planet.linuxaudio.org

Sratom 0.6.20 has been released. Sratom is a small library for serializing LV2 atoms. Sratom reads/writes atoms from/to RDF, allowing them to be converted between binary and text or stored in a model.

Changes:

• Avoid over-use of yielding meson options
• Avoid use of scanf when reading MIDI events
• Fix lint checks
• Fix potential memory error when writing ambiguous relative paths
• Improve code quality

Suil 0.10.24 has been released. Suil is a library for loading and wrapping LV2 plugin UIs. It provides wrappers that allow Gtk and Qt hosts to load, and potentially embed, plugin GUIs that use the "native" windowing API (Coca, WIN32, or X11).

Changes:

• Add header warnings test
• Avoid over-use of yielding meson options

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:

• Fix showtime video player showing washed-out colours for HDR videos when subtitles are active
• core: performance improvements for elements with many source pads
• aacparse: support streams which do not have frequent LOAS config
• av1parse: Fix duplicated frames issue in frame splitting
• fmp4mux: Fix EAC3 datarate calculation and substream writing
• gtk4painablesink: fixes glitches with padded buffers such as for sub-sampled video formats with odd sizes
• mpegtsmux: PUSI flag and ID3 tag handling fixes
• rtpbaseaudiopay2: Fix marker bit handling for DISCONT and RESYNC buffer flags
• rtpvp9pay: Fix parsing of show-existing-frame flag, fixes compatibility with vavp9lpenc
• splitmuxsink: accept pads named 'sink_%u' on the muxer for fmp4 muxer support
• webrtcsink: Correct lock ordering to prevent deadlock
• gst-plugins-rs meson build gained an `auto_plugin_features` option and no longer requires all gstreamer libraries to be available
• v4l2 device monitor fixes
• x265enc: advertise latency based on encoder parameters instead of hard-coding it to 5 frames
• cerbero package builder: Add Rust support for 32-bit Linux x86
• Various bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

See the GStreamer 1.26.8 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.

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!

Tired of Big Tech scanning your online data? Why not make your own deep scan of all the lost sound files on your own hard drive, producing an entirely local result? No sooner than Envion wowed us with its beautiful esoteric sonic landscapes, its developer Emiliano drops a killer second act.

The post Free Envion Deepscan turns your hard drive’s lost files into a soundscape appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

An issue has been identified

The Ubuntu Release team has now enabled upgrades from 25.04 to 25.10! This is great news! In fact, you may have noticed this icon on your toolbar and a notification to upgrade.

However, upon doing so, you may have noticed something a little more unfortunate:

Yep, we know. This tells you nothing about what is wrong. What is wrong is slightly more technical. As it turns out, the backend application that actually performs the upgrade removed an argument from its command line unannounced during the Plucky Puffin release cycle, approximately a year ago.

As our project leader, Erich Eickmeyer, maintains the upgrade notifier widget for both Ubuntu Studio and Kubuntu, he woke up and immediately got to work identifying what’s wrong and how to patch the Plasma widget in question to correctly execute the upgrade process. He has uploaded the fix, and it was accepted by a member of the Ubuntu Stable Release Updates team.

At the moment, the fix needs to be tested and verified. In order to test it, one must install the fix from the plucky-proposed repository. In order for it to be available, it must build for all architectures and, as of this writing, is awaiting building on riscv64 which has a 40-hour backlog.

The Workaround

If you wish to begin the upgrade process manually rather than waiting on the upgrade notifier fix to be implemented, feel free to make sure you are fully updated, type alt-space to execute Krunner, and paste this:

do-release-upgrade -f DistUpgradeViewKDE

This is the exact command that will be executed by the notifier widget as soon as it is updated.

Of course, if you’re in no hurry, feel free to wait until the notifier is updated and use that method. Do bear in mind, though, that as of this writing, you have exactly 90 days to perform the upgrade to 25.10 before your system will no longer be supported. At that time, you’ll risk being unable to upgrade at all unless certain procedures for End-Of-Life Upgrades are done, which can be tedious for those uncomfortable in a command line as it will require modifying system files.

Mea Culpa

We do apologize for the inconvenience. Testing upgrade paths like this are hard to do and things go missed, especially when teams don’t communicate with each other. We’re try to identify things before they happen but, unfortunately, certain items cannot be foreseen.

This issue has now been added to the Ubuntu Studio 25.10 Release Notes.

Open licensing for proprietary audio and plug-in standards could enable the entire industry to move forward on some critical work. So it's great news that Steinberg this month announced not one but two big licensing announcements: first, a dual-licensing model for their ASIO audio driver protocol for Windows (including an OBS collaboration), and now a permissive MIT license for the mighty VST3 plug-in spec.

The post Open Steinberg: VST3 and ASIO SDKs now have open source licenses appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

In previous episodes of this long-running series looking at the world of high-quality audio, at every point we’ve stayed in the real world of physical audio hardware. From the human ear to the loudspeaker, from the DAC to measuring distortion, this is all stuff that can happen on your bench or in your Hi-Fi rack.

We’re now going for the first time to diverge from the practical world of hardware into the theoretical world of mathematics, as we consider a very contentious topic in the world of audio. We live in a world in which it is now normal for audio to have some form of digital compression applied to it, some of which has an effect on what is played back through our speakers and headphones. When a compression algorithm changes what we hear, it’s distortion in audio terms, but how much is it distorted and how do we even measure that? It’s time to dive in and play with some audio files.

How Good A Copy Does A Copy Have To Be?

Were we to record some music with a good quality microphone and analogue tape recorder, we know that what came out of the speakers at playback would be a copy of what was heard by the microphone, subject to distortion from whatever non-linearities it has encountered in the audio path. But despite that distortion, the tape recorder is doing its best to faithfully record an exact copy of what it hears. It’s the same with a compression-free digital recording; record those musicians with a DAT machine or listen to them on a CD, and you’ll get back as good a copy as those media are capable of returning.

The trouble is that uncompressed audio takes up a lot of bandwidth, particularly when streaming over the Internet. Thus just as with any other data format, it makes sense to compress it such that it takes up less space. There are plenty of compression algorithms to choose from, but with analogue sources there are more choices than there are with text, or software. A Linux ISO has to uncompress as a perfect copy of its original otherwise it won’t run, while an image or an audio file simply has to uncompress to something that looks or sounds like the original to our meaty brains.

Those extra compression options for analogue data take advantage of this; they use so-called lossy compression in that what you get out sounds just like what you put in, but isn’t the same. This difference can be viewed as distortion, and if you have ever saved an image containing text as a JPEG file, you’ll probably have seen it as artifacts around sharply defined edges.

So if lossy compression algorithms such as MP3 introduce distortion, how can we measure this? The analogue distortion analyser featured in our last installment is of little use, because the pure sine wave it uses is very easy for the compression algorithm to encode faithfully. Compression based on Fourier analysis is always going to do a good job on a single frequency. Another solution is required, and here the Internet is of little help. It’s time to set out on my own and figure out a way to measure the distortion inherent to an MP3 file.

Math Will Give Us The Right Answer!

At moments like these it’s great to be surrounded by other engineers, because you can mull it over and reach a solution. This distortion can’t be measured through my analogue instrumentation with a sine wave for the reasons discussed above, so it must instead be measured on a real world sample. We came up with a plan: measure the difference between two samples, compute the RMS value for that difference, then calculate the ratio between that and the RMS of the uncompressed sample.

As is so often the case with this type of task, it’s a relatively straightforward task using GNU Radio as a DSP workshop. I created a GNU Radio project to do the job, and fed it an uncompressed and compressed version of the same sample. I used a freely available recording of some bongo drums, and to make my compressed file I encoded it as a 128kbit MP3, then decoded it back to a WAV file. You can find it in my GitHub account, should you wish to play with it yourself.

Math Will Give Us The Wrong Answer!

The result it gives for my two bongo samples varies a little around 0.03, or 3%, depending upon where you are in the sample. What that in effect means is that the MP3 encoded version is around 3% different from the uncompressed one. If that were a figure measured on an analogue circuit using my trusty HP analyser I would say it wasn’t a very good quality circuit at all, and I would definitely be able to hear the distortion when listening to the audio. The fact that I can’t hear it raises a fundamental question as to what distortion really is, and the effect it has upon listeners.

What I would understand as distortion due to non-linearities in the audio path, is in reality harmonic distortion. Harmonics of the input signal are being created; if my audio path is a guitar pedal they are harmonics I want, while if it’s merely a very low quality piece of audio gear they’re unwelcome degradation of the listening experience. This MP3 file has a measurable 3% distortion, yet I am not hearing it as such when I listen. The answer to why that is the case is that this is not harmonic distortion, instead it’s a very similar version of the same sound, which differs by only 3% from the original. People with an acute ear can hear it, but most listeners will not notice the difference.

So In Summary: This Distortion Isn’t Distortion Like The Others

So in very simple terms, I’ve measured distortion, but not distortion in the same sense of the word. I’ve proven that an MP3 encoded audio source has a significant loss of information over its uncompressed ancestor, but noted that it is nowhere near as noticable in the finished product as for example a 3% harmonic distortion would be. It’s thus safe to say that this exercise, while interesting, is a little bit pointless because it produces a misleading figure. I think I have achieved something though, by shining some light on the matter of audio compression and subsequent quality loss. In short: for most of you it won’t matter, while the rest of you are probably using a lossless algorithm such as FLAC anyway.

The super talented [Switch Angel] is an electronic music artist, with a few cool YouTube videos to show off their absolute nailing of how to live code with Strudel. For us mere mortals, Strudel is a JavaScript port of TidalCycles, which is an algorithmic music generator which supports live coding, i.e. the music that is passed down to the synthesizer changes on-the-fly as you manipulate the code. It’s magical to watch (and listen!) to how you can adapt and distort the music to your whims just by tweaking a few lines of code: no compilation steps, hardly any debugging and instant results.

The traditional view of music generators like this is to create lists of note/instrument pairs with appropriate modifiers. Each sound is specified in sequence — adding a sound extends the sequence a little. Strudel / Tidalcycles works a little differently and is based on the idea of repeating patterns over a fixed time. Adding an extra sound or breaking down one sound slot into multiple sounds squeezes all the remaining slots down, causing the whole pattern to repeat in the same period, with the sounds individually taking up less space. This simple change makes it really easy to add layer upon layer of interest within a sequence with a few extra characters, without recalculating everything else to fit. On top of this base, multiple effects can be layered—more than we can mention here—and all can be adjusted with pop-in sliders directly in the code.

You see, the code is also the visualizer. As the sequence runs, the notes and time periods are highlighted, with piano rolls and oscilloscope views adding to the visuals to help guide you. Tweaking the various components of the sound composition in real time with embedded sliders is a quick and easy way to smoothly hear the impact of settings. It just makes sense. Additionally, since Strudel is written in JavaScript, you can pull in external libraries of customized functions to make your code more straightforward to read, like this short library from [Switch Angel].

On the back end, the built-in web-based synthesizer is basic but functional for roughing out. Still, for absolute control, you’re going to want to send the notes over to something like SuperCollider or Sonic Pi. This is easy because Strudel supports OSC, making it a simple, configurable item.

If you were thinking that you’ve seen a JavaScript-based generative music thing before, you’d be right. Whilst we’re thinking about generative music and generative art in general, what about having a look at this neat sound-and-light sculpture?

Thanks to [JohnU] for sending this in!

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:

• cea608overlay: improve handling of non-system memory
• cuda: Fix runtime kernel compile with CUDA 13.0
• d3d12: Fix crop meta support in converter and passthrough handling in deinterlacer
• fallbacksrc: source handling improvements; no-more-pads signal for streams-unaware parents
• inter: add properties to fine tune the inner elements
• qtdemux: surround sound channel layout handling fixes and performance improvements for GoPro videos
• rtp: Add linear audio (L8, L16, L24) RTP payloaders / depayloaders
• rtspsrc: Send RTSP keepalives in TCP/interleaved modes
• rtpamrpay2: frame quality indicator flag related fixes
• rtpbasepay2: reuse last PTS when possible, to work around problems with NVIDIA Jetson AV1 encoder
• mpegtsmux, tsdemux: Opus audio handling fixes
• threadshare: latency related improvements and many other fixes
• matroskamux, tsmux, flvmux, cea608mux: Best pad determination fixes at EOS
• unixfd: support buffers with a big payload
• videorate unknown buffer duration assertion failure with variable framerates
• editing services: Make GESTimeline respect `SELECT_ELEMENT_TRACK` signal discard decision; memory leak fixes
• gobject-introspection annotation fixes
• cerbero: Update meson to 1.9.0 to enable Xcode 26 compatibility
• Various bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

See the GStreamer 1.26.7 release notes for more details.

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

The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu Studio 25.10 code-named “Questing Quokka”. This marks Ubuntu Studio’s 37th release. This release is a Regular release and as such, it is supported for 9 months, until July 2026.

Since it’s just out, you may experience some issues, so you might want to wait a bit before upgrading. Please see the release notes for a more complete list of changes and known issues. Listed here are some of the major highlights.

You can download Ubuntu Studio 25.10 from our download page.

Special Notes

The Ubuntu Studio 25.10 disk image (ISO) exceeds 4 GB and cannot be downloaded to some file systems such as FAT32 and may not be readable when burned to a standard DVD. For this reason, we recommend downloading to a compatible file system. When creating a boot medium, we recommend creating a bootable USB stick with the ISO image or burning to a Dual-Layer DVD.

Minimum installation media requirements: Dual-Layer DVD or 8GB USB drive.

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

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

Upgrades from 25.04 should be enabled within a month after release, so we appreciate your patience. Upgrades from 24.04 LTS will be enabled after 25.04 reaches End-Of-Life in January 2026.

New This Release

The Return of Internet DJ Console (IDJC)!

After a long hiatus, Internet DJ Console (IDJC) has returned. This package for creating and running Internet-based radio stations had been removed from Debian, but has returned, and therefore, returned to Ubuntu Studio!

JackTrip

Ubuntu Studio now includes JackTrip! JackTrip serves two purposes: low-latency networked JACK audio within your network, and low-latency Internet audio collaboration. Bands are even known to jam remotely using JackTrip’s services!

It supports any number of channels (as many as the computer/network can handle) of bidirectional, high quality, uncompressed audio signal streaming.

More Musical Plugins

We came to the realization that we needed to support musicians a little better, so we added a few instrument and musical plugins to assist with that:

• din
• drumkv1
• freewheeling
• gxtuner
• Hydrogen Drumkit Effects
• kmetronome
• padthv1
• polyphone
• samplv1
• synthv1

More Photography Tools

• PhotoCollage – allows you to create photo collage phosters
• PicPlanner – Calculates and displays the positions of the Sun, Moon, and Milky Way for any time and location on earth, to help you get those perfect astronomical photos or for taking pictures during the Golden or Blue hours.

PipeWire 1.4.7

This release contains PipeWire 1.4.7.

PipeWire’s JACK compatibility is configured to use out-of-the-box and is zero-latency internally. System latency is configurable via Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuration and can now be configured on a per-user basis instead of globally.

Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuration

Speaking of Audio Configuration, we have added a number of options for configuring the PipeWire JACK compatibility, as can be seen in the image below. Additionally, buffer size can now be configured from within any JACK application that supports it, such as Patchance, Carla, Ardour, and more!

Ardour 8.12

This is, as of this writing, the latest release of Ardour, packed with the latest bugfixes.

To help support Ardour’s funding, you may obtain later versions directly from ardour.org. To do so, please one-time purchase or subscribe to Ardour from their website. If you wish to get later versions of Ardour from us, you will have to wait until the next release of Ubuntu Studio, due in April 2026.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Does Ubuntu Studio contain snaps?
A: Yes. Mozilla’s distribution agreement with Canonical changed, and Ubuntu was forced to no longer distribute Firefox in a native .deb package. We have found that, after numerous improvements, Firefox now performs just as well as the native .deb package did.

Thunderbird also became a snap so that the maintainers can get security patches delivered faster.

Additionally, Freeshow is an Electron-based application. Electron-based applications cannot be packaged in the Ubuntu repositories in that they cannot be packaged in a traditional Debian source package. While such apps do have a build system to create a .deb binary package, it circumvents the source package build system in Launchpad, which is required when packaging for Ubuntu. However, Electron apps also have a facility for creating snaps, which can be uploaded and included. Therefore, for Freeshow to be included in Ubuntu Studio, it had to be packaged as a snap.

We have additional snaps that are Ubuntu-specific, such as the Firmware Updater and the Security Center. Contrary to popular myth, Ubuntu does not have any plans to switch all packages to snaps, nor do we.

Q: Will you make an ISO with {my favorite desktop environment}?
A: To do so would require creating an entirely new flavor of Ubuntu, which would require going through the Official Ubuntu Flavor application process. Since we’re completely volunteer-run, we don’t have the time or resources to do this. Instead, we recommend you download the official flavor for the desktop environment of your choice and use Ubuntu Studio Installer to get Ubuntu Studio – which does *not* convert that flavor to Ubuntu Studio but adds its benefits.

Q: What if I don’t want all these packages installed on my machine?
A: Simply use the Ubuntu Studio Installer to remove the features of Ubuntu Studio you don’t want or need! Additionally, we include a Minimal Install option that, when used with Ubuntu Studio Installer, will give you the Ubuntu Studio experience for whatever your desktop studio needs!

Get Involved!

A wonderful way to contribute is to get involved with the project directly! We’re always looking for new volunteers to help with packaging, documentation, tutorials, user support, and MORE! Check out all the ways you can contribute!

Our project leader, Erich Eickmeyer, is now working on Ubuntu Studio at least part-time, and is hoping that the users of Ubuntu Studio can give enough to generate a monthly part-time income. We’re not there, but if every Ubuntu Studio user donated monthly, we’d be there! Your donations are appreciated! If other distributions can do it, surely we can! See the sidebar for ways to give!

Contact the Team

The best way to contact the Ubuntu Studio team is via the Ubuntu Discourse.

Special Thanks

Huge special thanks for this release go to:

• Eylul Dogruel: Artwork, Graphics Design
• Ross Gammon: Upstream Debian Developer, Testing
• Sebastien Ramacher: Upstream Debian Developer
• Dennis Braun: Upstream Debian Developer
• Rik Mills: Kubuntu Council Member, help with Plasma desktop
• Scarlett Moore: Kubuntu Project Lead, help with Plasma desktop
• Len Ovens: Testing, insight
• Mauro Gaspari: Tutorials, Promotion, and Documentation, Testing, keeping Erich sane
• Erich Eickmeyer: Project Leader, Packaging, Development, Direction, Treasurer
• Steve Langasek: You are missed.

Demonstration of the b4Modular synthesizer Series 7 by Malte Steiner. The system features 2 analog Oscillators / LFO, one digital oscillator with 6 different modes, oscillator bank with 6 square waves, triple clock module, 3 slew limiters, a lowpass filter, tone control filter, wave folder, one ring mod / wave folder thingy, 5 VCAs, crossfader, mixer, 2 pressure sensors, a trigger button, unity and gates mixer.

"My diy modular synthesizer in a suitcase which I developed between 2024 and 2025. The goal was to develop a cheap modular system mainly for live concerts which is repairable and can go into Checkin Luggage without much worries (I would never do that with my Eurorack). So far I used that system for several concerts of my projects Elektronengehirn and Notstandskomitee in Berlin and Helsinki, and local Jam sessions here in Aalborg. It is build in a Nanuk 923 case which can remove the lid, the rails are made of wood and wood screws, the front plates are 3D printed. Everything works fine and the concerts were great, but learnings so far:

- the frame is rigidly attached to the case so any shock impacts directly the system. So far one of my 3D printed brackets broke which didn't hinder a concert. I redesigned it to be more sturdy and it never happened since. But the rigid design is a bit questionable and I rethink the approach.

- the PCBs have been fixed to the frontplates with common metal screws and nuts. From the travel one nut unscrewed itself because of the vibration. I replaced it with nylon screws and nuts which have more grip. It remembers of a story from a Berlin company which created custom modular synths for Tangerine Dream back then. They tested the sturdiness against vibration by dragging those flight cases over a copplestone street at night until police stopped them asking what the hell they were doing.

- I hit a limit with my power supply design with a self made voltage splitter and an additional 7805 on the positive rail. It can't handle many microcontroller based modules before it collapses. In future systems I use another approach for the power supply which is much more stabile."