planet.linuxaudio.org

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:

• curlhttpsrc fixes and improvements
• decklinkvideosink: Fix frame completion callbacks for firmware 14.3+
• flac: Fix 6.1 and 7.1 channel layouts and support encoding and decoding of 32-bit audio
• glimagesink: Fix handling of odd height buffers
• matroskademux: make maximum allowed block size large enough to support 4k uncompressed video
• mxf: Add support for custom Sony XDCAM video variant
• opusenc: multichannel and surround sound handling improvements
• playbin3: HLS/DASH stream selection handling improvements to fix disabling and re-enabling of audio/video streams with adaptivedemux2
• qtmux: robust recording mode space left estimation fixes for streams that start with a timestamp offset
• splitmuxsrc seeking improvements
• Support FLAC audio in DASH manifests
• Python bindings: fix regression where buffers were no longer writable in pad probe callbacks
• cerbero: add python bindings for GstApp; Windows installer improvements
• Various bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

See the GStreamer 1.26.10 release notes for more details.

Binaries for Android, iOS, Mac OS X and Windows will be available shortly and will be published on the Downloads page.

For how crucial whales have been for humanity, from their harvest for meat and oil to their future use of saving the world from a space probe, humans knew very little about them until surprisingly recently. Most people, even in Herman Melville’s time, considered whales to be fish, and it wasn’t until humans went looking for submarines in the mid-1900s that we started to understand the complexities of their songs. And you don’t have to be a submarine pilot to listen now, either; all you need is something like these homemade hydraphones.

This project was done as part of a workshop in Indonesia, and it only takes a few hours to build. It’s based on a piezo microphone enclosed in a small case. A standard 3.5 mm audio cable runs into the enclosure and powers a preamp using a transistor and two resistors. With the piezo microphone and amplifier installed in this case, the case itself is waterproofed with a spray and allowed to dry. When doing this build in places where Plasti-Dip is available, it was found to be a more reliable and faster waterproofing method. Either way, with the waterproofing layer finished, it’s ready to toss into a body of water to listen for various sounds.

Some further instructions beyond construction demonstrate how to use these to capture stereo sounds, using two microphones connected to a stereo jack. The creators also took a setup connected to a Raspberry Pi offshore to a floating dock and installed a set permanently, streaming live audio wirelessly back to the mainland for easy listening, review, and analysis. There are other ways of interacting with the ocean using sound as well, like this project, which looks to open-source a sonar system.

Thanks to [deathbots] for the tip!

A Web-native version of FL Studio generated a lot of buzz -- and some confusion. Was this replacing the desktop version? (Absolutely not.) Was it part of some larger AI play? (Mostly Suno users seemed to think that.) Image-Line responded to my questions with their side of this -- and I took the new Web UI for a spin.

The post FL on the Web: hands-on, Image-Line tells us what it all means appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

We’re most familiar with sound as vibrations that travel through the atmosphere around us. However, sound can also travel through objects, too! If you want to pick it up, you’d do well to start with a contact mic. Thankfully, [The Sound of Machines] has a great primer on how to build one yourself. Check out the video below.

The key to the contact mic is the piezo disc. It’s an element that leverages the piezoelectric effect, converting physical vibration directly into an electrical signal. You can get them in various sizes; smaller ones fit into tight spaces, while larger ones perform better across a wider frequency range.

[The Sound of Machines] explains how to take these simple piezo discs and solder them up with connectors and shielded wire to make them into practical microphones you can use in the field. The video goes down to the bare basics, so even if you’re totally new to electronics, you should be able to follow along. It also covers how to switch up the design to use two piezo discs to deliver a balanced signal over an XLR connector, which can significantly reduce noise.

There’s even a quick exploration of creative techniques, such as building contact mics with things like bendable arms or suction cups to make them easier to mount wherever you need them. A follow-up explores the benefits of active amplification. The demos in the video are great, too. We hear the sound of contact mics immersed in boiling water, pressed up against cracking spaghetti, and even dunked in a pool. It’s all top stuff.

These contact mics are great for all kinds of stuff, from recording foley sounds to building reverb machines out of trash cans and lamps.

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Chiptune, granular, ambient pads, experimental, percussion -- once upon a time, Tweakbench plug-ins were everything. And now they're back, with full support for AU and VST3 on macOS (including Apple Silicon), Windows, and Linux.

The post Tweakbench plug-ins return after 20 years, from NES to ambient appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

Xfce Legacy

A lot of people have asked us why Ubuntu Studio comes with a panel on top as the default. For that, it’s a simple answer: Legacy.

When Ubuntu Studio 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) released over 13 years ago, it was released with a top panel by default as that was the default for our desktop envirionment: Xfce.

Fast-forward eight years to 20.10 and Xfce was no longer our default desktop environment: we had switched to KDE’s Plasma Desktop. Plasma has a bottom panel by default, similar to Windows. However, to ease the transition for our long-time users, we kept the panel on top by default, resizing it to be similar to the default top panel of Xfce.

A macOS-Like Layout

With 25.10’s release, we included an additional layout: two panels. One panel is on top with a global menu, and the bottom contains some default applications, a trash can, and a full-screen application launcher. This is a way to feel familiar to those with a similar layout from where they may be coming from, being an operating system for creativity: macOS.

Familiarity and Traditionalism: Windows-like Layout

Starting with 26.04 LTS, we’ll also include one more layout: a bottom, Windows 10-like layout. This is to ease the transition for those coming from Windows, and due to popular request and reports.

Should We Change The Default?

It has been 13 years since we defaulted to a top panel, but is that the right idea anymore?

Right now, on the Ubuntu Discourse, we have a poll to decide if we should change the default layout starting with 26.04 LTS. This will not affect layouts for anyone upgrading from a prior release, but only new installations or new users going forward.

If you would like to participate in the poll, head on over to the Ubuntu Discourse and cast a vote!

The GStreamer team is pleased to announce another development release in the API/ABI-unstable 1.27 release series.

The API/ABI-unstable 1.27 release series is for testing and development purposes in the lead-up to the stable 1.28 series which is scheduled for release in late 2025. Any newly-added API can still change until that point.

The 1.27.50 release marks the beginning of our feature freeze in preparation of the upcoming 1.28 stable release.

This development release is primarily for developers and early adopters, and distros should probably not package it.

Highlighted changes:

• Vulkan Video AV1 decoder
• webrtcsink: add renegotiation support, and support for va hardware encoders
• New ST-2038 ancillary data combiner and extractor elements
• applemedia: VP9 and AV1 hardware-accelerated video decoding support, and 10-bit HEVC encoding
• fallbacksrc gained support for encoded streams
• flv: enhanced rtmp H.265 video support, and support for multitrack audio
• glupload: Implement udmabuf uploader to share buffers between software decoders/sources and GPUs, display engines (wayland), and other dma devices
• video: Add crop, scale, rotate, flip, shear and more GstMeta transformation
• New task pool GstContext to share a thread pool amongst elements for better resource management and performance, especially for video conversion and compositing
• analytics: New tensordecodebin element to auto-plug compatible tensor decoders based on their caps and many other additions and improvements
• New Deepgram speech-to-text transcription plugin
• Speech synthesizers: expose new "compress" overflow mode that can speed up audio while preserving pitch
• Support new Speechmatics speaker identification API
• ElevenLabs voice cloning element
• New Qt6 QML qml6 render source element
• appsink, appsrc: new bindings-friendly "simple" callbacks API
• New element to calculate perceptual video quality assessment scores using Netflix's VMAF framework
• Add new metadata GstStream type and use in decodebin3 for KLV, ID3 PES and ST-2038 ancillary data
• New MPEG-H audio decoding plugin plus MP4 demuxing support
• The inter plugin wormhole sink and source elements gained new properties to fine tune the inner elements
• hlscmafsink can generate I-frame only playlist now
• New LCEVC H.266 encoder element
• webrtc: add WHEP server signaller
• Added "robust MPEG audio", raw audio (L8, L16, L24), and ancillary metadata RTP payloaders in Rust
• The Windows IPC plugin gained support for passing generic data in addition to raw audio/video, and various properties
• New D3D12 interlace and overlay compositor elements
• GStreamer AMD HIP integration functionality is now available in a helper library
• Blackmagic Decklink elements gained support for capturing and outputting all types of VANC via GstAncillaryMeta
• Replaygain R128 gain tags support
• aws: URI handler for S3 URIs; dropped registration of rusotos3src and rusotos3sink
• quinn: Support sharing of QUIC/WebTransport connection/session
• validate: New plugin with a check-last-frame-qrcode action
• clocksync: new "rate" property and "resync" action signal
• debug logging: Add convenience macros around GstLogContext for logging things only once
• Countless bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

Binaries for Android, iOS, Mac OS X and Windows will be made available shortly at the usual location.

Release tarballs can be downloaded directly here:

• gstreamer-1.27.50.tar.xz
• gst-plugins-base-1.27.50.tar.xz
• gst-plugins-good-1.27.50.tar.xz
• gst-plugins-ugly-1.27.50.tar.xz
• gst-plugins-bad-1.27.50.tar.xz
• gst-libav-1.27.50.tar.xz
• gst-rtsp-server-1.27.50.tar.xz
• gst-python-1.27.50.tar.xz
• gst-editing-services-1.27.50.tar.xz
• gst-devtools-1.27.50.tar.xz,
• gstreamer-docs-1.27.50.tar.xz

As always, please give it a spin and let us know of any issues you run into by filing an issue in GitLab.

You can now watch online last weeks Elektronengehirn concert at Piksel 25 Bergen (NO). It was the maximalist version of the concert Hardware with pieces from the same named album: three independent videoprojections (like the 2024 concert in Aarhus (DK)) and quadrophonic sound. The main projection Malte Steiner programmed with the game engine Godot, the side projection comes each from a Raspberry Pi with a C program done with Raylib. Remotecontrol was done from the PureData patch on the main computer via OSC through ethernet cables. Additional sound source was a custom made modular synthesizer system Steiner developed in the past years. This audiovisual concert comes close to his vision of the Gesamtkunstwerk.

My simple single-plugin LV2 host, Jalv, isn't quite sure whether it's a developer utility or polished user program, but in any case, it had become stale in the past few years and needed an update.

Most of those changes are internal and only interesting for those who use it as a basis for larger systems. The internals have been largely rewritten to support various things, but this post isn't about that. This post is about a more obviously stale thing: the Gtk2 interface.

In keeping with the free desktop tradition of constant breakage with reduced functionality, that toolkit is now EOLed, and soon the ability to embed GUIs whatsoever will probably go away. Luckily though, we're not quite there yet, and it's still possible/feasible to embed GUIs in Gtk3 (at least on X11), so things can continue roughly as they were for a while. Gtk2 is EOLed though, which is a problem for distributions, and I have no interest in maintaining code for a dead toolkit, so that frontend is gone entirely in the latest release. This does mean that some plugin GUIs written in Gtk2 will no longer work, but that's inherent to the situation (and why general plugin GUIs shouldn't use Gtk).

This seemed like a good time to update the UI to be a bit more “modern”, particularly since a menu bar has never really made much sense here anyway. I replaced this with a header bar, which I think does suit plugins better. For example, here's the custom GUI for the LSP Compressor:

As always, there's also generic controls, with a few refinements but still using the same boring stock widgets:

All of the menu items have been moved into a single menu button, which is a pattern I'm sceptical of in general, but it works fine for a very simple applications like this. The preset menu can be unwieldy, but that's a whole topic unto itself that I hope to tackle more comprehensively later.

Code-wise, it's long been a problem that the rudimentary (lack of) architecture couldn't easily support the more advanced features people wanted from it. So, I've reworked everything into a more serious application, with a more explicit architecture and communication patterns that make adding new features much easier. As far as the Gtk frontend goes, I've also switched to using more modern APIs like GtkApplication, GAction, and so on. To be fair, these parts are quite nice. Actions are a pretty good model for building accessible GUI applications, and these new APIs encourage doing the right thing. There's still some areas that need work, but jalv.gtk3 (the version which has a .desktop file and all that) is much closer to being a proper application that integrates with the desktop environment now, and smells less like a hackey program that developers just use to check if their plugin works.

That aside, Jalv is still frequently used from the command-line, and there's a major QoL improvement there as well: the positional argument now accepts files and directories, not just plugin URIs. The code will try to figure out what to do automatically, for example, if a bundle or data file only describes a single plugin, then that plugin is loaded. Presets can also be passed (by path or by URI), which will load the appropriate plugin with that preset initially applied. In short, it's more like the “do what I mean” interface many people expect.

It's been entirely too long since the last release, but now that the host libraries and Jalv are up to date with most issues resolved, I'm going to try to do some broader cross-project efforts to address a few things that are a mess across the LV2 ecosystem as a whole, with Jalv serving as a sort of reference implementation. For now, though, it's just a much better implementation of the same old features.

Jalv 1.8.0 has been released. Jalv (JAck LV2) is a simple host for LV2 plugins. It runs a plugin, and exposes the plugin ports to the system, essentially making the plugin an application. For more information, see http://drobilla.net/software/jalv.

Changes:

• Add "quit" console command
• Add AppStream metainfo file
• Add Qt6 version
• Add missing short versions of command line options
• Add option to install tool man pages
• Add support for advanced parameters in console frontend
• Add support for control inputs with time:beatsPerMinute designation
• Add support for control outputs with lv2:latency designation
• Avoid over-use of yielding meson options
• Build Qt UI with -fPIC
• Clean up and strengthen code
• Clean up command line help output
• Cleanly separate audio thread from the rest of the application
• Fix Jack latency recomputation when plugin latency changes
• Fix clashing command line options
• Fix minor memory leaks
• Make help and version commands exit successfully
• Only send control messages to designated lv2:control ports
• Only send position to ports that explicitly support it
• Reduce Jack process callback overhead
• Remove Gtk2 interface
• Remove limits on the size of messages sent from plugin to UI
• Remove transport position dumping from Jack process callback
• Replace use of deprecated Gtk interfaces
• Rework Gtk3 interface into a relatively modern Gtk application
• Rewrite man pages in mdoc
• Simplify and unify plugin and preset command-line arguments
• Switch to external zix dependency
• Use Gtk switches instead of checkboxes for toggle controls
• Use fewer platform-specific APIs
• Use portable zix filesystem API

Elektronengehirn is going to perform a concert at Piksel festival in Bergen, Norway on the 22. November at Østre. During Piksel Malte Steiner also shows the installation The Tradwives at the exhibition from 20.-23. November.

Introduction Built on jj and fzf, jj-fzf offers a text-based user interface (TUI) that simplifies complex versioning control operations like rebasing, squashing, and merging commits. This post will guide you through integrating jj-fzf into your Emacs workflow, allowing to switch between emacs and jj…

qpwgraph v0.9.7 - An Autumn'25 Beta Release rncbc Fri, 14 Nov 2025 - 18:00

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Not much interesting was happening the past few weeks, so this is a multi-week recap. Highlights: release candidates planned for GIMP, Ardour, and FreeCAD; new releases of LSP plugins, new technical preview of Audacity 4.0.

GIMP

The team is getting ready for the first release candidate of v3.2. This means some interesting features in the works are being postponed till v3.4. One such example is vector masks. Some patches may still come through, though, such as merging paths.

Some neat minor new features merged recently:

• Exporting patterns of fill and stroke in vector layers.
• Pasting unformatted text in the Text tool.
• Importing of PVR textures.

Krita

Dmitry Kazakov recently merged HDR support for Wayland to Krita Next. So far, this has been tested on KWin only.

Inkscape

Martin Owens recently added a new UI for changing the paint order in the Fill’n’Stroke dock:

Meanwhile, the GSoC artwork recolor project by Fatma Omara has been merged and will be part of the next release.

Tavmjong Bah started working on adding support for all color font formats.

FreeCAD

The project has been slowly arriving at the first release candidate of version 1.1. There are fewer than 10 release blockers lately, so we may still see the final release in 2025.

At the moment, there are over 300 pull requests, both open and in draft. A huge part of those are scheduled for inclusion in v1.2, which means a busy post-release time.

Ardour

The Ardour team is getting really close to the first release candidate of v9.0. Upcoming changes include things like much-requested pianoroll windows (see below on the screenshot), a bottom panel editing area for regions and cue clips, cue recording, and various UX/UI improvements.

Most recently, Paul added MIDI note brushing (coming to v9.0, and Robin has been working on a reimplementation of mix tools from Mixbus (probably coming to v9.1 or so).

Audacity 4.0alpha2

This is still more of a technical preview, but with improvements:

• Allow track range selection with Shift-Enter.
• Record from anywhere.
• Export loop region.
• Preference for paste behavior: overlapping other clips vs pushing them.
• Preference for whether clicking on the ruler should trigger playback

Go get it here if you are curious.

LSP Plugins 1.2.25

This is mainly a bugfix update for another recent release, where Vladimir Sadovnikov implemented a Ring-Modulated sidechain plugin series (regular and multiband), A/B preset switching support, integrated loudness metering for Referencer plugin series, and other great new features and improvements.

See here for release notes and downloads.

Easy Effects 8.0.0

This is a very exciting and yet not very well-known project that simplifies using global audio effects on Linux, among other things. Wellington Wallace et al. released this new version with a port from GTK4 to Qt/QNL-based user interface.

Other changes include:

• Built-in tray icon and menu.
• Better echo cancellation.
• Various preset improvements.
• The last used plugin or tab is now restored when the window is reopened.

For the full list of changes, please see here. The recommended way to install it is from Flathub.

Artworks

Shaman House by Dahyun kal, made with a plethora of tools, including Blender:

Awakening by Javen Yuan, made with Zbrush, Blender, and Photoshop:

The Silent Geometry by Sathish Kumar, made with Blender and Photoshop:

神秘小鎮 (Mysterious Town) by 魔灯Modeng, made with Blender, Maya, Zbrush, etc.:

Vampire Castle of Tanagari by Dimitris Tsilavakis, made with Blender and Krita:

Thanks to all patrons!

Steinberg recently announced that they are changing the licensing of both VST3 and ASIO. VST3 is now MIT-licensed instead of GPLv3+/proprietary, and ASIO is GPLv3+/proprietary rather than just proprietary. Let’s pick the news apart bit by bit.

VST3

This iteration of the plugin SDK has always been available under the dual GPLv3+/proprietary license. Changing the license to MIT means two things:

• Companies don’t have to sign any agreements with Steinberg anymore.
• Steinberg, therefore, now cannot enforce any ridiculous policies on plugin developers the way they did it with VST2.

Here is what’s not going to happen:

• Developers won’t release more plugins for Linux because of that.
• Developers won’t release more plugin hosts (such as DAWs) for Linux because of that.

I’m not talking out of my arse here.

Building a VST3 for Linux is not rocket science, especially if you use a crossplatform framework like JUCE.

I was an early beta tester of Sinevibes plugins for Linux. Artemiy only needed to set up an Ubuntu system and a basic build environment, which only took a couple of hours. The rest was adding literally one line of code to define the path to where presets should be stored, launch the build, and write an install.sh. That’s really it.

VST3 availability under the terms of the MIT license is not changing the build process in any way. Nor does it make Linux more interesting all of a sudden.

What will affect plugin developers is availability of more proprietary DAWs on Linux. Something like FL Studio getting a native Linux port would probably make some developers reconsider their position.

As for hosts, nothing prevents DAW developers from releasing native ports, as is evidenced by Bitwig, Presonus Studio One, Reaper, etc. All they need is assurance that this will be worth the effort. Unfortunately, most are stuck in the vicious circle:

• DAW developers want more proprietary plugins and more official audio hardware support for Linux.
• Plugin developers want more proprietary DAW support for Linux.
• Audio hardware vendors want more proprietary DAW and plugins support for Linux.

This really mostly applies to larger companies. Smaller companies and indie devs are more courageous. You can see it by how few Presonus-level companies make Linux releases as compared to how many indie devs build their plugins for Linux (check out this recent blog post by Amadeus Paulussen for an extensive list).

I’m not sure if CLAP’s moderate success affected the new VST3 licensing, but Steinberg’s policies were #1 reason for creating the new plugin API.

ASIO

Audio Stream Input/Output (ASIO) is a driver protocol that provides low latency when using audio interfaces on Windows for recording and playback. For ASIO, Steinberg dropped proprietary-only licensing and moved to the GPLv3+/proprietary combo.

This is where you may see some limited change. This will mostly affect free software that works on Windows. One notable example is OBS: Steinberg is now in a technical partnership with the project.

It’s entirely possible that some FOSS hosts will get a straightforward ASIO support on Windows, although I don’t really know of many. LMMS seems to be using PortAudio that already has ASIO support. Ardour definitely uses PortAudio with confirmed ASIO support, so there you go. Peter Kirn mentions VCV Rack though, and that sounds like a sensible idea.

For Linux users, the relevance of this licensing change is zero.

In conclusion

Personally, I don’t expect any major news for Linux users here. Neither VST3 nor ASIO licensing change will get us more software, FOSS or otherwise. All we realistically can do is vote by our wallets and give money to developers and companies who are friendly to this community. I mean this in the most sincere way.

Focusrite was among the several companies that supported FFADO back when Firewire was still cool, so I got Saffire Pro 24. Years later, they supported Geoffrey Bennett’s work on getting their USB audio interfaces first-class support on Linux, and so my next audio interface will a focusrite again (currently on Scarlett 2i4 gen1).

Pianoteq added Linux support early on, and I’ve been their customer since v5 (2013). The same goes for Sinevibes and a few more developers whose stuff I actually need.

If we all do this sort of thing, this may not tip the scale to get Native Instruments to port their sampler engine and make a ton of orchestral libraries available. But it may give folks like David Healey of Libre Wave an incentive to produce more complex sample libraries and eventually get there.

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

Repository updates

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

 

That is all for now, see you next month!