planet.linuxaudio.org

June 26, 2025

GStreamer News

GStreamer 1.26.3 stable bug fix release

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

This release only contains bugfixes as well as a number of security fixes and important playback fixes, and it should be safe to update from 1.26.x.

Highlighted bugfixes:

  • Various security fixes and playback fixes
  • Security fix for the H.266 video parser
  • Fix regression for WAV files with acid chunks
  • Fix high memory consumption caused by a text handling regression in uridecodebin3 and playbin3
  • Fix panic on late GOP in fragmented MP4 muxer
  • Closed caption conversion, rendering and muxing improvements
  • Decklink video sink preroll frame rendering and clock drift handling fixes
  • MPEG-TS demuxing and muxing fixes
  • MP4 muxer fixes for creating very large files with faststart support
  • New thread-sharing 1:N inter source and sink elements, and a ts-rtpdtmfsrc
  • New speech synthesis element around ElevenLabs API
  • RTP H.265 depayloader fixes and improvements, as well as TWCC and GCC congestion control fixes
  • Seeking improvements in DASH client for streams with gaps
  • WebRTC sink and source fixes and enhancements, including to LiveKit and WHIP signallers
  • The macOS osxvideosink now posts navigation messages
  • QtQML6GL video sink input event handling improvements
  • Overhaul detection of hardware-accelerated video codecs on Android
  • Video4Linux capture source fixes and support for BT.2100 PQ and 1:4:5:3 colorimetry
  • Vulkan buffer upload and memory handling regression fixes
  • Python bindings: fix various regressions introduced in 1.26.2
  • cerbero: fix text relocation issues on 32-bit Android and fix broken VisualStudio VC templates
  • packages: ship pbtypes plugin and update openssl to 3.5.0 LTS
  • Various bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

See the GStreamer 1.26.3 release notes for more details.

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

June 26, 2025 11:55 PM

June 23, 2025

Linux Archives - CDM Create Digital Music

cables, free visual creation patcher on Web and app, gets big updates

cables.gl, the stunning, free, and open-source media creation environment for visuals and sound, is back with its June update. The Web-powered, Web-or-offline tool is faster, editing is easier, it's more future-proof and reliable, and they've updated their roadmap for what they envision this to be. Even alongside other tools, it's great to patch like this on the Web.

The post cables, free visual creation patcher on Web and app, gets big updates appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

by Peter Kirn at June 23, 2025 07:14 PM

June 21, 2025

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

qpwgraph v0.9.4 - An Early-Summer'25 Beta Release

qpwgraph v0.9.4 - An Early-Summer'25 Beta Release

Hello all,

qpwgraph v0.9.4 (early-summer'25) is out!

Change-log:

  • Indulged on a new 'Add' (pinned connection) button into the Patchbay/Manage... dialog also make dialog size and position persistent.
  • Introducing Graph/Options.../Merger to unify node-names for Patchbay persistence, especially useful to PipeWire clients that spawn more than one node, having the very same name (eg. web browsers).

Description:

qpwgraph is a graph manager dedicated to PipeWire, using the Qt C++ framework, based and pretty much like the same of QjackCtl.

Project page:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/rncbc/qpwgraph

Downloads:

Git repos:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/rncbc/qpwgraph.git (official)
https://github.com/rncbc/qpwgraph.git
https://gitlab.com/rncbc/qpwgraph.git
https://codeberg.org/rncbc/qpwgraph.git

License:

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

Enjoy!

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by rncbc at June 21, 2025 11:00 AM

June 20, 2025

digital audio hacks – Hackaday

Pi Pico Powers Parts-Bin Audio Interface

USB audio is great, but what if you needed to use it and had no budget? Well, depending on the contents of your parts bin, you might be able to use [Veyniac]’s Pico-Audio-Interface as a free (and libre! It’s GPL3.0) sound capture device.

In the project’s Reddit thread, [Veyniac] describes needing audio input for his homemade synth, but having no budget. Necessity being the mother of invention, rather than beg borrow or steal a device with a working sound card, he hacked together this lovely device. It shows up as a USB Audio Class 2.0 device so should work with just about anything, and offers 12-bit resolution and 4x oversampling to try and deal with USB noise with its 2-channel, 44.1 kHz sample rate.

Aside from the Pico, all you need is an LM324 op-amp IC and a handful of resistors and capacitors — [Veyniac] estimates about $10 to purchase the whole BOM. He claims that the captured audio sounds okay in his use, but can’t guarantee it will  be for anyone else, noise being the fickle beast that it is. We figure that sounding “Okay” has got to be pretty good, given that you usually get what you pay for — and again, [Veyniac] did build this in a cave with a box of scraps. Well, except for the cave part. Probably.

While the goal here was not to rival a commercial USB sound card, we have seen projects to do that. We’re quite grateful to [Omadeira] for the tip, because this really is a hack. If you, too, want a share of our undying gratitude (which is still worth its weight in gold, despite fluctuations in the spot price of precious metals), send in a tip of your own.

by Tyler August at June 20, 2025 03:30 PM

Ben Eater Makes Computer Noises

Hand holding small speaker

When [Ben Eater] talks, hackers everywhere listen. In his latest video [Ben] shows us how to make computer noises using square waves and a 6502 microprocessor.

[Ben] uses the timer in the W65C22 Versatile Interface Adapter to generate the square waves which generate a tone. He then adds support for a new BEEP command into his MS BASIC interpreter. We covered [Ben Eater]’s MS BASIC here at Hackaday back in April, so definitely check that out if you missed it.

After checking the frequency of oscillation using his Keysight oscilloscope he then wires in an 8Ω 2W speaker via a LM386 audio amplifier. We can’t use the W65C22 output pin directly because that can only output a few milliwatts of power. [Ben] implements the typical circuit application from the LM386 datasheet to drive the speaker. To complete his video [Ben] writes a program for his BASIC interpreter which plays a tune.

Thanks to [Mark Stevens] for writing in to let us know about this one. If you’re planning to play along at home a good place to start is to build your own 6502, like [Ben] did!

by John Elliot V at June 20, 2025 02:00 AM

June 17, 2025

Linux Archives - CDM Create Digital Music

Barry Vercoe, who made coding sound accessible to all, has died

Barry Vercoe, composer and music scientist, founded MIT's electronic music efforts and helped shape the Lab's efforts in digital synthesis and machine listening and learning. But his biggest impact came outside the academy: as the inventor of Csound, he took the original innovations of Max Mathews and made them accessible to everyone. The live coding scene that followed has transformed the practice of coding sound into a new form of musical performance.

The post Barry Vercoe, who made coding sound accessible to all, has died appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

by Peter Kirn at June 17, 2025 09:44 PM

June 15, 2025

Home on Libre Arts

Weekly recap — 15 June 2025

Week highlights: new release of Audacity and Kdenlive, new features in GIMP, Inkscape, and Ardour.

GIMP

Jehan created a tag for GIMP 3.1.2 in the desktop files, so the first unstable release in the 3.1 series is likely coming soon. This will lead up to a stable v3.2 release sometime in this decade.

Meanwhile, here are some recent changes in git:

A few more things in merge requests:

Inkscape

Charlotte Curtis proposed a patch that adds configurable grouping of items when importing PDF files: by XObject (current behavior), by optional content groups (OCGs), by page, or necessary only (ignores XObjects and OCGs).

Anunay submitted a patch for review that adds (configurable) zooming with middle-click/drag. That’s actually really nice!

Kdenlive 25.04.2

This is a bugfix release without any new features. Over 20 issues have been resolved since the previous update. Here is the full list of changes.

Audacity 3.7.4

This is mostly a bugfix release, but with some nice additions:

  • A new welcome/what’s new screen.
  • A bunch of changes in OpenVINO effects: availability on macOS, their own category in the Effects menu, anddiscoverability through the Get Effects button.

Ardour

The team is still very far from v9, but there’ve been some neat fixes and improvements. Here are some of the recent ones:

  • Various pianoroll window improvements and the seemingly never-ending saga of tweaking the rendering of MIDI note lines and the scroomer.
  • New command to search for tracks and busses in the session, with automatic scrolling to get the found item to the top of the timeline.
  • Icon colors are now themable.
  • The real-time analyzer is now available in regular nightly builds.

RTA in Ardour

Artworks

Fantasy Tree by Facundo Mileo, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Fantasy Tree by Facundo Mileo

“Solstice” Concept Art by MauFlores, made with Krita:

“Solstice” by MauFlores

June 15, 2025 05:14 PM

June 11, 2025

GStreamer News

GStreamer 1.24.13 old-stable bug fix release

The GStreamer team is pleased to announce another bug fix release in the new old stable 1.24 release series of your favourite cross-platform multimedia framework!

This release only contains bugfixes as well as a number of security fixes and important playback fixes, and it should be safe to update from 1.24.x.

Please note that the 1.24 old-stable series is no longer actively maintained and has been superseded by the GStreamer 1.26 stable series now.

Highlighted bugfixes:

  • Various security fixes and playback fixes
  • MP4 demuxer atom parsing improvements and security fixes
  • H.265 decoder base class and caption inserter SPS/PPS handling fixes
  • Subtitle parser security fixes
  • Subtitle rendering and seeking fixes
  • Closed caption fixes
  • Matroska rotation tag support and v4 muxing support
  • Ogg seeking improvements in streaming mode
  • Windows plugin loading fixes
  • MIDI parser improvements for tempo changes
  • Video time code support for 119.88 fps and drop-frames-related conversion fixes
  • GStreamer editing services fixes for sources with non-1:1 aspect ratios
  • RTP session handling and RTSP server fixes
  • Thread-safety improvements for the Media Source Extension (MSE) library
  • macOS video capture improvements for external devices
  • Python bindings: Fix compatibility with PyGObject >= 3.52.0
  • cerbero: bootstrapping fixes on Windows, improved support for RHEL, and openh264 recipe update
  • Various bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

See the GStreamer 1.24.13 release notes for more details.

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

June 11, 2025 04:00 PM

June 08, 2025

Home on Libre Arts

Weekly recap — 8 June 2025

Week highlights: new release of RawTherapee, new features in GIMP, and new apps for screenshot annotation and film photography.

The X11Libre drama

It’s hard to avoid this topic. In a nutshell:

  • Enrico Weigelt started contributing to xserver (X11/X.org) around January 2024. He has over 800 commits to his name to date.
  • He didn’t test at least some of his patches, which broke things on multiple occasions.
  • At least one maintainer (employed by Red Hat) complained that his patches added little value, yet the sheer number of them blocked the review of patches by other contributors.
  • Some contributors, such as Jasper St. Pierre of Valve, complained that Enrico’s patches broke ABI compatibility way too often.
  • Many of Enrico’s patches stayed unapplied, which he complained about, too.
  • Enrico also complained that his fixes are not being released (there were actually five xserver releases in 2024 and one in 2025).
  • Enrico spent some time publicly badmouthing Red Hat / IBM online (in this comments section, for instance), claiming that the company was sabotaging X11 development.
  • He ended up forking X11, renaming it to X11Libre, and hosting his fork on freedesktop’s infrastructure (now on GitHub).
  • The FreeDesktop CoC committee reportedly discussed this and—which is an established fact—banned Enrico from the platform and deleted the fork repository, which automatically deleted all unapplied merge requests (because Gitlab).
  • The person (employed by Red Hat) who pushed the red button posted on Mastodon what some people think was schadenfreude (unlikely).

If all this complaining is not quite sufficient, the story was reported by Bryan Landuke in his usual narrative-twisting style to add extra drama and skip some important details.

I have little interest in discussing the whole X11 vs Wayland topic. I’m neither against nor in favor of either. Overall, I’d happily switch to Wayland since that’s where GNOME is heading. The only reason I’m still an X11 user is that Ardour works less reliably on XWayland for me, and chances of Paul and Robin porting YTK (their vendored version of GTK2) to Wayland any time soon seem extremely slim, same as a port of Ardour to GTK3/GTK4 (however little of that they would use).

I also don’t buy the entire “passionate developer vs big evil dishonest corporation” narrative. I’ve read enough discussions in the issue tracker and merge requests to form my own opinion. Everybody had a problem with his changes: both Red Hat, Oracle, Valve, and NVIDIA peeps. His contribution style and approach to testing his patches didn’t change at all despte multiple confrontations.

What I find more interesting to discuss is that the decision-making is not transparent in many FOSS organizations. It’s hard for me to name a project that has a code of conduct and a public record on any voting to apply its policy.

In this particular instance, we don’t know who posted a complaint to the CoC, who actually participated in the conversation, what CoC rule was deemed broken, and why the committee decided to ban instead of issuing an official warning. As a matter of fact, it’s possible that they did issue a warning, but there’s just no way to tell.

This is not a unique issue. But it’s the kind of growing pains in the community that are educational to watch.

All in all, I think there’s a multitude of lessons to learn from this controversy. For example, if you have a difficult contributor who disrupts the project’s operation and you know he won’t shut up about the ban, maybe try being extra open about the process of ejecting him. Or if a big bad corpo is out to get ya, maybe don’t try to host your fork on the infrastructure they can kick you out of.

GIMP

Okay, this was an eventful week for the project:

  • Advance Software implemented JPEG2000 exporting.
  • The Lock Content command is now undoable (CmykStudent).
  • GIMP can now optionally follow the light/dark theme system switch on systems where thi is supported (Niels De Graef, Hari Rana, Jehan Pages, Isopod).
  • Some transformations can once again add the alpha channel automatically (CmykStudent).
  • GIMP can now load JIF (Jeff’s Image Format) images which are a variation of the GIF format that compresses indexed images using zlib rather than LZW (CmykStudent).
  • When reading and writing OpenRaster files, GIMP now supports two official specification extensions: storing if layers are pixel-locked and if they are selected (CmykSudent). Both extensions are supported by Krita and MyPaint.
  • The CMYK color selector now displays total ink coverage (CmykStudent, unsurprisingly).

Gradia 1.4

This is a brand-new application to annotate screenshots. Functionally, it’s a lot like Annotator, but with a slightly different approach to UI.

Gradia 1.4

The application lacks some important features, such as cropping and a delay for screenshots, but the developer is quite responsive in the issue tracker, in my experience. Definitely check it out. Officially, it’s only distributed as a flatpak build, but I just built it from git (it’s all in Python, anyway).

RawTherapee 5.12

This is a major update bringing some neat changes, including these:

  • Dehaze option added to The Raw Black Points.
  • De-fish option in Distortion Correction to convert fisheye images into rectilinear images.
  • New Gamut Compression tool to apply ACES Reference Gamut Compression operator.
  • The Resize tool can now add a single-color border around the image.
  • New global tone mapper in Shadows/Highlights & Tone Equalizer tools.

See here for the full list of changes.

Filmbook

This is a brand-new application to help film camera users keep track of their rolls. The interface seems to be heavily geared towards phones despite being written in GTK4 (there isn’t an abundance of platforms you can run this on at the moment, it’s pretty much just Phosh).

Filmbook

Björn Adelberg was kind enough to provide some background about this project.

At the moment, the application is still very much geared to my needs. I have several cameras and not all of them have the option of inserting part of the film carton at the back. That’s why I wanted to remember which film is in which camera. It is also sometimes good to remember which films have not yet been developed. I would then take a film of the same type and load it again.

Once this is exposed, I have two films of the same type and can develop them in one developer box. It should also be possible to remember which films you have in the fridge and which cameras are in the cupboard. How much you expand this is another question.

One feature that is not yet integrated is the ability to create image entries for an inserted film. There you could enter the exposure time and which lens you used. Perhaps also a quick little sketch of the image. However, I think that having to document every image there is too time-consuming and not relevant in practice. But maybe I’m wrong.

The source code is over at Codeberg. There haven’t been any releases of this application yet. However, the developer publicly asked film photography aficionados for feedback. So there, consider this a broadcast of that request.

Flowblade 2.22

There are a few interesting changes in this new release of Flowblade, an MLT-based video editor:

  • 32 new options for easing in keyframes.
  • GUI editors for Alpha Shape, Crop, and Gradient Tint effects.
  • Text labels for tracks displayed in track headers.
  • Various minor UI improvements.

See here for the full changelog.

Artworks

Power Beacon by Marat Zakirov, made with Blender:

Power Beacon by Marat Zakirov

Amsterdamsche Munt by Laura Kempff, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Amsterdamsche Munt by Laura Kempff

June 08, 2025 05:14 PM

June 06, 2025

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

Qtractor 1.5.6 - An End-of-Spring'25 Release

Qtractor 1.5.6 - An End-of-Spring'25 Release

Hello y'all,

Qtractor 1.5.6 (end-of-spring'25) released!

Change-log:

  • MIDI clip editor (aka. piano-roll): Transport/Step/Note/Backward, Forward, now plays the step-selected notes, provided send/Preview is on and playback is not rolling.
  • MIDI Tools: Normalize now finally fixed to an absolute Value, ie. without a Percent(age) factor applied.
  • MIDI Controller Observer: 'Hook' attribute is now on by default.
  • MIDI Controller Send pseudo-plugin introduced: accessible from plugins menu/Inserts/MIDI/Add Controller...

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 && Keep having fun!

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by rncbc at June 06, 2025 05:00 PM

May 29, 2025

News – Ubuntu Studio

Ubuntu Studio 22.04 LTS has reached End-Of-Life (EOL)

Ubuntu Studio 22.04 LTS has reached the end of its three years of supported life provided by the Ubuntu Studio team. All users are urged to upgrade to 24.04 LTS at this time.

This means that the KDE Plasma, audio, video, graphics, photography, and publishing components of your system will no longer receive updates, plus we at Ubuntu Studio won’t support it after 29-May-2025, though your base packages from Ubuntu will continue to receive security updates from Ubuntu until 2027 since Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Cloud and Ubuntu Core continue to receive updates.

See the Ubuntu Studio 24.04 LTS Release Notes for upgrade instructions.

No single release of any operating system can be supported indefinitely, and Ubuntu Studio has no exception to this rule.

Long-Term Support releases are identified by an even numbered year-of-release and a month-of-release of April (04). Hence, the most recent Long-Term Support release is 24.04 (YY.MM = 2024.April), and the next Long-Term Support release will be 26.04 (2026.April). LTS releases for official Ubuntu flavors (not Desktop or Server which are supported for five years) are three years, meaning LTS users are expected to upgrade after every LTS release with a one-year buffer.

by eeickmeyer at May 29, 2025 04:50 PM

May 26, 2025

blog4

Pictures from Elektronengehirn Berlin concert

The Elektronengehirn concert 19. April 2025 at Noiseberg, Berlin (DE). Pictures by Orange 'Ear.
Equipment was Linux computer with custom Pure Data patch for sound, custom software created with the Godot game engine for visuals, a digital synthesizer Malte Steiner developed 2 years ago and the new modular synthesizer he developed in the last couple of months.






by herrsteiner (noreply@blogger.com) at May 26, 2025 06:23 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 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

March 27, 2025

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 11, 2025

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

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