found at https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-studio-25-04-release-notes/

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

Additionally, the main Ubuntu release notes contain more generic issues: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/plucky-puffin-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 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 this cycle in order for the maintainers to 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.

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. However, if Audacity returns to the Ubuntu repositories before final release, then you might end-up with a double-installation of Audacity. Removal instructions of one or the other will be made available in a future post.

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.

by eeickmeyer at March 27, 2025 06:28 PM

blog4

concerts spring 2025

The next live concerts of Malte Steiner's soloprojects:

Elektronengehirn will play 19. April at Noiseberg Berlin, Germany

Notstandskomitee will play 17. May Object Permanence Festival at Caisa Culture Centre Helsinki, Finland

by herrsteiner (noreply@blogger.com) at March 27, 2025 05:28 PM

March 26, 2025

GStreamer News

GStreamer Spring Hackfest on 16-18 May 2025 in Nice, France

The GStreamer project is thrilled to announce that there will be a spring hackfest on Friday-Sunday 16-18 May 2025 in Nice, France.

For more details and latest updates check out the announcement on Discourse.

We will announce any further updates on Discourse, but you can also follow us on Bluesky and on on Mastodon.

We hope to see you in Nice!

Please spread the word!

March 26, 2025 01:00 PM

March 11, 2025

GStreamer News

GStreamer 1.26.0 new major stable release

The GStreamer team is excited to announce a new major feature release of your favourite cross-platform multimedia framework!

As always, this release is again packed with new features, bug fixes and many other improvements.

The 1.26 release series adds new features on top of the previous 1.24 series and is part of the API and ABI-stable 1.x release series of the GStreamer multimedia framework.

Highlights:

  • H.266 Versatile Video Coding (VVC) codec support
  • Low Complexity Enhancement Video Coding (LCEVC) support
  • Closed captions: H.264/H.265 extractor/inserter, cea708overlay, cea708mux, tttocea708 and more
  • New hlscmafsink, hlssink3, and hlsmultivariantsink; HLS/DASH client and dashsink improvements
  • New AWS and Speechmatics transcription, translation and TTS services elements, plus translationbin
  • Splitmux lazy loading and dynamic fragment addition support
  • Matroska: H.266 video and rotation tag support, defined latency muxing
  • MPEG-TS: support for H.266, JPEG XS, AV1, VP9 codecs and SMPTE ST-2038 and ID3 meta; mpegtslivesrc
  • ISO MP4: support for H.266, Hap, Lagarith lossless codecs; raw video support; rotation tags
  • SMPTE 2038 ancillary data streams support
  • JPEG XS image codec support
  • Analytics: New TensorMeta; N-to-N relationships; Mtd to carry segmentation masks
  • ONVIF metadata extractor and conversion to/from relation metas
  • New originalbuffer element that can restore buffers again after transformation steps for analytics
  • Improved Python bindings for analytics API
  • Lots of Vulkan integration and Vulkan Video decoder/encoder improvements
  • OpenGL integration improvements, esp. in glcolorconvert, gldownload, glupload
  • Qt5/Qt6 QML GL sinks now support direct DMABuf import from hardware decoders
  • CUDA: New compositor, Jetson NVMM memory support, stream-ordered allocator
  • NVCODEC AV1 video encoder element, and nvdsdewarp
  • New Direct3D12 integration support library
  • New d3d12swapchainsink and d3d12deinterlace elements and D3D12 sink/source for zero-copy IPC
  • Decklink HDR support (PQ + HLG) and frame scheduling enhancements
  • AJA capture source clock handling and signal loss recovery improvements
  • RTP and RTSP: New rtpbin sync modes, client-side MIKEY support in rtspsrc
  • New Rust rtpbin2, rtprecv, rtpsend, and many new Rust RTP payloaders and depayloaders
  • webrtcbin support for basic rollbacks and other improvements
  • webrtcsink: support for more encoders, SDP munging, and a built-in web/signalling server
  • webrtcsrc/sink: support for uncompressed audio/video and NTP & PTP clock signalling and synchronization
  • rtmp2: server authentication improvements incl. Limelight CDN (llnw) authentication
  • New Microsoft WebView2 based web browser source element
  • The GTK3 plugin has gained support for OpenGL/WGL on Windows
  • Many GTK4 paintable sink improvements
  • GstPlay: id-based stream selection and message API improvements
  • Real-time pipeline visualization in a browser using a new dots tracer and viewer
  • New tracers for tracking memory usage, pad push timings, and buffer flow as pcap files
  • VA hardware-acclerated H.266/VVC decoder, VP8 and JPEG encoders, VP9/VP8 alpha decodebins
  • Video4Linux2 elements support DMA_DRM caps negotiation now
  • V4L2 stateless decoders implement inter-frame resolution changes for AV1 and VP9
  • Editing services: support for reverse playback and audio channel reordering
  • New QUIC-based elements for working with raw QUIC streams, RTP-over-QUIC (RoQ) and WebTransport
  • Apple AAC audio encoder and multi-channel support for the Apple audio decoders
  • cerbero: Python bindings and introspection support; improved Windows installer based on WiX5
  • Lots of new plugins, features, performance improvements and bug fixes

For more details check out the GStreamer 1.26 release notes.

Binaries for Android, iOS, macOS and Windows will be provided in due course.

You can download release tarballs directly here: gstreamer, gst-plugins-base, gst-plugins-good, gst-plugins-ugly, gst-plugins-bad, gst-libav, gst-rtsp-server, gst-python, gst-editing-services, gst-devtools, gstreamer-vaapi, gstreamer-sharp, gstreamer-docs.

March 11, 2025 11:30 PM

Ardour 8.12 released

Ardour 8.12 is now available.

This is a hot-fix release, intended to fix two issues.

  1. the bug fix introduced in 8.11 turned out to be incorrect, and broke several other things in subtle ways. 8.12 is a completely new approach to fixing the problem with region lengths after certain operations could cause sessions to be unloadable.

  2. for several previous versions, the packaging of translation files on macOS was broken. This has been corrected, and translations should work again on that platform.

Note that 8.12 will also correctly load sessions suffering from the problem referred to in #1 above.

All users of earlier 8.x versions should plan to upgrade as soon as possible. Apologies for the problems the bug in #1 has caused people - we hope this is a permanent, correct fix this time.

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by Paul Davis at March 11, 2025 11:06 PM

March 08, 2025

blog4

The Tradwives

Last year Malte Steiner learned that there is an antifeminist movement. Female antifeminists. Further research lead to the art installation The Tradwives: Three color e-paper screens generate and show unsupervised and uncensored collages of material which was data-scraped from Tradwife influencer profiles on Instagram. The material was first decomposed with Machine Learning into smaller bits which within the installation are rearranged to ever changing collages.
First shown at Oksasenkatu 11 Helsinki (FI) last September. Part of Steiner's art project Absolute Power.





by herrsteiner (noreply@blogger.com) at March 08, 2025 08:01 PM

February 17, 2025

Internet Archive - Collection: osmpodcast

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February 17, 2025 06:56 PM

February 16, 2025

drobilla.net - LAD

Software Pages Removed

I haven't been sure what to do about the software pages here for quite a while. Most of them were essentially just stale versions of the README files from their projects, and for better and worse, most of the projects I maintain are libraries that don't have as much of a need for a homepage as user-facing software. It's easy to just ignore things that don't really matter in day-to-day work, but the embarrassingly bad state of things became really clear when I sat down to actually poke through this site.

Since it's much more important for me right now to streamline maintenance duties and eliminate as much overhead as possible, I've simply removed all of the software pages, and redirected those addresses to the corresponding Gitlab projects where possible. I might bring them back at some point, but for now, no pages are better than stale pages that really only serve to make things look bad. I don't have traffic metrics here, but I seriously doubt anyone will either notice or care.

I'm not sure about the utility of the software release posts or tarballs either. Ideally, the effort required to make a release could be reduced to simply pushing a git tag, and cross-domain posting hugely complicates that. Besides, the tarballs are made manually on my personal machine, so they're absolutely less trustworthy than the signed tags in git anyway, and, I assume, not reproducible. At the same time, for many reasons I'm wary of fully investing in some git forge or another, the automatic tarballs provided by all of them leave much to be desired (the silly "v" names for example), and I don't want to disrupt things for packagers. We'll see, but for now I'll leave the mechanics of actual releases as they are.

Ultimately, pages and posts are largely a waste of time for libraries and similar things that only support other projects anyway. So, a more radical simplification of the release process would be a good idea, but for now I'll just take out the trash and reduce the amount of things I need to consider in that process.

by drobilla at February 16, 2025 04:32 PM

February 06, 2025

Abstraction Leakage

(This post is geekery of, if not the highest order, then fairly high order. It doesn’t contain any useful information about Ardour itself, but might be interesting for … people interested in such arcana)

The packaging issue that broke translations in our initial release of 8.11 for Linux and macOS was almost a cool bug. I thought I’d quickly describe it here for the geeks among us.

The problem came from a combination of two things: an actual error in our packaging scripts, and the subtle and generally not-considered behavior of the Unix find command.

Our wonderful translators work on files that end in “.po” and connect the original english strings in the source code with their translated versions. During the build process, tools from the GNU translation system are used to convert the .po files into .mo files (aka “message catalogs”), which contain the same information but in a binary format that can be more efficiently used by the program when it is running.

During packaging Ardour for distributions, we copy all the .mo files into a new location in preparation for “bundling” (e.g. as a DMG file for macOS or a .run file for Linux). The copy also requires a renaming, because the organization of the message catalogs for use by the program needs to be fairly different than the way they are organized in our source code.

So the first bug was that we used find(1) to locate all the .mo files and copy/rename them. We start in several locations within the source code, including the directory that holds the GUI source code (gtk2_ardour). The files we’re looking for are in the po folder, and we use find because we don’t want to hard-code the languages that have translations. However, it turns out that there are another set of message catalogs associated with the RedHat/Fedora “appdata” system, and these files not only also are somewhere under gtk2_ardour but also, because of the way the translation software works, they have the same name.

So, if find finds the “real” message catalogs first and copies/renames them during packaging, and then later finds the “appdata” message catalogs, the latter will overwrite the former in the package being built. This is a bug - the appdata message catalogs are placed in the packaging at a separate step of the process, and we should not have been using a command that was so generic. This was easy to fix (and has been).

But wait a minute … didn’t this work just fine for Ardour 8.10 and other releases? It did. How could that be? Well, recall that at the beginning of the previous paragraph I wrote “if find …”. It turns out that that the order in which find will find files, unless told otherwise, depends on the filesystem the files are located on. Consequently, if you use two different types of filesystem (e.g. on Linux the ext4 or xfs filesystems), find may very well return files in a different order on each.

However, it does deeper than this. Certain directory operations can also cause the filesystem to change its state in a way that will change the order in which find finds files. It turns out that this had happened within the build systems we use for macOS and Linux. At the time we released 8.10, find would locate the (unintended) appdata message catalogs first, copy/rename them into the package and then later repeat this for the real message catalaogs. Result? The package has the correct translation files and everything works. When we released 8.11, the ordering had changed, and the real message catalogs were found first, and then overwritten by the “appdata” ones. Result – translations do not work.

I thought this was an example of a fairly cool and unusual category of bug. There was an error in our packaging scripts - we used an unnecessarily generic command to find message catalogs that needed installing, which found files it should not have. But this mistake by itself did not matter on systems where the unintended files were found first. It only caused problems when the unintended files were found second.

This is not a perfect example of what programmers called “Abstraction Leakage”, but it’s not a bad one. We generally like to think of filesystems as things where the details of their internal organization do not really matter, and for the most part that is possible. But combine the fact that their internal organization does affect the order that a program like find will list files in, and the bug in our packaging script, and all of a sudden the internal details of how filesystems work becomes a thing we have to think about.

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by Paul Davis at February 06, 2025 04:13 PM

February 04, 2025

drobilla.net - LAD

Intermission

I don't suppose inactivity from me will be terribly surprising to anyone after the past several years. Still, since I was working on emptying my bug-fix and maintenance queue, making releases, and finally getting to some significant forward progress again, an update:

Unfortunately I got violently ill last week with some horrible flu-like thing, the worst I've ever had (and I'm a COVID casualty, so that's saying quite a lot). Somehow, it's still going strong. So, aside from maybe a few minutes a day of idle tinkering, everything I was doing is on pause for a while. Hopefully a short while, but so far so not good, so we'll see.

As an added bonus, Google just bricked my phone with a botched forced update, so I'm locked out of 2FA and many other things besides (I suppose I had to learn the hard way that I've gotten lazy and too dependent on that horrible device). So, yeah, things aren't going great, to put it lightly.

On the bright side, I do have some exciting things in the queue, but since I don't do vapourware or hype (to a fault, really), and have a huge amount of "infrastructure" work to do first anyway, you'll have to stay tuned for that. Assuming I don't die first, anyway.

... if I do, it would be pretty funny that this was my last post though, so I've got that going for me, which is nice.

[Edited on 2025-02-16 to remove broken link]

by drobilla at February 04, 2025 07:40 PM