How about Commodore AMIGA-style sampling - complete with pixel UI, lo-fi sampling styles, vintage time-stretching, and both modern and Amiga file support - in a plug-in? It's Amigo Sampler, it's got a price point from a fish and chips shop, and it sounds wicked. (The plug-in, and the music from the folks making it, too...)
The GStreamer team is pleased to announce another bug fix release
in the new stable 1.24 release series of your favourite cross-platform
multimedia framework!
This release only contains bugfixes and security fixes and it should be safe
to update from 1.24.0.
Highlighted bugfixes:
Fix instant-EOS regression in audio sinks in some cases when volume is 0
rtspsrc: server compatibility improvements and ONVIF trick mode fixes
rtsp-server: fix issues if RTSP media was set to be both shared and reusable
(uri)decodebin3 and playbin3 fixes
adaptivdemux2/hlsdemux2: Fix issues with failure updating playlists
mpeg123 audio decoder fixes
v4l2codecs: DMA_DRM caps support for decoders
va: various AV1 / H.264 / H.265 video encoder fixes
vtdec: fix potential deadlock regression with ProRes playback
gst-libav: fixes for video decoder frame handling, interlaced mode detection
avenc_aac: support for 7.1 and 16 channel modes
glimagesink: Fix the sink not always respecting preferred size on macOS
gtk4paintablesink: Fix scaling of texture position
webrtc: Allow resolution and framerate changes, and many other improvements
webrtc: Add new LiveKit source element
Fix usability of binary packages on arm64 iOS
various bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements
As 24.04 LTS will represent the eighth Long-Term Support release of Ubuntu Studio and its 32nd release. For this release, we wanted to make sure we got some great representation from the community in terms of wallpaper, and while there weren’t as many entries as our previous competition, we were blown out of the way in terms of quality. While not every wallpaper could be included, all of the entries were solid, and narrowing it down to the best of the best was very difficult.
Revealing The Default
Our long-time art lead, Eylul Dogruel, worked diligently on making a quality textured default wallpaper that not only works well for traditional horizontal screens, but for vertical screens as well without losing quality. We have two variations: one with our logo, and one with the mascot that will be rotated-out for the next four releases.
Now to Crown the Winners!
As stated, this was a very difficult decision, but we would like to congratulate the winners of the competition! The full-quality images will be included in Ubuntu Studio 24.04 LTS and are already in our daily builds of Noble Numbat.
The GStreamer team is pleased to announce another bug fix release
in the now old-stable 1.22 release series of your favourite cross-platform
multimedia framework!
This release only contains bugfixes and security fixes and it should be safe
to update from 1.22.x.
Highlighted bugfixes:
Fix instant-EOS regression in audio sinks in some cases when volume is 0
rtspsrc: server compatibility improvements and ONVIF trick mode fixes
libsoup linking improvements on non-Linux platforms
va: improvements for intel i965 driver
wasapi2: fix choppy audio and respect ringbuffer buffer/latency time
rtsp-server file descriptor leak fix
uridecodebin3 fixes
various bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements
The good news are: just completed a successful migration to KDE Plasma 6 on ALL of the boxes in the house: 2 desktops and 3 laptops. No blisters found, hurray!
Huge congratulations to the KDE Team and all the unspoken contributors who made this a whole milestone and a quite smooth transition!
Now for the possible bad news: all upstream (that's me) QStuff* support for anything older than Qt6.0 is going to be scuttled, give or take a week, a month or two.
Moving forward... 🐱 because, there's no other way ;)
The video of the codepage live coding concert at the Helsinki Algorave data leap at WHS Teatteri Union on 1. March 2024 is online:
Codepage performs a live coding concert with their own software, gravel, which controls its internal synthesis and sample processing (implemented with Csound), as well as an external modular synthesizer via MIDI.
Performers Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen and Malte Steiner operate their laptops, which are synchronized via network cable. The screens are projected in an overlapping manner. They start from an empty canvas, typing the code in real-time, which generates the sequences. Additionally, Steiner plays a touch-controlled synthesizer he recently built.
Ultranet is a protocol created by audio manufacturer Behringer to transmit up to 16 channels of 24-bit sound over a Cat-5 cable. It’s not an open standard, though: Behringer doesn’t offer an API or protocol description to build your own Ultranet devices. But that didn’t stop [Christian Nödig], thanks to a defective mixer, he poked into the signals and built his own Ultranet receiver.
Ultranet runs over Cat-5 ethernet cables but isn’t an ethernet-based protocol. The electrical protocols of Ultranet are identical to Ethernet, but the signaling is different, making it a Level 1 protocol. So, you can use any Cat-5 cable for Ultranet, but you can’t just plug an Ultranet device into an Ethernet one. Or rather, you can (and neither device should explode), but you won’t get anything out of it.
Instead, [Christian]’s exploration revealed that Ultranet is based on another standard: AES/EBU, the bigger professional brother of the SPD/IF socket on HiFi systems. This was designed to carry digital audio over an XLR cable, and Behringer has taken AES/EBU and tweaked it to run over a single twisted pair. With two twisted pairs in the cable carrying a 192 kbps signal, you get sixteen channels of 24-bit audio in total over two twisted pairs inside the Cat-5 cable.
That’s a bit fast for a microcontroller to decode reliably, so [Christian] uses the FPGA in an Arduino Vidor 4000 MKR in his receiver with an open-source AES decoder core to receive and decode the Ultranet signal into individual channels, which are passed to an ADC and analog output.
In effect, [Christian] has built a 16-channel mixer, although the mixing aspect is too primitive for actual use. It would be great for monitoring, though, and it’s a beautiful description of how to dig into protocols like Ultranet that look locked up but are based on other, more open standards.
A new version of rtcqs, a Linux audio performance analyzer, is now available. Most notable changes include:
Fixed inconsistent use of single and double quotes
Replaced audio group check with a group agnostic check (fixes #4)
Governor check can now deal with systems that have SMT disabled
Tickless check now deals with all CONFIG_NO_HZ* variants and with nohz being set on the kernel command line (fixes #8)
File systems check has been expanded
IRQ check now loops through /sys/kernel/irq instead of parsing /proc/interrupts
rtprio check now checks if a SCHED_FIFO priority can be set instead of a SCHED_RR priority
Improved preempt RT check, check if “preempt=full” is part of the kernel command line (fixes #7)
Refactoring, created separate classes for main app, resources and GUI
Moved all packaging directives into pyprojects.toml
While working on this release I found out PySimpleGUI is not open source anymore so rtcqs’ GUI has become a bit of a moving target. I’m looking at alternatives like pygubu or even popsicle but that will be something for in the long run. In the short run there are more improvements in the pipeline. The swappiness check needs some attention and same goes for the IRQ check. I’ve been working on a different project to automate prioritizing IRQs and I’m planning to to reuse some parts of that project for the IRQ check in rtcqs. The idea is to have rtcqs not only list the status of all audio related IRQs but also any audio devices attached to those IRQs.
rtcqs is available on Codeberg, PyPI and is also included in the AUR.
As we get to the close of February 2024, we’re also getting close to Feature Freeze for Ubuntu Studio 2024 and, therefore, a closer look at what Ubuntu Studio 24.04 LTS will look like!
Before we get to that, however, we do want to let everyone know that community donations are down. We understand these are trying times for us all, and we just want to remind everyone that the creation and maintenance of Ubuntu Studio does come at some expense, such as electricity, internet, and equipment costs. All of that is in addition to the tireless hours our project leader, Erich Eickmeyer, is putting into this project daily.
Additionally, some recurring donations are failing. We’re not sure if they’re due to expired payment methods or inadequate funds, but we have no way to reach the people whose recurring donations have failed other than this method. So, if you have received any kind of notice, we kindly ask that you would check to see why those donations are failing. If you’d like to cancel, then that’s not a problem either.
If you find Ubuntu Studio useful or agree with its mission, we would ask that you would ask that you would contribute a donation or subscribe using one of the methods below.
Ubuntu Studio Will Always Remain a Free Download. That Will Not Change. The work that goes into producing it, however, is not free, and for that reason, we ask for voluntary donations.
Donate using PayPal Donations are Monthly or One-Time
Donate using Liberapay Donations are Weekly, Monthly, or Annually
Progress has been made on the new installer, and for a while, it was working. However, at this time, the code is entirely in the hands of the Ubuntu Desktop Team at Canonical and we at Ubuntu Studio have no control over it.
Additionally, while we do appreciate testing, no amount of testing or bug reporting will fix this, so we ask that you be patient.
Wallpaper Competition
Our Wallpaper Competition for Ubuntu Studio 24.04 LTS is underway! We’ve received a handful of submissions but would love to see more!
Moving from IRC back to Matrix
Our support chat is moving back from IRC to Matrix! As you may recall, we had a Matrix room as our support chat until recently. However, the entire Ubuntu community has now begun a migration to Matrix for our communication needs, and Ubuntu Studio will be following. Stay tuned for more information to that, but also our links will be changing on the website, and the menu links will default to Matrix in Ubuntu Studio 24.04 LTS’s release.
PulseAudio-Jack/Studio Controls Deprecation
Beginning in Ubuntu Studio 24.04 LTS, the old PulseAudio-JACK bridging/configuration, while still installable and usable with Studio Controls, will no longer be supported and will not be recommended for use. For most people, the default configuration using PipeWire with the PipeWire-JACK configuration enabled, which can be disabled on-the-fly if one wishes to use JACKd2 with QJackCtl.
While Studio Controls started out as our in-house-built Ubuntu Studio Controls, it is no longer useful as its functionality has largely been replaced by the full low-latency audio integration and bridging PipeWire has provided.
With that, we hope our next update will provide you with better news regarding the installer, so keep your eyes on this space!
Ardour 8.4 is available now for Linux, Windows, and macOS. Nothing particularly significant in this release, because our two lead developers have been busy with things linked to future releases. (note: there was no 8.3 release due to a critical bug discovered after tagging 8.3).
From a project-level perspective, perhaps the most important change is that we have moved the source code of our GUI toolkit (GTK v2) into the Ardour source tree. This has no impact whatsoever on people using the builds provided at ardour.org.
However, this version of GTK is about to be deprecated by a number of Linux distributions, and without this change it will become more difficult for both individual users and Linux package maintainers to continue building Ardour. This also leaves us free to (slowly) strip down aspects of the toolkit that we do not use, and potentially modify it as needed in the future. It also means that even the distribution builds of Ardour for Linux will contain our patches to GTK, which has historically not been the case.
Meanwhile, we now have beta-level AAF import, some new MIDI device maps, a new color theme, a stack of UX/UI tweaks and several fixes for crashing and workflow bugs.
You can do some wild things with sound waves, such as annoy your neighbours or convince other road users to move out of your way. Or, if you get into sonolithography like [Oliver Child] has, you can make some wild patterns with ultrasound.
Sonolithography is a method of patterning materials on to a surface using finely-controlled sound waves. To achieve this, [Oliver] created a circular array of sixteen ultrasonic transducers controlled via shift registers and gate driver ICs, under the command of a Raspberry Pi Pico. He then created an app for controlling the transducer array via an attached computer with a GUI interface. It allows the phase and amplitude of each element of the array to be controlled to create different patterns.
Creating a pattern is then a simple matter of placing the array on a surface, firing it up in a given drive mode, and then atomising some kind of dye or other material to visualize the pattern of the acoustic waves.
It could be a useful tool for studying the interactions of ultrasonic waves, or it could just be a way to make neat patterns in ink and dye if that’s what you’re into. [Oliver] notes the techniques of sonolithography could also have implications in biology or fabrication in future, as well. If you found this interesting, you might like to study up on ultrasonic levitation, too!
Cables (cables.gl), the powerful, completely free, browser-based, node-patching generative graphics tool, adds custom Ops and more in its February update. Even better, if you're looking for how to work with this, they've got a profile of a user who built a concert-ready video mixer entirely in Cables, with tips on how to create your own.
Well, Phoronix did a review of a similar machine and apparently it’s far from being a slouch and also has the fastest integrated GPU currently available. More on that GPU later. So no regret when it comes to those performance benchmarks. Actually no regret at all, so far the notebook performs really well.
There are some more things worth mentioning that add up to the positive verdict besides all the pros I already mentioned in my earlier posts. There is the battery life which is still pretty good given the performant and power greedy CPU. It can run for hours when idling. When running Ardour it’s done in about two hours though but then I work with all the sluices wide open. But it charges pretty fast. Another thing that struck me is that the notebook is so much quieter than the old one. And the keyboard is just really nice now that I got a bit more used to it. And I managed to map the last media key, the stop one, to something useful with my old friend xdotool. Mapped this media key to the “stop/cancel” keycode using udev and added a keyboard shortcut in XFCE that gets triggered by this keycode and that executes a small script that looks like this:
#!/bin/bash
xdotool search --classname ardour_ardour key --delay 100 h space h
Now if Ardour is running and I press the Stop media key, xdotool sends the key sequence “h space h” to Ardour with a delay of 100ms between the key strokes. “h” sets the playhead to start, “space” stops the transport and another “h” to be sure the playhead is at the start position. Only thing that I’d like to add is some kind of detection if transport is running or not.
Also managed to achieve an even lower latency with my USB interface by adding the option implicit_fb=1 to the snd-usb-audio kernel module. This not only gets rid of the kernel ring buffer getting flooded with warnings but it also results in clean audio at 32*3/48, so 2ms of systemic latency. So it’s on par with my old notebook, albeit with some more headroom. Lower doesn’t seem to be possible, it results in slowed down, distorted audio.
So would I advise everyone doing Linux audio to get this notebook or a similar spec’d one? Well, there’s this GPU that still seems to be a bit too new, too shiny and too fast for the kernel I’m currently running (6.7.2) so I’m getting reliable crashes with software like OwlPlug and occasional crashes when connected via HDMI to a second screen. But it’s tolerable and it will probably get sorted out sooner or later. Other than that, this thing flies and hopefully I can do another decade with this machine.
Edit: worked around the GPU crashing by copying /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-amdgpu.conf to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-amdgpu.conf and disabling hardware acceleration by adding the line Option "Accel" "off" to it. Content looks like this:
Lilv 0.24.24 has been released. Lilv is a C library to make the use of LV2 plugins as simple as possible for applications. For more information, see http://drobilla.net/software/lilv.
Changes:
Avoid overriding state features passed by the host
Fix null dereference when trying to load state from a missing file
Fix potential null dereferences and conversion warnings
David García Goñi released a brand new version of Elektroid, a sample and MIDI device manager for devices by Elektron, Arturia, Eventide, Moog, and Novation.
New features in this version:
Audio recording
Initial editing of samples
Auto sampler
Search on selected filesystems
Possibility to only display a local file system (the ‘Show Remote’ toggle in the hamburger menu)
CLI audio format converters
The project started out as a FOSS alternative to Electron Transfer, then effectively cannibalized two earlier projects by the same developer: MicroDude (Arturia MicroBrute librarian) and phatty (Moog Little Phatty librarian).
Here is the full list of supported devices:
Elektron Model:Samples
Elektron Model:Cycles
Elektron Digitakt
Elektron Digitone and Digitone Keys
Elektron Syntakt
Elektron Analog Rytm MKI and MKII
Elektron Analog Four MKI, MKII and Keys
All samplers implementing MIDI SDS
Casio CZ-101
Arturia MicroBrute
Eventide ModFactor, PitchFactor, TimeFactor, Space and H9
Moog Little Phatty and Slim Phatty
Novation Summit and Peak
I’ve been eyeballing both MicroBrute and Peak lately (completely different beasts price- and feature-wise!), so it’s great to know that I wouldn’t need to switch to Windows to make at least some desktop use of either or them.
The program also does some fun extras. If you dig non-12TET big time, it can convert Scala files to MTS for use with Moog Phatty.
Elektroid is available as source code and a flatpak build, although the latter hasn’t been updated yet.
This is not the only useful project by David García for musicians. Overwitch provides a JACK client for Overbridge 2 devices like Analog Four MKII, Digitakt, Digitone, or Syntakt.
Overwitch 1.1 was released along with Elektroid 3.0 with the following changes:
Support for Analog Heat +FX
Improved support for PipeWire
Latency reporting to JACK
Together, Elektroid and Overwitch cover a lot of ground for Elektron users. Probably not a drop-in replacement for their proprietary counterparts, but getting there at an impressive pace.
The developer also worked on a Linux kernel module for the E-Mu EIII and EIV sampler file systems and a CLI application to manage E-Mu EIII sampler bank files. I’d expect that to make its way to Elektroid at some point.
Libre Arts is a reader-supported publication. If you appreciate the work I do, donations are once again possible. You can subscribe on Patreon or make a one-time donation with BuyMeACoffee (see here for more info).
I recently worked on some hashtable lookup code that could benefit from
SIMD optimizations and microbenchmarking of modulus and hash functions
to improve the code quality. However, modern CPUs are complex and have
various components that cause fluctuations during benchmarks, such as core
design…
Ardour 8.2 is now available. Nothing incredibly dramatic for this release, but it completes our support for all current Novation LaunchPad devices (as well as the new SSL UF8 surface) and includes the usual collection of bug fixes, small new features and quality of life improvements.