planet.linuxaudio.org

The simple, immediate UI of Cluster, the fourth plug-in in Sinevibes' Dynamic Collection, belies a deep engine. Yes, this is a multi-filter with a sequencer, and yes, with the same ability to sketch in ideas quickly or roll the dice. But you can push the filters inside to open up worlds of sounds.

The post Cluster v3, Sinevibes’ multi-filter sequencer, goes deep appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

LV2 plugins (and other data, like presets) are discovered by parsing Turtle files installed in various bundle directories. If the host only needs to know which things are installed, then only manifest.ttl files need to be loaded. That takes only a fraction of a second (60 ms on this machine, which has 897 plugins installed), but if the host needs more information (like the plugin's label or what ports it has), then the data files need to be loaded as well, which can take several seconds. The parser (from serd) is very fast, so the overwhelming majority of this time is spent inserting data into a model.

I was recently doing some work on lilv related to discovery, and got sidetracked into investigating how much of this overhead could be eliminated. Quite a bit, as it turns out, but before explaining how, I'll give a brief summary of the relevant fundamentals so people who don't spend their days in the triple mines can understand what I'm talking about.

LV2 data is written in the Turtle syntax, which can have a lot of structure, but is ultimately just a shorthand for data that is simply a “flat” series of triples. For example, the abbreviated Turtle

<http://example.org/amp>
    a lv2:Plugin ;
    doap:name "Amplifier" .

represents the two triples

<http://example.org/amp> rdf:type  lv2:Plugin .
<http://example.org/amp> doap:name "Amplifier" .

which describe a plugin with the name “Amplifier”.

Two implications of this format are important to understand here:

• All data is a set of triples which can be stored in some lexicographical order to be quickly searchable (for example, a set ordered subject-first can be used to quickly find triples that start with a given subject).

• All data can be streamed via a simple “flat” interface (for example a function with three parameters), and is trivial to inspect and/or filter on the fly (much like line-based text in POSIX pipelines).

The data may not be stored as a “literal” ordered set of triples (they're actually quads in memory for one thing), but this simplified way of thinking about it is good enough for this explanation.

Which order is best depends on the query. For example (borrowing a bit of syntax from SPARQL where ?name represents a query variable), if the host asks something like “what's the name of this plugin” or

<http://example.org/amp> doap:name ?name .

then it needs to find triples that start with the given subject and predicate (<http://example.org/amp> and doap:name) to see what object (?name) they have. So, a subject-predicate-object or “SPO” index will work well. If, however, the host asks something like “which things are plugins” or

?plugin rdf:type lv2:Plugin .

then an SPO index doesn't help because there's no known subject to search for. Most queries are like this, with either a subject or object wildcard (querying relatively “fixed” predicates is rare), so lilv has always had both an SPO and OPS index to support them.

This is convenient, but twice the indexing means roughly twice the overhead. The SPO index is the natural order used in the syntax, and supports most code (which mainly looks up properties of known things), but the OPS index isn't used so much. Can it be removed entirely to speed things up? It is used for many important things, but conveniently, there's only a few fixed cases of those (like finding plugins as above). So, we can take advantage of the streaming nature of the data to record this information while it's being read, instead of inserting it into an index only to query it out later.

To do this in the implementation, I introduced the concept of a “skimmer”. A skimmer inserts triples into a model as usual, but first "skims" them and records items of interest for later use. For example, a skimmer checks whether a triple has rdf:type lv2:Plugin, and if so, records the subject in a result set that stores only plugin URIs. Some cases are a bit trickier, and actually pulling this off cleanly took quite an overhaul, but details aside, it turns out that this approach can be used to eliminate the OPS index entirely without losing any functionality.

How much of an improvement does this make? On this machine, using lv2ls -n as a crude benchmark, the time goes from 3.11 to 1.72 seconds, or about a 45% improvement. The memory consumption goes down a bit as well, from (even more crudely) a max-RSS of about 138 to 112 MiB, or about a 19% improvement (everything here is an average of three runs). The improvement will vary dramatically based on what's installed, for example in some earlier tests with a different configuration I saw drops from around 7 to 4 seconds, but in general, not bad!

Are there any downsides to this? Yes, primarily two:

1. As with any significant change, there is the possibility of regression. Discovery is a little more restricted than before, so although I've done my best to test things, there is a possibility of things not being discovered anymore. Usually the fix for this is adding information to the manifest that should have been there anyway.

2. Though the implementation itself doesn't make queries that require the OPS index, hosts themselves can since lilv provides generic query functions. To support this, there's a new boolean option, LILV_OPTION_OBJECT_INDEX, which can be used to enable or disable the OPS index. Since most hosts don't need it, I decided to disable this by default. That will be a regression for hosts that do, however, who need to explicitly opt in to the old behaviour by enabling this option. A warning is printed if a query will be slow because of the missing index, so it should at least be obvious if this happens.

These changes are now in the main branch in git, which will be released soon, probably as version 0.26.0.

Week highlights: new releases of Krita, RapidRAW, and Gradia; MIDI strumming in Ardour.

Krita 5.2.13

The Krita team released a bugfix update. Some of the notable fixes are targeted at users of Android and devices with touch input:

• Background saving has been revamped
• Devices running Android v15 with a lot of memory are now supported.
• The Transform tool now works with touch input.

See here for a more complete list of changes.

RapidRAW 1.4.x

New RapidRAW releases now take longer, but the pace is still impressive. This version features several notable enhancements. I’ll take a deeper dive in a separate post, so here is the list of changes:

• Auto-culling to help you detect similar photos and discard blurry ones (in the screenshot below).
• Collage maker that distributes a selection of photos over a configurable grid.
• New color calibration panel hidden by default, for tweaking hue and saturation of primary RGB channels.
• Preset importer (says “other common photo editors”, but I don’t see any in the list, just the ones by RapidRAW).
• New section in Settings to select which functionality to show in the UI (this is where you enable the color calibration panel).
• Sorting by Exif data: a small selection of Exif fields is available (Date taken, ISO, Focus length, etc.).
• Major improvement ot local contrast tools.

As usual, downloads and the full list of changes are on GitHub.

Gradia 1.11

Alexander Vanhee released an update to his screenshot annotation tool that is growing into something larger, it seems.

Release highlights:

• At 100% zoom, scrolling the mouse wheel now changes the tool size.
• Highlighter colors are now more transparent.
• Images on the home page now have drop shadows.
• Additional resizing options for tools like Arrow and Rectangle.
• Color and width can now be changed for annotations you already added.
• Image background got some new presets.
• Angle selector on the gradient background tab has been improved.
• Tesseract-based OCR is now available.

I’d love to include a screenshot of the OCR feature and some of the other new features. Alas, the Flatpak build hasn’t been updated yet, and my custom build is faulty and doesn’t really work. Sorry about that!

Ardour

There’s a lot of under-the-hood work happening, but the team recently merged a patch that adds a simplistic MIDI note strumming feature. It’s nowhere as sophisticated as the MIDI Strum filter by Robin Gareus, but it can be enhanced in the future.

Artworks

Coral Ship Wreck by Jan Rozanski, made with Photoshop, 3DCoat, and Blender:

The Gladiators by Ken Li, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Spirit Hollow by Ignacio Bruno, made with GIMP:

When you think of a Bluetooth speaker, you’re probably picturing a roughly lunchbox-sized device that pumps out some decent volume for annoying fellow beachgoers, hikers, or public transport users. [Matt Frequencies] has developed something in an altogether different form factor—tiny Bluetooth speakers you can dangle from your earlobes! They’re called Earrays, and they’re awesome.

The build started with [Matt] harvesting circuit boards from a pair of off-the-shelf Bluetooth earbuds. These are tiny, and perfect for picking up a digital audio stream from a smartphone or other device, but they don’t have the grunt to drive powerful speakers. Thus, [Matt] hooked them up to a small Adafruit PAM8302A amplifier board, enabling them to drive some larger speaker drivers that you can actually hear from a distance. These were then installed in little 3D printed housings that are like a tiny version of the speaker arrays you might see hanging from the rigging at a major dance festival. Throw on a little earring hook, and you’ve got a pair of wearable Bluetooth speakers that are both functional, fashionable, and very audible!

[Matt] has continued to develop the project, even designing a matching pendant and a charging base to make them practical to use beyond a proof-of concept. Despite the weight of the included electronics, they’re perfectly wearable, as demonstrated by [DJ Kaizo Trap] modelling the hardware in the images seen here.

We’ve seen plenty of great LED earrings over the years, but very few jewelry projects in the audio space thus far. Perhaps that will change in future—if you pursue such goals, let us know!

plugdata, the visual programming environment for sound and media based on Pure Data (Pd), is becoming its own scene. It's a great place to start patching your own sonic experiments, and if you haven't already done that, you should. But it's also becoming a treasure trove of free and paid tools and toys for musicians even if you never touch the wires inside. v.0.9.2 makes that better for developers and users alike. And did I mention it's free, on Mac, Windows, Linux, and iOS/iPad?

The post plugdata 0.9.2 is huge update for this free sound exploration powerhouse appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

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."

Week highlights: GIMP is getting an SVG exporter; Ton Roosendaal is stepping down as executive director of Blender Foundation; Kdenlive is planning exciting new features, FreeCAD is launching a bughunt for v1.1.

GIMP

CmykStudent started working on an SVG exporter plugin. Most of the work has been done: the plugin can export both vector, text, and bitmap layers, as well as layer groups. The merge request currently lists exporting options in the user interface and code cleanup as the missing bits. However, the exporting dialog already allows you to choose how you want to deal with bitmap layers.

Blender

The major news is that Ton is stepping down as the executive director of Blender Foundation and moving into a newly introduced advisory board.

Just as in any good organization, the transition was planned well in advance and began years prior, in 2019.

Ton was also recently interviewed by folks from the Bad Decisions Studio, check it out: https://youtu.be/hx3lnDHeqKs

On the same day, the Blender Foundation released its annual 2024 report. Financially, the foundation appears to be in a stronger position than the year before that, and judging by recent sponsorship announcements, the 2025 fiscal year will be even better.

It could be fun to slice the data over the years, but to give you an idea, the budget has grown from €958K in 2019 (the first time they published a report) to €3.1mln in 2024. That makes a solid average increase of ~26.5% year over year.

FreeCAD

The team has announced that the feature freeze for v1.1 is now on. Small UI changes are still allowed until October, but it’s basically bugfix time. As of today, there are 44 release blockers in the issue tracker.

The previous time, it took the team nearly 5 months to clean up this dreadful queue, as new blockers kept pouring in. If that’s how things will go this time, the final release is likely to happen in early 2026.

Kdenlive

The team did a development sprint in Berlin at the aKademy conference in early September and recently posted a recap and future plans. Highlights:

• Jean-Baptiste Mardelle got an NLnet grant to implement dopesheet for users who do a lot of animation.
• Ongoing and upcoming menu and terminology changes (Project Bin -> Media, Render -> export, etc.).
• Various monitor changes.
• Upcoming switch to KDDockWidgets for docking panels in the program.
• Animations for the titler (technical discussions still ongoing).

See here for details.

Artworks

Sword of the Sea - Crystal Zone by Eytan Zana, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Strong Pamukkale vibes there!

Desert Ruins Palmyra by Ahmad Al-Aliyan, made with Maya, Blender, Zbrush, and more. It’s a large project with 20 renders, including ones that apparently depict a relief of Queen Zenobia.

[ASTRAVALE] Center of Resonant Astrum by Kan Rongrueangkul, made with Blender and Photoshop:

The Monkey King by Aashutosh Patel, made with Blender:

This post is to celebrate a few things despite the events that are clouding our feelings. 😠

Another thing to not celebrate is the slaughtering by Sourceforge of my developer web site, which they are calling "sunsetting", by October. I've already migrated it. 

On the other, brighter hand, I'm celebrating this week La Mercè, which is the local festivity of Barcelona.

You may download it from GitHub (source code and APK), or you may get it from the IzzyOnDroid repository which is available in the F-Droid app, but also on Neo-Store, Droid-ify,  and the unofficial IzzyOnDroid app.

If you already have the F-Droid app, you only need to add the IzzyOnDroid repository in Settings>Repositories and install it today, or you may prefer to use the official F-Droid repo.

I would like to add to the celebration a video live streaming concerto, but I am too lazy and odd playing for that. Better use this wonderful rendering of the Tchaikovsky Violin concerto by TwoSet Violin, with Brett Yang playing the soloist and Eddy Chen the rest of the orchestra. Enjoy!

The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the beta release of Ubuntu Studio 25.10, codenamed “Questing Quokka”.

While this beta is reasonably free of any showstopper installer bugs, you will find some bugs within. This image is, however, mostly representative of what you will find when Ubuntu Studio 25.10 is released on October 9, 2025.

We encourage everyone to try this image and report bugs to improve our final release. Pay specific attention to apps that might need to be forced to run inside Xwayland so we can patch their launchers.

Special Notes

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

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

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

New Features This Release

This release is more evolutionary rather than revolutionary. While we work hard to bring new features, this one was not one where we had anything major to report. Here are a few highlights:

• Plasma 6.4 is now the default desktop environment, an upgrade from Plasma 6.1.
• PipeWire continues to improve with every release.. Version 1.4.7
• We now include an optional “macOS-like” layout for our users migrating from macOS, which features a dock at the bottom and a global menu. Do note that the global menu doesn’t work with all applications.
• More fine-tuning of options available in Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuraiton
• Many options in Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuration are now at the user level as opposed to the system level.
• JackTrip has been added for those needing a GUI way to network audio between computers or collaborate remotely. version 2.7.1

Major Package Upgrades

• Qtractor version 1.5.8
• Audacity version 3.7.5
• digiKam version 8.7.0
• Kdenlive version 25.08.1
• Krita version 5.2.11
• GIMP version 3.0.4

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

Known Issues

• You will be prompted, upon first login of any new user, to reboot to apply proper audio configurations for audio production. This is intentional and is a workaround for the installer’s inability to configure the first user as part of the “audio” group or for new users to be added to the audio group automatically.
  
• Official Ubuntu Studio release notes can be found at https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-studio-25-10-release-notes/

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

Additionally, the main Ubuntu release notes contain more generic issues: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/questing-quokka-release-notes/

How You Can Help

Please test using the test cases on https://iso.qa.ubuntu.com. All you need is a Launchpad account to get started.

Additionally, we need financial contributions. Our project lead, Erich Eickmeyer, is working long hours on this project and trying to generate a part-time income. Go here to see how you can contribute financially (options are also here in the sidebar).

Frequently Asked Questions

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

Thunderbird is also a snap in order for the maintainers to get security patches delivered faster. This is done by the Thunderbird team in cooperation with Canonical.

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

Also, to keep theming consistent, all included themes are snapped in addition to the included .deb versions so that snaps stay consistent with out themes.

We are working with Canonical to make sure that the quality of snaps goes up with each release, so we please ask that you give snaps a chance instead of writing them off completely.

Q: If I install this Beta release, will I have to reinstall when the final release comes out?
A: No. If you keep it updated, your installation will automatically become the final release.

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

Q: What if I don’t want all these packages installed on my machine?
A: We now include a minimal install option. Install using the minimal install option, then use Ubuntu Studio Installer to install what you need for your very own content creation studio.

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:

• analytics GstTensorMeta handling changes (see release notes)
• closed caption combiner and transcriberbin stability fixes
• decklinkvideosrc: fix unrecoverable state after failing to start streaming because device is busy
• decodebin3 tag handling improvements
• fallbacksrc: Fix sources only being restarted once, as well as some deadlocks and race conditions on shutdown
• gtk4paintablesink: Try importing dmabufs withouth DMA_DRM caps
• hlsdemux2: Fix parsing of byterange and init map directives
• rtpmp4gdepay2: allow only constantduration with neither constantsize nor sizelength set
• spotifysrc: update to librespot 0.7 to make work after recent Spotify changes
• threadshare: new blocking adapter element for use in front of block elements such as sinks that sync to the clock
• threadshare: various other threadshare element fixes and improvements
• v4l2: Add support for WVC1 and WMV3
• videorate: possible performance improvements when operating in drop-only mode
• GstBaseParse fixes
• Vulkan video decoder fixes
• Fix gst-device-monitor-1.0 tool device-path regression on Windows
• Python bindings: Handle buffer PTS, DTS, duration, offset, and offset-end as unsigned long long (regression fix)
• Cerbero: Reduce recipe parallelism in various cases and dump cerbero and recipe versions into datadir during packaging
• Various bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

See the GStreamer 1.26.6 release notes for more details.

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

Over at Quanta Magazine [Shalma Wegsman] asks What Is the Fourier Transform?

[Shalma] begins by telling you a little about Joseph Fourier, the French mathematician with an interest in heat propagation who founded the field of harmonic analysis in the early 1800s.

Fourier’s basic insight was that you can represent everything as a sum of very basic oscillations, where the basic oscillations are sine or cosine functions with certain parameters. [Shalma] explains that the biology of our ear can do a similar thing by picking the various notes out from a tune which is heard, but mathematicians and programmers work without the benefit of evolved resonant hairs and bone, they work with math and code.

[Shalma] explains how frequency components can be discovered by trial and error, multiplying candidate frequencies with the original function to see if there are large peaks, indicating the frequency is a component, or if the variations average to zero, indicating the frequency is not a component. [Shalma] tells how even square waves can be modeled with an infinite set of frequencies known as the Fourier series.

Taking a look at higher-dimensional problems [Shalma] mentions how Fourier transforms can be used for graphical compression by dropping the high frequency detail which our eyes can barely perceive anyway. [Shalma] gives us a fascinating look at the 64 graphical building blocks which can be combined to create any possible 8×8 image.

[Shalma] then mentions James Cooley and John Tukey and the development of the Fast Fourier Transform in the 1960s. This mathematical tool has been employed to study the tides, to detect gravitational waves, to develop radar and magnetic resonance imaging, and to support signal processing and data compression. Even quantum mechanics finds use for harmonic analysis, and [Shalma] explains how it relates to the uncertainty principle. The Fourier transform has spread through pure mathematics and into number theory, too.

[Shalma] closes with a quote from Charles Fefferman: “If people didn’t know about the Fourier transform, I don’t know what percent of math would then disappear, but it would be a big percent.”

If you’re interested in the Fourier transform and want to dive deeper we would encourage you to read The Fastest Fourier Transform In The West and Even Faster Fourier Transforms On The Raspbery Pi Zero.

Header image: Joseph Fourier, Attributed to Pierre-Claude Gautherot, Public domain.

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

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

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

Highlighted changes:

• Add more 10bit RGB formats in GStreamer Video, OpenGL and Wayland, as well as in deinterlace and gdkpixbufoverlay
• analytics: new analytics combiner and splitter elements plus batch meta to batch buffers from one or more streams
• analyticsoverlay: Add expire-overlay property
• onnx: Add Verisilicon provider support
• awstranscriber2: add property for setting show_speaker_labels
• awstranslate: expose property for turning brevity on
• speechmatics: expose mask-profanities property
• textaccumulate: new element for speech synthesis or translation preprocessing
• tttocea608: expose speaker-prefix property
• cea708mux: expose "discarded-services" property on sink pads
• cuda crop meta support
• hlssink3, hlscmafsink: Support the use of a single media file
• s302mparse: Add new S302M audio parser
• webrtc: add WHEP client signaller; sdp and stats-related improvements
• threadshare: many improvements to the various elements, plus examples and a new benchmark program; relicense to MPL-2.0
• gtk4paintablesink: Add YCbCr memory texture formats and improve color-state fallbacks
• OpenGL: Add support for the NV24 pixel format; support changing caps and `get_gl_context()` in glbasesrc
• rtspsrc: Send RTSP keepalives also in TCP/interleaved modes
• nvencoder: interlaced video handling improvements
• vaav1enc: Enable intrablock copy and palette mode
• videopool: support parsing dma_drm caps
• Vulkan VP9 video decode support and many other video encode and decode improvements
• waylandsink: Parse and set the HDR10 metadata and other color management improvements
• LCEVC: Add autoplugging decoding support for LCEVC H265 and H266 video streams and LCEVC H.265 encoder
• GstMiniObject: Add missing `take()` and `steal()` functions and convert `is_writable()` and `make_writable()` macros to inline functions
• alsa: Improve PCM sink enumeration
• d3d12: various d3d12swapchainsink enhancements and bug fixes; fisheye image dewarping support
• wasapi2: add support for dynamic device switching, exclusive mode and format negotiation; device provider and latency enhancements
• windows: Disable all audio device providers except wasapi2
• dots-viewer: Improve dot file generation and interactivity
• gst-editing-services: Make framepositioner zorder controllable and expose it
• Various introspection fixes and bindings updates
• Cerbero: Update to Android API level 24; add config for number of cargo jobs; ship unixfd plugin
• Cerbero: Implement library melding for smaller binary sizes of Rust plugins

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

Release tarballs can be downloaded directly here:

• gstreamer-1.27.2.tar.xz
• gst-plugins-base-1.27.2.tar.xz
• gst-plugins-good-1.27.2.tar.xz
• gst-plugins-ugly-1.27.2.tar.xz
• gst-plugins-bad-1.27.2.tar.xz
• gst-libav-1.27.2.tar.xz
• gst-rtsp-server-1.27.2.tar.xz
• gst-python-1.27.2.tar.xz
• gst-editing-services-1.27.2.tar.xz
• gst-devtools-1.27.2.tar.xz,
• gstreamer-docs-1.27.2.tar.xz

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

The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu Studio 24.04.3 LTS. This is a minor release which wraps-up the security and bug fixes into one .iso image, available for download now.

The biggest change is the lowlatency kernel has been officially retired, replaced by the generic Ubuntu kernel. Those that have been using Ubuntu Studio 24.04 and upgraded may have already noticed this change.

With that said, much like Ubuntu Studio 24.10 and higher, the generic kernel includes kernel parameters added upon boot that allow the kernel to act in a lowlatency mode, so you now can enjoy the benefits of the lowlatency kernel while using the generic kernel.

We realize this may come as a shock, but when 24.04 was released, we knew this day would eventually come. However, there is no difference between the lowlatency kernel and the generic kernel with these boot parameters. They are:

• preempt=full: Makes the kernel fully preemptible
• rcu_nocbs=all Offloads Read-Copy Update (RCU) callbacks from all CPUs dedicated to kernel threads, improves real-time performance
• threadirqs Forces interrupt handlers to run in a threaded context, reducing buffer xruns

These kernel parameters can be found in the files in /etc/defaults/grub.d

Please give financially to Ubuntu Studio!

Giving is down. We understand that some people may no longer be able to give financially to this project, and that’s OK. However, if you have never given to Ubuntu Studio for the hard work and dedication we put into this project, please consider a monetary contribution.

Additionally, we would love to see more monthly contributions to this project. You can do so via PayPal, Liberapay, or Patreon. We would love to see more contributions!

So don’t wait, and don’t wait for someone else to do it! Thank you in advance!

Donate using PayPal Donations are Monthly or One-Time

Donate using Liberapay Donations are Weekly, Monthly, or Annually

Donate using Patreon Become a Patron!Donations are Monthly

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

New releases

• NEW! J2SC project first release which supersedes Cadence
• Carla updated to 2.5.10
• WineASIO updated to 1.3.0

Repository updates

• NEW! added j2sc 0.0.1
• carla updated to 2.5.10
• wineasio updated to 1.3.0

Final notes

Some applications in the KXStudio Website repositories' pages have been hidden and some plugins have been marked as "abandoned".
Everything is still available to install through "apt-get" though.

That is all for now, see you next month!

The problem

London is very well served for independent cinemas, often showing classics, obscura and independent films that mainstream cinemas don’t have.

But, it’s not trivial to find or keep track of the films you’re interested in. There’s no way to search for a film across all the cinemas, or even to see what’s on today, without painstakingly checking all the individual cinema sites. It’s very easy to miss a rare theatrical showing of a beloved film.

filmhose.uk

So, I made filmhose.uk.

FilmHose lets you browse each day’s listings for the next couple of months. You can choose between the full listings or the “distilled” listings, which have less noise from the big current releases that you can see “anywhere”. You can also select only the cinemas you’re interested in, if you don’t think you’ll ever make it to Romford or whatever (although the Lumiere Romford is cool, you should make the effort). You can also search by title if you want to know where and when a specific film will be showing.

A few wrinkles

A more commercially focused post would probably skip this section, but I’m not that so I’ll share some caveats:

• Some cinemas’ websites are not easy to scrape. In fact broadly speaking I’d say, the cooler the cinema, the more likely it is they do their website in some ad-hoc way that’s difficult to scrape automatically. At the moment I don’t have these, which is a pity:
  • The Nickel
  • David Lean Cinema
  • Cinema Museum, Kennington
  • Theatreship, Canary Wharf
  • Sands Films

  At some point maybe I’ll just ask them if I can have their listings, like it’s the twentieth century or something. Or some of them have few enough that I could enter them manually. But for now I’m just doing the lazy thing and omitting them.

• There’s a quite narrow focus on independent / arts cinemas. I’m not necessarily against adding the big chains (Odeon, Vue etc), but for nerds like me the indies’ listings will be more interesting. Maybe one day.
• I’m relying on the scraped titles, which aren’t necessarily very consistent. Eg. some cinemas will have “Lilo and Stitch”, others will have “Lilo & Stitch”. There’s a lot of titles like “Amadeus [40th Anniversary]”. I’ve tried to normalize these a bit for sorting and matching purposes, but it’s far from perfect. This means 1) the stats above are a bit unreliable, because they’re based on the scraped titles 2) It’s not easy to do things like automatically get interesting data like directors, release years etc. Although I might still see if I can figure out a way that mostly works well enough.
• I’m automatically generating the film thumbnails from images found on the cinemas’ websites. Because these could have any dimensions, I’m cropping them to be square. I’m trying to be slightly clever when doing the cropping, but sometimes it makes suboptimal choices. I think it’s mostly good enough. Originally I was quite hesitant to have the thumbnails at all, but people told me the site looked too boring.

But overall

So far it seems to be working out pretty well. I’m able to get data for 27 cinemas, currently covering about 700 separate films, 2500 showtimes, with an average of 36 film options and 67 showtimes per day. Film lovers in London are pretty blessed, especially when you consider that’s not including the big chains.

The site loads very quickly and has very little extraneous nonsense, for me it’s easily the best way to see what’s on that’s interesting. I hope other people will find that too.

Where do I sign up?

You can’t, it’s a free website with no login. Just go to filmhose.uk.

But if you really want to sign up for something you can follow on X / Twitter or Bluesky.

Hello all, it has been a while since the last project update/news.
Life has been very chaotic and I was not able to pay too much attention to "optional" projects, other things needed priority.
Now with work and housing situation sorted and also some holidays, it is the right time to give some general project update.
That said, I always have trouble writing these kind of updates, taking me quite some time to go through each individual thing that happened, giving it an explanation/reason, plans for future, etc.
So starting this month, KXStudio project updates will be more formal and generic so I can mostly copy & paste between each one, keeping the same format but just changing the content.

New releases

• NEW! lv2-gtk-ui-bridge project first release - LV2 Gtk2/3 UIs as LV2 X11 UIs
• NEW! podcast-plugins project first release - speech enhancement audio plugins for podcasters
• Cardinal updated to 25.06
• master_me updated to 1.3.0

Repository updates

• NEW! added lv2-gtk-ui-bridge 0.1
• NEW! added odin2 2.4.1
• NEW! added podcast-plugins 1.0.0
• NEW! added tunefish4 4.3.0
• NEW! added vitling-crypt 0.3.0
• cardinal updated to 25.06
• jalv updated to 1.6.8
• master-me updated to 1.3.0
• zam-plugins updated to 4.4

Final notes

Some applications in the KXStudio repositories do not run on new systems and have also been abandoned by their official upstream authors, I will soon remove some of them.

That is all for now, see you next month!