planet.linuxaudio.org

Malte Steiner's generative projection piece ‘retexturizing: recontextualizing‘ for the open house Konstrundan event at Life on a Leaf 6. September in Turku (FI). A computer generates and animates randomly collages out of 1892 image fragments of processed real estate ads from Steiner's project The Big Crash, Art for the pending burst of the real estate bubble . Programmed in Pure Data / Gem, running on a Linux computer.

The GStreamer team is pleased to announce another release of liborc, the Optimized Inner Loop Runtime Compiler, which is used for SIMD acceleration in GStreamer plugins such as audioconvert, audiomixer, compositor, videoscale, and videoconvert, to name just a few.

This release mostly contains bug fixes for some i386-related regressions.

Highlights:

• Fix various i386-related regressions
• avx512: Disable target on x86
• avx512: Implement the missing memoff-reg moves
• Fix Debian gcc miscompiling the backup float conversion functions

Direct tarball download: orc-0.4.44.tar.xz.

Now this is how to do generative melodies. Add expression. Get control with your hands. Make melodies accessible -- including if you're blind and visually impaired. Sting, the beloved maker of acid melodies and other patterns, is confined to Max for Live no more: now, it's available as VST3, AU, CLAP / macOS, Windows, Linux.

The post Eminently controllable, accessible by design, Sting is now a plug-in appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

The GStreamer team is pleased to announce another 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.x, and we recommend you do so at your earliest convenience.

Highlighted bugfixes:

• Various security fixes and playback fixes
• appsrc EOS handling regression fix for applications pushing EOS into a blocked appsrc
• glcolorconvert fixes for older OpenGL/GLSL versions
• mxfdemux: Fix keyframe detection regression and possible artefacts after seeking
• QML6 GL Overlay output texture lifetime handling fixes
• opencv: Add support for building against OpenCV 5
• hip: Add missing API version suffix in HIP support library filename and fix hipcc detection on Windows with HIP SDK 7.x
• analytics: fix classes off-by-one in ssdtensordec leading to mislabelling of objects in the examples
• isobmff: Fix min_display_mastering_luminance in mdcv box
• rtpbin2: rtprecv: limit the number of remote sources being tracked
• st2038anc: parity bit handling fixes for ST 291 ADF words
• video converter and videoconvertscale fixes
• mpegdemux: restore gap event sending in MPEG-PS demuxer
• typefinding: fix typefinding regressions for ogg and text files
• Fix x264enc high bit depth support in binary packages
• Various bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

See the GStreamer 1.28.7 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.

Ardour 9.8 continues the rapid, detailed development of this free and open-source DAW, with improved session recovery and clip recording, expanded support for controllers and hardware, and an arpeggiator MIDI tool. The 9.8 update also adds scales and keys, but with a twist: unlike competing software, scales/modes will soon be tuning-aware.

The post Scales among updates to the free Ardour DAW — with tuning on the way appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

As should be obvious from browsing our website for any amount of time, Ubuntu Studio releases a Long-Term Support (LTS) release every two years. The latest LTS release happens to be our latest release: 26.04. What’s more is we just released 26.04.1, a roll-up of bugfixes and security updates, on August 27th.

Also announced is the “Butllet-Proof” KDE Initiative, where Kubuntu Focus, Techpaladin Software, and KDE e.V. are working together to make Plasma 6.6, along with KDE Frameworks, an LTS release as well. This means that Techpaladin, Kubuntu, and Kubuntu Focus will be working to fix bugs in the version of the desktop environment and back-end libraries released in Ubuntu Studio 26.04 LTS. This means that, while Kubuntu will be primarily working on the Stable Release Updates as provided by KDE, Ubuntu Studio uses the same packages that get these updates.

Our project leader, Erich Eickmeyer, has been doing what he can to help support Kubuntu with this task from his side, while the Ubuntu Studio team (including Erich) focuses on bug fixes to the multimedia applications included with their own Stable Release Updates for the life of 26.04, which is three years total until April 2029.

That, combined with Ubuntu Pro (free for every user up to 5 simultaneous machines) means you will not only receive bugfixes better than in the past, which was done at best effort, but also benefit from the security updates provided by Canonical. Yes, even Ubuntu Studio can use Ubuntu Pro. Do note that Ubuntu Pro will not extend the support time period for Ubuntu Studio, but give the added benefit of sponsored security updates.

If you would like to help with everything Ubuntu Studio has going on, from supporting the LTS to supporting the upcoming 26.10 release due in October, please feel free to join us!

Additionally, while there was an initial jump in monetary support following the 26.04 LTS release, it has dropped-off considerably. Please consider becoming a monthly monetary contributor to help support this project. Remember, our website now has a monthly cost along with the usual cost of packaging and development. If you cannot commit to a monthly monetary contribution, please consider at least a one-time contribution, even if you’ve given before. Even if it’s just a tank of petrol! For those already giving, thank you so much for your continued support. It means the world to us, and allows us to continue giving you and others this operating system for free! You’ve helped countless people throughout the world!

It’s technically true that any piece of software can be reproduced in hardware, although modern software’s size and complexity generally makes this a non-starter. But if we go far enough back in time, older software becomes easier and easier to implement in hardware. The original DOOM from 1993 might one day be recreated in full this way, but that day is not today. Instead, [Nick] has recreated the original music from that game, playing the opening track in nothing but 555 timers.

The circuit starts with a 555 timer that acts as a system clock with a rate of just over 7 Hz. These pulses feed a binary counter which in turn feeds a decoder, giving the circuit 15 positions. Each output of the decoder feeds to a diode matrix which stores information about what pitch the circuit should play. The circuit only needs to play six pitches so the diodes effectively connect each moment in time to one of these six notes. From there the circuit feeds into a set of switches which select different resistor networks of another 555 which is actually responsible for producing sound. The resistor networks have different values to adjust the timing of the 555 to produce different pitches.

Of course this entire exercise is largely academic as almost any microcontroller would be able to be programmed to play this chiptune quite easily, but it’s not a bad idea to get down into the weeds of digital logic from time to time in order to refine one’s skills and knowledge about what’s really going on in the inner workings of circuits. Or, go even deeper than that and build the logic gates themselves from first principles.

A new release of gst123, my commandline media player based on GStreamer is available. The main new “feature” is probably that it now can play videos without crashing on Wayland, although it still relies on Xwayland to do so. See release link for full list of changes.

[David] has a young child who is clever enough to use a computer to play music, but he doesn’t quite want to hand over the mouse just yet. Thus, he set about building an electronic music player that could be operated in an altogether simpler fashion. 

The build is based around an Arduino Nano — its job is to read RFID tags via an RC522 reader, with the tags themselves embedded in a series of small dolls belonging to [David]’s daughter. Upon reading the tag, the Arduino Nano chats over serial with a DFPlayer Mini module, which reads a playlist of MP3 files off of an SD card and plays them over a small 4 ohm speaker that [David] had laying around. It’s a simple build, with the components all neatly wrapped up in a handsome wooden case with a volume control and a skip button for if any one song becomes too annoying for a repeat listen.

We’ve featured other builds in this vein before, too. There’s something satisfying about a music player with such a simple interface—no delicate media to fiddle with, just pop the toy on top and get the playlist you were looking for. If you’re creating your own little musical builds at home, we’d love to see them on the tipsline.

About

Prerequisites

Installation

dd if=/path/to/downloads/a3vtl_VERSION.img of=/dev/sdb

Persistence

Getting Started

Advanced -- Shell script to create USB drive

#!/bin/bash
# the disk-device to use: 
DEVICE=/dev/sdb # or /dev/mmcblk0 or /dev/hdb ,...

URL=http://robin.linuxaudio.org/a3vtl_latest.img
URL=http://rg42.org/d/a3vtl_latest.img

# Download the image and write it to the disk:
curl http://rg42.org/d/a3vtl_latest.img | dd of=$DEVICE bs=64k

### OPTIONAL: ###  
# re-read the partition-table after the image has been written
partprobe $DEVICE
# create a 2nd partition using the rest of the space on the device..
echo -e "n\np\n2\n\n\np\nw\n" | fdisk $DEVICE
# ..and create an ext4 filesystem on it, labeled live-rw'
mkfs.ext4 -L live-rw ${DEVICE}2

As of July 9, 2026, all flavors of Ubuntu 25.10, including Ubuntu Studio 25.10, codenamed “Questing Quokka”, 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 26.04 LTS 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 26.04 (YY.MM = 2026.April), and the next Long-Term Support release will be 28.04 (2028.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.

MDA.lv2 1.2.12 has been released. This is a port of the MDA VST plugins to LV2.

Changes:

• Avoid over-use of yielding meson options
• Fix build with MSVC 2022
• Fix strict aliasing violation
• Fix use of uninitialized values in TalkBox
• Improve const-correctness
• Remove development symbols from modules by default
• Use a deterministic and more uniform RNG

Jalv 1.10.0 has been released. Jalv (JAck LV2) is a simple host for LV2 plugins. It runs a plugin, and exposes the plugin ports to the system, essentially making the plugin an application. For more information, see http://drobilla.net/software/jalv.

Changes:

• Add block length command-line parameter for PortAudio
• Fix PortAudio backend
• Fix crash with plugins that have non-event inputs
• Fix stale parameter descriptions in man pages
• Fully implement fixedBlockLength and powerOf2BlockLength
• Gracefully handle failure to open audio backend in Gtk interface
• Update meson fallback subproject wrap files

Geoffrey D. Bennett has just released a major update of ALSA Scarlett GUI, a control program for Focusrite’s Scarlett, Clarett, and Vocaster audio interfaces.

DSP control

For Vocaster One and Two, Geoffrey added controls for the built-in DSP that includes a pre-compressor filter, a compressor, and a parametric EQ.

The controls on the pre-compressor filter and parametric EQ graphs are interactive: you can pick handles and move them around (Q can only be edited numerically though, it seems).

You can also choose between 12 filter types:

Configuration

This is another new window where you can toggle the visibility of unused channels, set stereo linking, and give custom names to inputs and outputs.

In addition, you can set the target level for the Autogain feature.

For models with larger number of IOs (think Gen4 18i20), this is also where you control monitor groups:

Routing window updates

There have been some improvements here:

• Routing lines now display a real-time glow effect that reflects the audio signal level passing through the connection.
• When a routing connection has a hidden port, there’s an arrow indicator at the visible end now.
• Adjacent stereo-linked channels are now displayed as a single stereo port.
• On 4th Gen 16i16/18i16/18i20 interfaces with monitor groups configured, the routing window now shows the effective audio routing.

Mixer window updates

Just like Routing, the Mixer window got its share of UX/UI updates:

• Mixer input and output labels now display a real-time horizontal glow bar that reflects the signal level at that port.
• Gain knobs now include a signal level meter inside the dial (except for Gen1 devices that don’t support it).
• When channels are stereo-linked, the mixer displays them as a single stereo fader.

Presets

You can now save and restore presets from the main window.

Firmware update changes

For the 4gen devices with larger number of IOs, the program now support multi-step firmware upgrade: leapfrog, then ESP, then application.

Device support

The changes mainly affect the “big 4gen” devices and Vocaster units:

• Scarlett Big 4th Gen (16i16, 18i16, 18i20) support now includes hardware identification, monitor groups, input mute, and output volume/mute/dim controls.
• Vocaster interfaces now have dedicated mute controls for speaker and headphone outputs in the main window.

For more detailed info, please see release notes.