planet.linuxaudio.org

November 05, 2024

Linux Archives - CDM Create Digital Music

Bastl Instruments Crust drum voice is free in VCV Rack, too

The free modules for VCV Rack are coming fast and furious. The latest is Bastl's awesomely versatile Crust drum voice. Just in case you need something to, you know, distract yourself today/tonight/the rest of this week.

The post Bastl Instruments Crust drum voice is free in VCV Rack, too appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

by Peter Kirn at November 05, 2024 02:27 PM

November 04, 2024

Testbit

JJ-FZF - a TUI for Jujutsu

JJ-FZF is a TUI (Terminal-based User Interface) for Jujutsu, built on top of fzf. It centers around the jj log view, providing key bindings for common operations on JJ/Git repositories. About six months ago, I revisited JJ, drawn in by its promise of Automatic rebase and conflict resolution. I have…

November 04, 2024 02:32 AM

November 03, 2024

Home on Libre Arts

Weekly recap — 3 November 2024

Week highlights: Ondsel is shutting down; new releases of Audacity, Shotcut, fudge, qpwgraph, Qtractor; videos from KiCon Europe 2024; FreeCAD news.

fudge 0.2

Even though the newer official Fujifilm app is surprisingly usable (I can’t say that about the original one), there’s probably a place for an unofficial open-source one, too. This is what fudge is: an early Android application for remote capturing with your Fujifilm cameras. Here is a demo of an earlier version:

Newly released version 0.2 (and its bugfix update) comes with new features and QoL improvements, such as a gallery for downloaded images, mass file importing, better WiFi connectivity, and more. See here for details.

The latest APK is here, but builds are also available on Google Play and F-Droid.

Ondsel is shutting down

Ondsel wasn’t the first company to try building around FreeCAD commercially. But it was one that got a lot of attention, especially after contributing to the first stage of porting RealThunder’s toponaming fixes and then implementing a brand new assembly workbench. And then fixing a bunch of UX/UI issues in Sketcher and TechDraw. And implementing a brand new custom properties system. And being positively contrarian enough to trigger some changes in how FreeCAD operates.

Just like for most other startups out there, the major challenge was finding a product-market fit. This was one of those cases where you talk to a hundred potential customers, and every one of them tells you something that doesn’t match what the other 99 people say. Meanwhile, you are trying to make FreeCAD marketable by adding major missing features and fixing its UX/UI. It was all too much to handle; the company was about to run out of money. So, all operations are now winding down. There will be no Ondsel ES 2024.3, new registrations have already been locked, and the Lens server will eventually stop serving content.

Most of the changes to the FreeCAD code base have already been merged, other are mostly waiting for code review. One last bit is the Reloadable Objects script served by the Lens addon. The team will submit it in a pull request later on.

I got involved with Ondsel around March 2023 to help them with blog content and ended up doing a little more than that. This was a great experience for me, full of challenges. The team is amazing, and I think most of them will stick around FreeCAD. I know I will.

The response I’ve seen so far is amazing. People mostly feel sorry this had to end and express their gratitude to developers. They don’t mention Open Core Ventures much, though, but that’s where the money was coming from! :)

What you as users can do to help FreeCAD is donate to the FreeCAD Project Association.

FreeCAD update

Once again, the list of v1.0 release blockers is down to just three. At any point, the team can decide they are fine with how things are and either cut another release candidate or do the final release.

Meanwhile, pull requests with new features and improvements for the future v1.1 release keep piling up; there are currently 241 of those. If FreeCAD 1.0 was released today and the next Monday merge meeting was all devoted to code review for v1.1, it would take at least 5 extended merge meetings to go through that list. So don’t feel too bad about the Ondsel thing: there’s a lot of development going on.

And a few fun things happening around FreeCAD.

Dave Carter released a major update of his Rocket workbench with two significant changes: support for the new materials system he developed for FreeCAD 1.0 and a directed workflow to set up computational fluid dynamics studies (requires the CfdOF workbench to be installed and configured).

Andrew Shkolik announced FoamCut, a new workbench he developed. It does exactly what it says on the box: creates G-Code for 4- and 5-axis CNC foam cutting machines.

KiCon Europe 2024

Videos from the European KiCad conference are now up on YouTube, here is the playlist, and here is the schedule with slides. The event took place in September in Bochum, Germany.

Here is a talk by Lukas Hartmann about how KiCad enables the open hardware future.

Shotcut 24.10

Dan Dennedy released a new version of Shotcut featuring automatic speech-to-text translation using whisper.cpp. This feature creates a new subtitle track and fills it with recognized subtitles. The program ships with a fairly simple language model, you can download a better one.

The rest of the changes are minor improvements and bug fixes. You will probably only notice the new File > Show Project in Folder menu command. See here for the full list of changes.

Audacity 3.7

This is a maintenance release that, however, ships with a worthwhile change: you can now any changes in the effects stack for a track, such as adding, removing, replacing, and reordering effects. The team also improved the startup speed for systems with many audio devices. Here is the full list of changes.

There will likely be more maintenance releases like that because Audacity 4.0 is far from completion. That’s unsurprising: one doesn’t simply port a huge codebase from one toolkit to another while revamping the UX/UI.

qpwgraph 0.7.9

This program helps manage connections between audio and MIDI ports of hardware and applications when PipeWire is your audio system on Linux. I recently mentioned qpwgraph in a tutorial on recording audio from your browser.

A major new feature in this release is a navigation area called Thumbview. When you zoom into connections, you often stop seeing the entire picture. This is where Thumbview comes in handy: point your mouse where the view should center and click. Dragging the highlighted zone around like in many other applications doesn’t work, at least for now.

qpwgraph 0.7.9 with thumbview

Rui also released an update of Qtractor: minor UI and feature improvements, worth upgrading.

Artworks of the week

“The Tavern” by ZiYuan Wang, made with Blender and Photoshop:

The Tavern by ZiYuan Wang

“The Cave of Shattered Reflection” by Titas Ženevičius (One Pixel Brush), made with Blender and Photoshop:

The Cave of Shattered Reflection by Titas Ženevičius

“Ocean” by Gurkirat Singh, made with Blender and Krita:

Ocean by Gurkirat Singh


Libre Arts is a reader-supported publication. If you appreciate the work I do, you can subscribe on Patreon to get early access to my posts. You can do the same on BuyMeACoffee. See here for more info.

Support Libre Arts at Patreon

November 03, 2024 07:51 AM

November 02, 2024

Home on Libre Arts

About

Libre Arts was previously known under the name Libre Graphics World. It’s an online magazine for creative professionals using free applications for digital painting, graphic and web design, desktop publishing, photography, and CAD. The project focuses on news, tutorials and articles to provide you with the most up to date information about evolution of these applications and best practices.

Free software is a rapidly evolving niche, we feel that this fact should be better represented on the web which is exactly what we do. In many ways foundation of this project was triggered by Ginger Coons’s talk “Ownership and Standards: Why Designers are Slow to Adopt Open Source” at Libre Graphics Meeting 2009.

We sometimes (seldom, really) cover selected proprietary software that works on Linux, if it’s interesting enough, has no direct free software alternative, and/or its developers contribute to free/libre software. A perfect example would be Harrison Consoles’ Mixbus which is a fork of Ardour digital adio workstation, with developers contributing to Ardour in both code and money.

Contacts

We are interested to hear from you what topics you would us to cover next, what new interesting applications we missed, what excellent work was done using free software.

There are different ways to get in touch with us. First of all, you can email. We also actively maintain a Twitter account where we post interesting things related to free software that don’t qualify for a full-fledged article.

The team

The project was founded and is currently managed by Alexandre Prokoudine who is affiliated with several free/libre projects such as Ardour and FreeCAD.

The new website was made possible thanks to the PIXLS.US team:

Former contributors:

  • Maxim Barabash, web programming. Contributor to sK1, PrintDesign, UniConvertor. Twitter: @Maxim_Barabash.
  • Igor Novikov, web programming. Lead developer of sK1 vector graphics editor.
  • Vera Lobacheva, web programming. Contributor to Open Clip Art Library. Twitter: @summerstyle.

Unless explicitly stated otherwise, all the content is available under CC BY SA 3.0 Unported license. Feel free to translate and publish it, but please name the original author and link back to the original.

November 02, 2024 06:53 AM

November 01, 2024

rncbc.org

Qtractor 1.4.0 - A Halloween'24 Release

Hello again,

Qtractor 1.4.0 (halloween'24) is out!

Change-log:

  • Improved color contrast on track and clip title labels, when given track foreground and background colors are too similar in lightness.
  • Clip/Split now also applies to multiple selected clips, on any other track than current, if the split point (play-head) is found within.
  • Clip Merge/Export... audio clips now taking the internal audio resolution (ie. 64 frames/period), independent to former JACK/Pipewire buffer-size/period.
  • New Clip Mute state property introduced.
  • New MIDI clip tool option: Normalize / Compress.
  • Prepping up next development cycle (Qt >= 6.8)

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.

Cheers && Keep having (lotsa) fun!

Donate to rncbc.org using PayPal Donate to rncbc.org using Liberapay

by rncbc at November 01, 2024 12:00 PM

drobilla.net - LAD

Main Branches Renamed

As most git users are aware, the default branch name in git changed from master to main a while ago. Since I maintain projects created both before and after this change, some maintenance tasks have become more difficult to automate as a result (and I'm a sucker for consistency).

I put off dealing with this because I was planning to make master branches disappear at the same time APIs are broken, but that wasn't a good idea for several reasons beyond the scope of this post. So, I've changed all of my personal projects, and all projects maintained under the LV2 umbrella, to use main.

If you're tracking any of those repositories, maintain packaging infrastructure, or similar, please update your local trees and/or configuration accordingly. It's best to rename the local branch with git, since this preserves your local reftree and avoids accidental use of the old name:

git branch -m master main

by drobilla at November 01, 2024 03:23 AM

October 31, 2024

rncbc.org

Vee One Suite 1.1.3 - A Halloween'24 Release

Greetings (from the crypt),

The Vee One Suite, the so called gang-of-four old-school software instruments,

  • synthv1 as a polyphonic subtractive synthesizer;
  • samplv1 a polyphonic sampler synthesizer;
  • drumkv1 as yet another drum-kit sampler;
  • padthv1 a polyphonic additive synthesizer.

Are here released for the spooky Halloween'24 evening...

All creepy delivered in dual form:

  • a pure stand-alone JACK client with JACK-session, NSM (Non/New Session Management) and both JACK MIDI and ALSA MIDI input support;
  • a LV2 instrument plug-in.

Change-log:

  • Prepping up next development cycle (Qt >= 6.8)

The Vee One Suite are free, open-source Linux Audio software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 or later.

 

synthv1 - an old-school polyphonic synthesizer

synthv1 1.1.3 (halloween'24) is out!

synthv1 is an old-school all-digital 4-oscillator subtractive polyphonic synthesizer with stereo fx.

LV2 URI: http://synthv1.sourceforge.net/lv2

website:
https://synthv1.sourceforge.io
http://synthv1.sourceforge.net

project page:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/synthv1

downloads:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/synthv1/files

git repos:
https://git.code.sf.net/p/synthv1/code
https://github.com/rncbc/synthv1.git
https://gitlab.com/rncbc/synthv1.git
https://codeberg.org/rncbc/synthv1.git

 

samplv1 - an old-school polyphonic sampler

samplv1 1.1.3 (halloween'24) is out!

samplv1 is an old-school polyphonic sampler synthesizer with stereo fx.

LV2 URI: http://samplv1.sourceforge.net/lv2

website:
https://samplv1.sourceforge.io
http://samplv1.sourceforge.net

project page:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/samplv1

downloads:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/samplv1/files

git repos:
https://git.code.sf.net/p/samplv1/code
https://github.com/rncbc/samplv1.git
https://gitlab.com/rncbc/samplv1.git
https://codeberg.org/rncbc/samplv1.git

 

drumkv1 - an old-school drum-kit sampler

drumkv1 1.1.3 (halloween'24) is out!

drumkv1 is an old-school drum-kit sampler synthesizer with stereo fx.

LV2 URI: http://drumkv1.sourceforge.net/lv2

website:
https://drumkv1.sourceforge.io
http://drumkv1.sourceforge.net

project page:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/drumkv1

downloads:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/drumkv1/files

git repos:
https://git.code.sf.net/p/drumkv1/code
https://github.com/rncbc/drumkv1.git
https://gitlab.com/rncbc/drumkv1.git
https://codeberg.org/rncbc/drumkv1.git

 

padthv1 - an old-school polyphonic additive synthesizer

padthv1 1.1.3 (halloween'24) is out!

padthv1 is an old-school polyphonic additive synthesizer with stereo fx

padthv1 is based on the PADsynth algorithm by Paul Nasca, as a special variant of additive synthesis.

LV2 URI: http://padthv1.sourceforge.net/lv2

website:
https://padthv1.sourceforge.io
http://padthv1.sourceforge.net

project page:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/padthv1

downloads:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/padthv1/files

git repos:
https://git.code.sf.net/p/padthv1/code
https://github.com/rncbc/padthv1.git
https://gitlab.com/rncbc/padthv1.git
https://codeberg.org/rncbc/padthv1.git

 

Enjoy the treats!

Donate to rncbc.org using PayPal Donate to rncbc.org using Liberapay

by rncbc at October 31, 2024 08:00 PM

October 30, 2024

GStreamer News

GStreamer 1.24.9 stable bug fix release

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 a security fix and it should be safe to update from 1.24.x.

Highlighted bugfixes:

  • gst-rtsp-server security fix
  • GstAggregator start time selection and latency query fixes for force-live mode
  • audioconvert: fix dynamic handling of mix matrix, and accept custom upstream event for setting one
  • encodebin: fix parser selection for encoders that support multiple codecs
  • flvmux improvments for pipelines where timestamps don't start at 0
  • glcontext: egl: Unrestrict the support base DRM formats
  • kms: Add IMX-DCSS auto-detection in sink and fix stride with planar formats in allocator
  • macOS main application event loop fixes
  • mpegtsdemux: Handle PTS/DTS wraparound with ignore-pcr=true
  • playbin3, decodebin3, parsebin, urisourcebin: fix races, and improve stability and stream-collection handling
  • rtpmanager: fix early RTCP SR generation for sparse streams like metadata
  • qml6glsrc: Reduce capture delay
  • qtdemux: fix parsing of rotation matrix with 180 degree rotation
  • rtpav1depay: added wait-for-keyframe and request-keyframe properties
  • srt: make work with newer libsrt versions and don't re-connect on authentication failure
  • v4l2 fixes and improvement
  • webrtcsink, webrtcbin and whepsrc fixes
  • cerbero: fix Python 3.13 compatibility, g-i with newer setuptools, bootstrap on Arch Linux; iOS build fixes
  • Ship qroverlay plugin in binary packages
  • Various bug fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

See the GStreamer 1.24.9 release notes for more details.

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

October 30, 2024 11:30 PM

October 25, 2024

Linux Archives - CDM Create Digital Music

Synthesizers.com in VCV Rack gives you Moog-like 5U in software, for free

Imagine having access to a full original Moog modular system. Now imagine you could run the whole thing for free - and it won't take up a wall of your home. Synthesizers.com has brought its MU East Coast-inspired modular to VCV Rack as freeware. It's also a great place to begin with software modular synthesis.

The post Synthesizers.com in VCV Rack gives you Moog-like 5U in software, for free appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

by Peter Kirn at October 25, 2024 05:18 PM

October 17, 2024

Source builders: git/master is now an unstable pre-release branch

For those who build ardour from source, please read:

git/master is now considered an unstable pre-release branch. The “pianorule” branch has been merged, and will cause significant breakage for a while yet.

master has been tagged 9.0-pre0 which will (a) cause a major version switch (b) will generally display the pre-release warning dialog every time unless you grep the source code to find the name of the file to create to disable it.

If you need to build an earlier version of Ardour from a git repository, please use git checkout VERSION first to avoid building this unstable master branch.

We will be working over the next few months to get this into shape for a 9.0 release with several notable new features (region FX, clip recording and clip editing among them).

12 posts - 5 participants

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by Paul Davis at October 17, 2024 04:15 PM

Ardour 8.10 released

Ardour 8.10 is now available for Linux, Windows and macOS. As with the last several releases, 8.9 turned out to have at least a couple of new major issues that required a hot-fix. We believe that we have corrected issues with performance caused by scheduling of disk input/output threads (these problems tended to be system dependent, but were very real on systems where they occured). Importing SMF (MIDI) via drag-n-drop now uses the file name once again. Content-slipping a region correctly causes an update of the playback buffers so you can hear the result as expected.

In addition to those hot-fixes, 8.10 sees small updates to all our non-default color themes, a new MIDI binding map for the M-Audio Axiom 49 MkII and a new Lua script to duplicate regions on the grid.

This is intended to be the last release of the 8.x series. Our git repository is now at 9.0-pre0, and should no longer be considered stable or usable for production work now that it contains what was the “pianorule” branch. Over the next few months, we will be working hard to get this into shape for a 9.0 release with several notable new features.

Download as usual with the full release notes (for 8.7 - 8.10) at the normal place.

27 posts - 12 participants

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by Paul Davis at October 17, 2024 04:08 PM

October 10, 2024

News – Ubuntu Studio

Ubuntu Studio 24.10 Released

The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu Studio 24.10 code-named “Oracular Oriole”. This marks Ubuntu Studio’s 35th release. This release is a Regular release and as such, it is supported for 9 months, until July 2025.

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

You can download Ubuntu Studio 24.10 from our download page.

Special Notes

The Ubuntu Studio 24.10 disk image (ISO) exceeds 4 GB and cannot be downloaded to some file systems such as FAT32 and may not be readable when burned to a standard DVD. For this reason, we recommend downloading to a compatible file system. When creating a boot medium, we recommend creating a bootable USB stick with the ISO image or burning to a Dual-Layer DVD.

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

Images can be obtained from this link: https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/24.10/release/

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

Upgrades from 24.04 LTS should be enabled within a month after release, so we appreciate your patience.

New This Release

Minimal Installation

We have now implemented minimal installations in the system installer. This will let you install a minimal desktop to get going and then install what you need via Ubuntu Studio Installer. This will make a faster installation process and lets you customize what you need for your personal Studio.

Unfortunately, at least for the time being, we also had to get rid of the default shortcuts in the panel since it would cause an error when loading without the applications being installed. A solution for this is coming in 25.04.

Generic Kernel

The Generic Ubuntu Kernel is now fully capable of low-latency workloads. As such, with this release, we have switched from the LowLatency Kernel to the Generic Kernel with the boot options to enable the low-latency configuration enabled by default.

These options can be changed via Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuration and customized depending on your use-case and your workload. If you don’t need the low-latency and wish to have a computer that is more energy-efficient, you may wish to turn off all three options. The choice is yours.

Plasma 6

Ubuntu Studio, in cooperation with Kubuntu, switched to Plasma 6 this cycle. This switch was not without issues, so we expect many of the issues to be Plasma 6 related, especially when it comes to the default configuration and theming.

New Look

Ubuntu Studio had been using the same theming, “Materia” (except for the 22.04 LTS release which was a re-colored Breeze theme) since 19.04. However, Materia has gone dead upstream. To stay consistent, we found a fork called “Orchis” which seems to match closely and have switched to that.

As you can see from the screenshot, it has more vivid colors, round corners, and a more modern look. We hope you enjoy it. We are aware of a bug involving a dark bar under windows which may be an issue, but sometimes switching the window decorations to another variation of the theme is a solution.

PipeWire 1.2.4

This release contains PipeWire 1.2. With PipeWire 1.2, FireWire devices requiring FFADO are supported. Do note that the Ubuntu Studio team does not have any FireWire devices and could not test this.

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.

Complete Deprecation of PulseAudio/JACK setup/Studio Controls

Due to the maturity of PipeWire, the traditional PulseAudio/JACK setup, where JACK would be started/stopped by Studio Controls and bridged to PulseAudio, is now fully deprecated and the option is not offered anymore. This configuration is no longer installable via Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuration. Studio Controls may return someday as a PipeWire fine-tuning solution, but for now it is unsupported by the developer.

Ardour 8.6

While this does not represent the latest release of Ardour, Ardour 8.6 is a great release. If you would like the latest release, we highly recommend purchasing one-time or subscribing to Ardour directly from the developers to help support this wonderful application.

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 April 2025.

Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuration

Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuration’s Dummy Audio Device now also has a much-requested Dummy Audio Input.

Additionally as described above, Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuration has an option to configure the default boot parameters that are commonly used to enable the low-latency capabilities of the Linux kernel used in Ubuntu. For more information about that, see the Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuration page.

We’re back on Matrix

You’ll notice that the menu links to our support chat and on our website will now take you to a Matrix chat. This is due to the Ubuntu community carving its own space within the Matrix federation.

However, this is not only a support chat. This is also a creativity discussion chat. You can pass ideas to each other and you’re welcome to it if the topic remains within those confines. However, if a moderator or admin warns you that you’re getting off-topic (or the intention for the chat room), please heed the warning.

This is a persistent connection, meaning if you close the window (or chat), it won’t lose your place as you may only need to sign back in to resume the chat.

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
  • Cristian Delgado: Translations for Ubuntu Studio Menu
  • Dan Bungert: Subiquity, seed fixes
  • Len Ovens: Testing, insight
  • Wim Taymans: Creator of PipeWire
  • Mauro Gaspari: Tutorials, Promotion, and Documentation, Testing, keeping Erich sane
  • Krytarik Raido: IRC Moderator, Mailing List Moderator
  • Erich Eickmeyer: Project Leader, Packaging, Development, Direction, Treasurer

by eeickmeyer at October 10, 2024 04:21 PM

October 09, 2024

Ardour 8.9 released

Ardour 8.8 turned out to have a couple of major issues. Many users experienced crashes at random times that were caused by a subtle change in how waveforms were drawn, introduced in 8.8. It also turned out that MIDI notes immediately at the start of playback were ignored.

Both of these have been fixed (and also the nightly website has been restored to proper functioning), and so 8.9 is now released and available. You can download it as usual.

We apologize for the lapse in quality control that led to these mistakes in the 8.8 release.

16 posts - 10 participants

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by Paul Davis at October 09, 2024 03:48 PM

October 03, 2024

digital audio hacks – Hackaday

Pulley System Makes Headphone Cables More Managable

It’s 2024. You’ve probably got one or more pairs of wireless headphones around the house. [Barnso] prefers wired headphones with a long cable, but he also decries the fact that it often gets tangled in his chair. The solution? A pulley system to make everything easier.

The concept is simple. [Barnso]’s system uses three pulleys. The headphone cable goes to the PC, and then runs over the first pulley. It then runs under a second pulley which is free to move, but weighted so that it naturally wants to fall down under gravity. The cable then comes back up over a third pulley, and then runs to the headphones on [Barnso]’s head. Basically, it’s a super simple cable retraction mechanism that keeps the long headphone cable organized and in one place.

It’s nice to see a simple mechanism that makes life easier, particularly one that solves a problem so many of us have faced in real life. The construction shown in the video is almost (intentionally?) maddeningly hacky but it does the job. If you prefer to go wireless, though, we can show you how to do that too.

by Lewin Day at October 03, 2024 06:30 PM

Add USB-C to Your AirPods the Easy Way

Two hands hold a rounded rectangular case with a small lollipop-shaped cutout. The case is dark grey with a bit of white protruding between the two halves in the middle.

While the death of Apple’s Lightning Connector can’t come soon enough, swapping the ports on their products as “category-defining innovations” seems a bit of a stretch. [Ken Pillonel] has designed a set of streamlined, repairable, USB-C adapters for the AirPods, AirPods Pro, and AirPods Max that show Apple what innovation really means.

If you’ve followed [Pillonel]’s work in the past, you’ll know he’s as a big a fan of repairability as we are here, so this isn’t just a cheap knockoff dongle that’ll be in the trash as fast as your counterfeit wireless earbuds. In the video below, he walks us through his quest start-to-finish to design something compact that gives you all the joys of USB-C without the pain of buying a whole new set of headphones.

We like the iteration on the connector, showing that flexible circuits can do some amazing things, but are still subject to failure at extreme angles. Using a combination of 3D printing, a cool robot sandblasting machine, a pick-and-place, and some old fashioned hand soldering, [Pillonel] treats us to a polished final product that’s put together with actual screws and not adhesive. His designs are all open source, so you can DIY, or he sells finished copies in his shop if you want to give one to your less-than-techy relatives.

[Pillonel] may seem familiar as he’s the guy who added USB-C to the iPhone before Apple and redesigned the AirPods Pro case for repairability. Apple is getting better about repair in some of its devices, for sure, but unsurprisingly, hackers do it better.

by Navarre Bartz at October 03, 2024 03:30 PM

September 30, 2024

GStreamer News

GStreamer Conference 2024: Full Schedule, Talk Abstracts and Speakers Biographies now available

The GStreamer Conference team is pleased to announce that the full conference schedule including talk abstracts and speaker biographies is now available for this year's lineup of talks and speakers, covering again an exciting range of topics!

The GStreamer Conference 2024 will take place on 7-8 October 2024 in Montréal, Canada, followed by a hackfest.

Details about the conference, hackfest and how to register can be found on the conference website.

This year's topics and speakers:

Lightning Talks:

Many thanks to our amazing sponsors ‒ Platinum sponsors Collabora, Igalia, and Pexip, Gold sponsors Centricular, La Société des Arts Technologiques, Axis Communications, and Genius Sports, and Silver sponsors Laerdal Labs, asymptotic, Cablecast, and Fluendo, without whom the conference would not be possible in this form.

We hope to see you all in Montréal! Don't forget to register as soon as possible if you're planning on joining us, so we can order enough food and drinks!

September 30, 2024 12:30 PM

September 25, 2024

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It's the last week of our exhibitions

It's the last week of our exhibitions.
They are open today 12:00 - 18:00 Oksasenkatu 11 in Helsinki
Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen : [proximity] sensing in, sensing out
Malte Steiner : Abolute Power : Ohnmacht

This week our exhibitions are open
Wednesday - Friday: 12:00 - 18:00
Saturday - Sunday: 12:00 - 17:00

On Saturday the 28. there is additionally from 18.00 – 20.00 a Sound event with Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen, and TMS (Madsen & Malte Steiner)

https://oksasenkatu11.fi/



by herrsteiner (noreply@blogger.com) at September 25, 2024 02:55 PM

September 21, 2024

News – Ubuntu Studio

Ubuntu Studio 24.10 Beta Released

The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the beta release of Ubuntu Studio 24.10, codenamed “Oracular Oriole”.

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 24.10 is released on October 10, 2024.

Special Notes

The Ubuntu Studio 24.10 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/24.10/beta/

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

New Features This Release

  • Plasma 6.1 is now the default desktop environment, an upgrade from Plasma 5.27. This may have some unknown bugs that we’re ironing out as we go along, along with theming.
  • Ubuntu’s Generic Kernel is now capable of the same low latency processing as Ubuntu’s lowlatency kernel when certain boot parameters are used. Additionally, the lowlatency kernel is eventually going to be deprecated. With this in mind, we have switched to the generic kernel with the low latency boot parameters enabled by default. These boot parameters can be tweaked in Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuation.
  • Minimal Install Option for new installations. This allows users to install Ubuntu Studio and customize what they need later with Ubuntu Studio Installer.
  • Orchis is now our default theme, which replaces Materia, our default theme since 19.04. Materia has stopped development, so we decided to
  • PipeWire continues to improve with every release and now includes FFADO support. Version 1.2.3
  • Ubuntu Studio Installer‘s included Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuration utility for fine-tuning the PipeWire setup now includes the ability to create or remove a dummy audio input device. Version 1.30
  • The legacy PulseAudio/JACK has been deprecated and discontinued, is no longer supported, and is no longer an option to use. Going forward, PipeWire or JACK are the only options. PipeWire’s JACK integration can be disabled from Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuration to use JACK by itself with QJackCtl, or via other means.

Major Package Upgrades

  • Ardour version 8.6.0
  • Qtractor version 1.1
  • OBS Studio version 30.2.3
  • Audacity version 3.6.1
  • digiKam version 8.4.0
  • Kdenlive version 24.08.1
  • Krita version 5.2.3

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

Known Issues

  • Due to the transition to Plasma 6 and Qt6, there may be some theming inconsistencies, especially for those upgrading. To work around these issues, reapply the default theme using System Settings and select “Orchis-dark” from Kvantum Manager.
  • Some graphics cards might find the transparency in the Orchis theme difficult to work with. For that reason, you can switch to “Orchis-dark-solid” in the Kvantum Manager. Feedback is welcome, and if the transparency becomes too burdensome, we can switch to the solid theme by default.
  • The new minimal install mode will not load the desktop properly with the extra icons (gimp, krita, patchance, etc.) in the top bar, so those had to be removed by default. If you find them useful, you can add them by right-clicking in the menu and clicking “Pin to Task Manager”. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Official Ubuntu Studio release notes can be found at https://ubuntustudio.org/ubuntu-studio-24-10-release-notes/

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

Additionally, the main Ubuntu release notes contain more generic issues: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/oracular-oriole-release-notes/44878

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 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 this cycle in order for the maintainers to 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.

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. However, if Audacity returns to the Ubuntu repositories before final release, then you might end-up with a double-installation of Audacity. Removal instructions of one or the other will be made available in a future post.

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.

by eeickmeyer at September 21, 2024 12:02 AM

September 20, 2024

Internet Archive - Collection: osmpodcast

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September 20, 2024 10:01 PM

September 16, 2024

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This week at Oksasenkatu 11 Helsinki

this week in Oksasenkatu 11 Helsinki:

Wednesday - Friday: both exhibitions
(Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen : [proximity] sensing in, sensing out
Malte Steiner : Abolute Power : Ohnmacht)
open from 12:00 - 18:00

Friday the 20th 17:00 - 19:00 : Deep Listening session with Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen (please sign up on info[at]tmkm[dot]dk)

Saturday - Sunday: both exhibitions open from 12:00 - 17:00
(picture below is from Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen exhibition [proximity] sensing in, sensing out)



by herrsteiner (noreply@blogger.com) at September 16, 2024 12:09 PM