planet.linuxaudio.org

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

Please note that the 1.26 old-stable series is no longer actively maintained and has been superseded by the GStreamer 1.28 stable series now.

This release only contains bugfixes, and it should be safe to update from 1.26.x.

Highlighted bugfixes:

• Security fixes for the JPEG, H.265 and H.266 video parsers and the DVB subtitle overlay
• Security fixes for the ASF, RealMedia and QuickTime/MP4 demuxers and RIFF library
• Security fixes for the WAV audio parser and the RTP QDM2 depayloader
• avviddec: Handle field/order changes in mixed interlace mode
• awstranscriber2: workaround AWS SDK regression, plus transcriberbin latency reporting fixes
• videodecoder: Handle recovery from temporary reordered output
• Decodebin3 collection handling improvements
• fmp4mux: fragment duration handling improvements for HLS
• Gap event handling fixes in audio/video decoders and aggregator/muxers
• GstPlay stream selection handling improvements
• Input selector fixes
• MPEG-TS demuxer continuity counter handling fixes
• Reverse playback fixes for the MP4 demuxer
• RTP, SRTP, RTCP and RTSP and Transport-Wide Congestion Control fixes
• Webrtcsink: better handling of platform-specific NVIDIA encoder differences, plus other improvements
• Apple macOS VideoToolbox decoder improvements
• Python bindings: more type hinting
• Various bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

See the GStreamer 1.26.11 release notes for more details.

Binaries for Android, iOS, Mac OS X and Windows will be available shortly and will be published on the Downloads page.

Picture from Malte Steiners workshop Saturday the 14. February at Äänen Lumo, Helsinki (FI), showing how to process statistical data with Jupyter Lab and Python to make them suitable for datasonification with programs such as Pure Data. Photo by Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen.

LOBOTIX is another reason to have hope in musical imagination. Even without speaking a word of Japanese, these are instantly some of my favorite tutorials. Here, these cover the spectral synthesis modes in Serum 2 and the modular capabilities of Bitwig Grid (and Vital and PhasePlant and more). And thanks to 2020s tech, we get her in the form of an anime character.

The post The best way to learn Bitwig Grid, Serum 2 is in Japanese from LOBOTIX appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

The Digital Audio Workstation can never quite escape the timeline and its roots in multitrack tape. Tweakbench's new Noemi, which entered alpha last month, starts from scratch. What if music in the DAW could constantly evolve and change? What if the DAW were non-deterministic?

The post The developer of Tweakbench wants to remake the DAW without linear time appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

oscmix is a relatively new free/libre control program for RME Fireface audio interfaces. It’s both a desktop application (GTK3) and a web app with the same functionality.

Most vendors of audio hardware either don’t bother with Linux support or, in some cases, provide gear and guidance to FOSS developers. I don’t really know which camp RME is in these days, but oscmix seems to be getting there as a free/libre replacement for RME TotalMix FX.

The project was originally developed by Michael Forney. huddx01 picked up where Michael left off last year and started writing missing code and improving things. Nightly builds are now available and make it easier to test the program.

Much like with some other FOSS applications (Qtpfsgui, anyone?), the name reflects what the program actually does under the hood: use OSC over USB MIDI to control the following audio interfaces:

• RME Fireface UCX II (supported)
• RME Fireface 802 (WIP)
• RME Fireface UCX (WIP)
• RME Fireface UFX+ (WIP)
• RME Fireface UFX II (WIP)
• RME Fireface UFX III (WIP)

The lead developer doesn’t have a feature parity comparison against TotalMix FX but states this:

Most things work, but still needs a lot more testing, polish, cleanup. Some things still need to be hooked up in the UI or implemented in oscmix.

If you have one of those in the studio and are interested in helping the developer improve the software, check out nightly builds. oscmix is available for both Linux and macOS, both x86_64 and ARM64. The web version is a separate download there.

Qsynth 1.0.5 - An End-of-Winter'26 Release rncbc Mon, 2 Mar 2026 - 18:00

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The GStreamer team is pleased to announce the first bug fix release in the new stable 1.28 release series of your favourite cross-platform multimedia framework!

This release only contains bug fixes as well as a number of security fixes. It should be safe to update from 1.28.0, and we recommend you do so at your earliest convenience.

Highlighted bugfixes:

• Various security fixes and playback fixes
• Add new whisper-based speech-to-text transcription element
• Add new debugseimetainserter plugin for testing SEI meta insertion
• Fix scaling and resizing with UIView on EAGL and Vulkan
• Reverse playback and gap handling fixes in various components
• avviddec: Handle field/order changes in mixed interlace mode
• awstranscriber2: workaround for suspected Rust SDK regression
• cudaupload, cudadownload: Fix CUDA/GL interop copy path
• decodebin3: Fix switch to smaller collections and improve collection change on existing pad
• devenv: Add a subproject for providing the LunarG MoltenVK SDK
• livesync: fixes and reverse playback handling; ignore upstream latency when upstream is not live
• objectdetectionoverlay: add support for rotated bounding boxes
• qml6glsrc: Fix rendering of scene with clipped items
• speechmatics: allow configuring audio events such as detecting applause, laughter and music
• livekit webrtc: emit session-requested only for Producer role
• tsdemux: Fix Continuity Counter handling and handle clock change/resets without skew correction
• v4l2: Add support for AV1 stateful V4l2 decoder
• vpxdec: Support downstream pools with alignment requirements
• vtdec, vtenc: Lots of Apple VideoToolbox decoder and encoder fixes
• applemedia build improvements, patches for tvOS support, tvos cross file
• wavpack: Fix handling of format changes, extend parser with new features, handle non-S32 samples
• webrtcsink: allow specifying custom headers to signalling server
• webrtcsink: negotiate profile and level for input encoded in H.264
• webrtcsrc: add request type pads and allow sending encoded data downstream
• cerbero: wheel: Add a new `gstreamer_meta` package with fewer deps
• Various bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

See the GStreamer 1.28.1 release notes for more details.

Binaries for Android, iOS, Mac OS X and Windows will be available shortly and will be published on the Downloads page.

Here is the second round of the fantastic photos by Roman Odjinud of the block 4 dialogues I event Friday the 13. at Äänen Lumo in Helsinki from the soloconcert Petri Kuljuntausta and the impro trio Kuljuntausta - Madsen - Steiner

 

Petri Kuljuntausta

Petri Kuljuntausta

trio Kuljuntausta - Madsen - Steiner

trio Kuljuntausta - Madsen - Steiner

trio Kuljuntausta - Madsen - Steiner

trio Kuljuntausta - Madsen - Steiner

trio Kuljuntausta - Madsen - Steiner

trio Kuljuntausta - Madsen - Steiner

trio Kuljuntausta - Madsen - Steiner

trio Kuljuntausta - Madsen - Steiner

 

David García Goñi released a new version of Elektroid, a sample and MIDI device manager for Elektron, Arturia, Eventide, Moog, and Novation devices.

Device support

Elektroid 3.3 adds support for several devices:

• KORG Volca Sample;
• Korg Volca Sample 2;
• KORG padKONTROL.

It also brings support for Elektron Digitakt (OG) track filesystem with optional timestreching in the track-loop filesystem and Digitakt II sample-stereo filesystem.

The Volca Sample support is possible thanks to general non-MIDI device support, which means more (especially old) devices can be supported in the future.

Tags for samples

You can now tag samples, the data will be written into the IKEY data chunk in WAV files:

The system is configurable, you can tweak the default list of tags in the Preferences dialog:

Audio recording, editing, and playback

Elektroid now tries to estimate tempo based on beats and sample length and displays it in the toolbar below the waveform. The waveform visualization has been improved and is now faster, there’s also a playback cursor.

The recording dialog now displays stereo monitoring:

Two new tools are available for editing samples: one splits stereo channels into separate monophonic audio files, the other one normalizes audio. Simply right-click on the waveform and go to the Tools submenu.

Other changes

Here are other changes in this release:

• Use floating point for audio (16-bit integer still user configurable)
• Add support for tempo (acid chunk) with “tempo:x” and “note:x” search options (using locales)
• Add support for MIDI note fraction (smpl chunk)
• The autosampler now generates SFZ files
• Use cross-zero detection when selecting and editing loop points (use while pressing shift to skip cross-zero detection)
• Replace hyphen with colon in the CLI command (still backwards compatible)

Elektroid is available in source code and as a flatpak build (not yet up to day on flathub).

Qsynth 1.0.4 - A Mid-Winter'26 Release rncbc Thu, 19 Feb 2026 - 18:00

QSynth 1.0.4 german localisation

Dear Rui!
Thank you very much for your wonderful software!
I again compiled your latest versions of qtractor 1.5.11.14, qjackctl 1.0.5 and qsynth 1.0.4 on my Debian 12 x64 qt5 system. All of them work perfectly fine but only qsynth 1.0.4 doesn't start with the german localisation but in english. The german translation file is in the src directory. The setting in options language is (default).
Qtractor and Qjackctl start in german as expected ...

Do you have any ideas what could be the issue?

Greetings, Michael

re. QSynth 1.0.4 german localisation...

in fact NONE of the translations seem to be working to Qsynth;

you and the world are simply left with the default "C" locale, anyway. :/

also this seems to be the case probably since v0.9.6 (four years ago).
sorry.

QSynth 1.0.4 german localisation

Thank you very much, Qsynth v1.0.4.1 loads the german localisation as expected :-)

Greetings, Michael

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Suil 0.10.26 has been released. Suil is a library for loading and wrapping LV2 plugin UIs. It provides wrappers that allow Gtk and Qt hosts to load, and potentially embed, plugin GUIs that use the "native" windowing API (Coca, WIN32, or X11).

Changes:

• Add clang nullability annotations
• Address new warnings in clang and clang-tidy 21
• Fix documentation build without sphinx_lv2_theme

Lilv 0.26.4 has been released. Lilv is a C library to make the use of LV2 plugins as simple as possible for applications.

Changes:

• Add clang nullability annotations
• Address new warnings in clang and clang-tidy 21
• Fix default LV2 path on cross-compiled Windows builds
• Fix loading of duplicate bundles with equivalent versions
• Fix potential crash when UIs have multiple types or binaries
• Use consistent quoting and punctuation in log messages

These days, Windows has a moderately robust method for managing the volume across several applications. The only problem is that the controls for this are usually buried away. [CHWTT] found a way to make life easier by creating a physical mixer to handle volume levels instead.

The build relies on a piece of software called MIDI Mixer. It’s designed to control the volume levels of any application or audio device on a Windows system, and responds to MIDI commands. To suit this setup, [CHWTT] built a physical device to send the requisite MIDI commands to vary volume levels as desired. The build runs on an Arduino Micro. It’s set up to work with five motorized faders which are sold as replacements for the Behringer X32 mixer, which makes them very cheap to source. The motorized faders are driven by L293D motor controllers. There are also six additional push-buttons hooked up as well. The Micro reads the faders and sends the requisite MIDI commands to the attached PC over USB, and also moves the faders to different presets when commanded by the buttons.

If you’re a streamer, or just someone that often has multiple audio sources open at once, you might find a build like this remarkably useful. The use of motorized faders is a nice touch, too, easily allowing various presets to be recalled for different use cases.

We love seeing a build that goes to the effort to include motorized faders, there’s just something elegant and responsive about them.

Generally, one opens a web browser or an app to use YouTube. However, if you’re looking to just listen to the audio, you can actually do that right from the terminal. You just need Shellbeats from [lalo-space].

Shellbeats is primarily intended for playing music from YouTube, and is well equipped for this task. It allows searching YouTube directly from the terminal, as well as streaming tracks or entire playlists from the command line interface. You can also make and edit playlists from within the tool, and even download the whole lot as MP3s if so desired. It’s all keyboard-operated and nicely lightweight. The overall experience isn’t dissimilar from operating a simple LCD-based MP3 player from 20 years ago.

There’s plenty of other fun stuff you can do in the terminal, too, as we’ve explored previously. If you’re working on your own media player hacks, be sure to notify us on the tipsline!

As of January 15, 2025, all flavors of Ubuntu 25.04, including Ubuntu Studio 25.04, codenamed “Plucky Puffin”, have reached end-of-life (EOL). There will be no more updates of any kind, including security updates, for this release of Ubuntu.

If you have not already done so, please upgrade to Ubuntu Studio 25.10 via the instructions provided here. If you do not do so as soon as possible, you will lose the ability without additional advanced configuration.

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

Interim Ubuntu releases, meaning those that are between the Long-Term Support releases, are supported for 9 months and users are expected to upgrade after every release with a 3-month buffer following each release.

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

A new version, SpectMorph 1.0.0-beta3 is available at www.spectmorph.org.

SpectMorph (CLAP/LV2/VST plugin, JACK) is able to morph between samples of musical instruments. A standard set of instruments is shipped with SpectMorph, and an instrument editor is available to create user defined instruments from user samples.

The new features of the 1.0.0 beta releases (compared to the latest stable version) are described in a YouTube Tutorial.

In the beta3 version, the instrument editor has a new pitch detection algorithm and support for mp3 files. Other than that, there were many smaller fixes, some of them addressing critical problems, so we recommend updating.

If you are interested in a detailed list of changes, you can look at the NEWS file.

This is a recap in blog form of the following Mastodon toot: https://mastodon.autostatic.net/@jeremy/115632831793380239

The biggest performance improvements when it comes to Linux audio you can do are in my experience:

• Setting the CPU scaling governor to performance.
• Disabling SMT (Simultaneous MultiThreading).
• Allow your DAW to set CPU DMA latency. For instance Ardour and Reaper can do this.

The Ardour manual provides some great background information on these matters. CPU scaling governor and SMT are explained here: https://manual.ardour.org/setting-up-your-system/the-right-computer-system-for-digital-audio/. CPU DMA latency is explained here: https://manual.ardour.org/setting-up-your-system/the-right-computer-system-for-digital-audio/

All other recommendations that for instance rtcqs or Millisecond give are for those that really need stable, ultra low latency. So buffer sizes below 64 samples that result in round-trip latencies below 10 milliseconds. This is the area where threaded IRQs or disabling Spectre/Meltdown mitigations might contribute to getting rid of that stray xrun.

Regarding threaded IRQs, enabling those by itself doesn’t change anything. You will need to configure those threaded IRQs after you’ve enabled them. Tools that can do this are rtcirqus or rtirq. You could also do this manually by using the chrt command on the threaded IRQ process.

Modern systems use MSI(-X) interrupts though (Message Signaled Interrupts) so shared IRQs should be something of the past. On those systems there’s very little gain in prioritising threaded IRQs.

The main difference between rtcirqus and rtirq is that rtcirqus allows you to set the real-time priority of a thread based on ALSA card names. rtirq works differently, it sets the real-time priority based on kernel module names. So with rtcirqus you can be sure the desired audio interface gets the desired real-time prio, with rtirq you’re prioritising all the devices that make use of a specific kernel module (xhci_hcd, snd_hda_intel).

rtirq does allow for some finer grained control regarding USB2 ports and onboard audio devices that use the snd_hda_intel driver. The USB2 ehci_hcd driver and the snd_hda_intel driver add the bus name and card index number respectively to the IRQ thread process name so you can use that designation in the rtirq configuration file. In case of USB2 you’re still prioritising the IRQ of the whole USB bus though but then rtcirqus does the same.