planet.linuxaudio.org

Raise your hand if you remember when PulseAudio was famous for breaking audio on Linux for everyone. For quite a few years, the standard answer for any audio problem on Linux was to uninstall PulseAudio, and just use ALSA. It’s probably the case that a number of distros switched to Pulse before it was quite ready. My experience was that after a couple years of fixing bugs, the experience got to be quite stable and useful. PulseAudio brought some really nice features to Linux, like moving sound streams between devices and dynamically resampling streams as needed.

The other side of the Linux audio coin is JACK. If you’ve used Ardour, or done much with Firewire audio interfaces, you’re probably familiar with the JACK Audio Connection Kit — recursive acronyms are fun. JACK lets you almost arbitrarily route audio streams, and is very much intended for a professional audio audience.

You may wonder if there is any way to use PulseAudio and JACK together. Yes, but it’s just a bit of a pain, to get the PulseAudio plugin to work with JACK. For example, all of the Pulse streams get mixed together, and show up as a single device on the JACK graph, so you can’t route them around or treat them seapartely.

It’s the conundrum faced by Linux users for years now. PulseAudio isn’t usable for pro audio, and JACK is too complicated for everything else. I’m loathe to suggest that yet another audio system could solve the world’s audio problems, but it would be nice to have the best of both worlds. To let the cat out of the bag, PipeWire is that new system, and it has the potential to be the solution for nearly everyone.

The Audio Video Chosen One

The story told is that [Wim Taymans] was contemplating applications distributed as Flatpaks, and realized that this would be problematic for video input and output. He had been working on making PulseAudio play nicely with containerized applications, and started thinking about how to solve the problem for video streams, too. While doing the initial protocol design, it became apparent that AV synchronization would be a devilish problem if audio and video were routed over separate systems, so it was decided that PipeWire would include audio handling as well. Once that decision was made, it became obvious that PipeWire could replace PulseAudio altogether. To make this a seamless transition, PipeWire was built to be fully compatible with the PulseAudio server. In other words, any application that can talk to PulseAudio automatically has PipeWire support.

If PulseAudio was going to be rebuilt from the ground up, then it might as well address pro audio. If PipeWire could satisfy the needs of pro audio users, it could feasibly replace JACK as the go-to audio backend for digital audio workstations like Ardour. Convincing every project to add support for yet another Linux audio server was going to be an uphill battle, so they cheated. PipeWire would just implement the JACK API. That may sound like a whole lot of feature creep, starting from a simple video transport system, and ending up re-implementing both JACK and PulseAudio.

Let’s make that point again. PipeWire is a drop-in replacement for Pulseaudio and JACK at the same time. Any application that supports Pulse now supports PipeWire, and at the same time it can pull all the clever tricks that JACK can. So far I’ve found two killer hacks that PipeWire makes possible, that we’ll get to in a moment. Pretty much all of the major distros now support running PipeWire as the primary audio server, and Fedora 34 made it the default solution. There were a few bugs to work out in the first couple weeks of using it, but PipeWire now seems to be playing nicely with all the apps I’ve thrown at it.

The Latency Question

JACK gets used for all sorts of hijinks, and one of its killer features is that it can achieve latencies low enough to be imperceptible. Playing audio back with a noticeable delay can throw music or talkers off badly. The effect is so strong, researchers have built a speech jammer that uses the principle to silence speakers from afar. Let’s just say that you really don’t want that effect on your conference call. A 200 ms delay shuts down speech, but even lower latencies can be distracting, especially for musicians.

For PipeWire to really replace JACK, how low do we need the latency to go? The Ardour guide suggests five milliseconds to really be imperceptible, but it depends on what exactly you’re doing. With just a bit of work, on a modern machine, I’ve gotten my latency down to just under 18 ms, over a USB audio device. To put that another way, that’s about the delay you get from standing 18 feet away from an audio source. It’s just enough for your brain to notice, particularly if you’re trying to play music, but not a deal breaker. Need to go lower? You’re probably going to need a real-time kernel.

To get started tuning your latency, copy alsa-monitor.conf and jack.conf into their places in /etc/pipewire. There are a few tweaks here, but the main knobs to turn are api.alsa.period-size and node.latency in jack.conf. To really get low latencies, there are a series of system tweaks that can help, essentially the same tweaks needed for low latency on JACK.

Oh The Fun We Can Have

Now on to those tricks. While JACK can handle multiple streams coming from a single soundcard, it doesn’t handle multiple external sources or sinks easily. You have a pair of USB mics and want to record both of them? Sorry, no can do with JACK or ALSA. Get a bigger, more expensive audio interface.

PipeWire doesn’t have this limitation. It sees all of your audio devices, and can mix and match channels even into Ardour. It’s now trivial to make a three-track recording with multiple soundcards.

OK, I hear you saying now, “I’m not an audio engineer, I don’t need to do multi-track recording. What can Pipewire do for me?” Let’s look at a couple other tools, and I suspect you will see the possibilities. First is Calf Studio Gear, an audio plugin collection. Among the plugins are a compressor, parametric EQ, and a limiter. These three make for a decent mastering toolkit, where “mastering” here refers to the last step an album goes through to put the final polish on the sound. That step is sorely lacking on some of the YouTube videos we consume. Inconsistent audio levels is the one that drive me crazy the most often.

A second tool, qjackctl, helps put Calf to use. Not only does it allow you to see and manipulate the graph of signal flow, it has the ability to design simple rules to route audio automatically. Those rules use Perl regex matching, and it’s easy enough to set them up to automatically direct audio streams from Chrome into the Calf compressor, and from there to your speakers. Add Calf and qjackctl to your desktop’s autorun list, and you have an automated solution for bad YouTube mastering. Why stop there? Going to be on a Zoom call? Route your mic through Calf, and do a bit of EQ, or add a gate to cut down on background noise. Since you’re at it, record your audio and the call audio to Ardour.

Work Left To Do

PipeWire was originally intended to shuffle video around. That part works too. Browsers have added PipeWire support for video capture, and if you happen to be running Wayland, desktop capture is a PipeWire affair now, too. OBS has added support for PipeWire video inputs, but output to PipeWire is still unimplemented. And on that topic, while the JACK tools work great for audio, the video control and plugin selection is noticeably lacking.

There is one thing that JACK supports that PipeWire currently can’t touch. JACK supports the FFADO drivers to talk to FireWire audio interfaces, and PipeWire can’t support them at all. (OK, yes, ALSA has a FireWire stack, but it’s not in great shape, and only supports a handful of devices.) USB3 has certainly replaced FireWire as the preferred connection for new devices, but there are plenty of quality interfaces still at work that are FireWire only. Very recently, a new TODO item has appeared on the official list: FireWire backend based on FFADO or fix up ALSA drivers.

So where does that leave us? PipeWire has already changed what I can do with Linux audio. If the video ecosystem develops, it has the potential to make some new things possible, or at least easier, there too. The future is bright for multimedia on Linux.

Due to the widely reported issues at the Freenode IRC network, the official GStreamer discussion IRC channel has moved to #gstreamer on the OFTC IRC network alongside other Freedesktop projects.

You can connect to it with your existing IRC client, or using Matrix which has a browser client and native apps for all platforms.

For more information, please see the mailing list announcement.

*** snip snip ***
Changes:
   RDImport. Fixed a bug that could cause a segfault when used with the
   '--fix-broken-formats' switch.

   Rivendell Service. Fixed a bug that could cause resource leaks on
   systems performing system maintenance.

Database Update:
   This version of Rivendell uses database schema version 347, and will
   automatically upgrade any earlier versions. To see the current schema
   version prior to upgrade, see RDAdmin->SystemInfo.

   Be sure to run 'rddbmgr --modify' (as root) immediately after upgrading
   to allow any necessary changes to the database schema to be applied.
*** snip snip ***

Details and source code are available at 
https://github.com/ElvishArtisan/rivendell/releases .


Cheers!


|---------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Frederick F. Gleason, Jr. |             Chief Developer             |
|                           |             Paravel Systems             |
|---------------------------------------------------------------------|
|         A room without books is like a body without a soul.         |
|                                                                     |
|                                                         -- Cicero   |
|---------------------------------------------------------------------|

I’m sure this post’s been done a million times over by now, but enough people at work have asked me how my video/audio looks/sounds so good, that at this point it’s quicker to have a blog post to point at!

I’m pretty sorted for audio and video for videoconferencing. Given my days are usually back-to-back video calls, that’s fairly important to me – I want people to be able to see me clearly and hear me clearly (and ideally vice versa, but that’s not always the case). Non-verbal communication is important for effective communication, especially with difficult topics and emotional issues.

In the past I’ve been almost entirely audio-only – playing games with friends, that’s all you need, and that’s most of what I did, chatting on Mumble etc. The de rigeur for this is a decent headset or a separate mic/headphone pairing – headphones for spatial awareness (thanks to HRTFs), but also to avoid feedback.

Audio, as it was (Feb 2020)

My setup at the time was a 2nd generation Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 – a well-loved and widely used 2 in, 2 out (stereo pair + headphone) USB audio interface. Into this I had plugged a custom breakout/switch box which went to a Beyerdynamic DT109. The DT109’s a weird headset – it’s the microphone-equipped version of the classic DT100 you’ll see in old (and some new) BBC music videos etc, primarily designed for camera operators and the like.

This had a few issues – the 2i2 occasionally fell over and just spat crackly audio at the PC, and the DT109 microphone was designed for clarity, not quality. Which is to say I was entirely intelligible but didn’t quite sound myself. However, it basically worked. I used the headphone jack for my headphones, and the main outputs fed my monitor speakers (a pair of Genelec 8320s and a 7350 subwoofer).

I did have an old webcam – a Microsoft thing which purported to do HD – but it wasn’t much to write home about. Good enough for occasional family Skype, but nothing special.

Limitations of space and budget

At no point did I want to spend a fortune on all this, but I should caveat the below by saying I’m doing all this in a pretty tiny cottage in which my “office” is also my partner’s office, a bedroom, and part-time workshop.

I’m not so constrained by budget – and I am very much of the opinion that if you go “cheap” you end up buying the expensive one down the line and paying 50% more (at least) in the end. However, I do strongly recommend the approach espoused by Adam Savage on tools – if you’ve not got one and have no experience, buy the cheapest possible thing and then decide if it’s worth it to you to have a good one. You’ll get a better understanding of what makes a good one, and be able to make better decisions. Plan accordingly!

Enter COVID-19 (March 2020)

My usual working pattern was to be in the office/lab every day. I’m very close to the office, so this isn’t so much of a drag, and a lot of what I do is to do with things, physical bits of plastic and metal and glass, so being able to get my hands on stuff is pretty key.

When the pandemic hit I realised I’d be videoconferencing and spending a lot of time at home, so I figured I had to fix a few things:

1. Ergonomics – so I wouldn’t end up with chronic RSI/carpal tunnel or back issues
2. Video – so people could see me and I could have proper conversations
3. Audio – so I could be heard clearly and well, and without background noise

Ergonomics

Ergonomics were fairly easy – I’ve had a Herman Miller Aeron for a while which works very well for me as a chair. I swapped my cheap-as-chips desk from an office surplus store for a Fully Jarvis electronic standing desk, and I try to stand up for half a day at least every other day. I got a “moving mat” to stand on, which is crucial both for comfort and to keep you moving around a bit as you stand.

Standing desks (of the moving type) also force you to think carefully about cable management and monitor positions, and I adjusted my monitor mounting setup a few times just to get everything movable. I have four monitors – one of which is also a drawing tablet (which is a godsend for engineering discussions). All but one are mounted on simple and cheap VESA arms of the solid-pole-and-clamp variety.

Video

I started out by buying a cheap chroma key background (greenscreen) and stands. I figured I had a lot of crap in the background of my shot – rather unavoidable mess (though my partner will disagree) that I’d rather avoid. At the time, AI-based “cutouts” were pretty basic and I knew how to make chroma key work.

I also added three lights, which I still use today. I don’t get much natural light in this room, with a tiny window.

They’re cheap “Neewer” brand dual colour temperature LED panels. I mounted them on cheap ceiling spigots and in one case a clamp – they have the “Manfrotto” standard spigots for which there are a lot of cheap and cheerful mounting options and tools available. I also put them on cheap TP-Link smart plugs so I can switch them off and on with my phone. These are a lot cheaper than things like the Elgato Key Lights, and though the light quality isn’t as good as “proper” cine lights like things from Aputure they’re good enough (they measure as having a CRI of about 93 on my meter).

I set up the lights in a key/fill/backlight setup and I’ve not adjusted them since – I have them set to produce a rough 5000K output (with 3000K on the back light, for some contrast) at about half their maximum brightness, which is plenty.

I stuck to my Microsoft HD camera for the time, and it worked OK.

Audio

I decided to make quite minor adjustments to my audio setup. I wanted a better microphone, and a switch in my DT109 breakout box died, so I dug out some old DT250s and bought a Rode NT1-A condenser microphone kit. This worked pretty well but picked up a lot of background noise, being a nice sensitive omni condenser.

I still had a bunch of issues with the Focusrite, but at the time didn’t want to spend a bunch on the box I wanted to replace it with, so stuck with it for the time being.

Software

To glue it all together I used the fabulous Open Broadcaster Software, OBS. This is open source and powers probably 95% of streamers and commercial internet broadcasts, esports, and so on. It’s incredibly powerful but also pretty simple.

My OBS setup was simple:

• Camera video came in and used the in-built “Chroma Key” filter to produce video that was just me, cropped to just capture my face/head
• I put a background image behind me (or fed in a “VLC Source” from an IP camera in the garden for a “live” background)
• Audio went through a basic noise reduction filter and a compressor

To actually get this as a usable feed in all my videoconferencing tools I used Virtual Audio Cable (VAC) on Windows to take the “monitor” output from OBS and present it as a new system audio input, and used the OBS Virtualcam plugin to present the output of OBS as a virtual webcam input. OBS has since added a native virtual camera, so this isn’t needed any more.

Basically, I boot up OBS and get a nice confidence monitor for video and audio levels. Then anything like Teams gets pointed at the virtual inputs and it’s none the wiser that I’m fiddling around with the inputs.

And this worked really well! I had lots of control over what people saw, and though the cropped HD feed was a bit rubbish in terms of resolution the lighting worked well.

Skip to the endgame – March 2021

Over the course of a year, I replaced almost every element I’ve described above. Some of this was for reasons other than videoconferencing – I’ve been getting into making “music” with some synthesisers, which drove a lot of the audio side.

The key upgrades that actually made a difference were the microphone, the audio interface/mixer, and a new webcam.

Software improvements over the last year have also made a big difference to things.

Video

I spent maybe a month with a borrowed camera from work – a Nikon Z6 with a Zeiss 50mm/f1.2 Milvus F-mount lens. I hooked this up with a HDMI-to-USB box, and used OBS to sync the audio up (as this came with about 120ms of video delay). This produced fabulous video and I could use an Atomos Ninja HDMI monitor as a screen to look at right next to the camera. It also let me nicely defocus the background and lose the greenscreen – blurry mess with pretty bokeh from some fairy lights isn’t quite so objectionable!

However, it couldn’t move with my desk, and was a huge bulky thing to deal with. So rather than go buy something similar and make that setup permanent, I decided to just upgrade my webcam and go down the AI route as the cheaper option.

My camera is a Logitech Brio 4K. For a while these were unobtanium, being the best reasonably-priced webcam out there – but eventually I nabbed one and it was a huge upgrade from the Microsoft one. Colour science is still a bit odd but I could fix the white balance setting to match my lighting conditions which helped consistency a lot. The extra resolution let me crop and still get a HD stream for OBS.

I added XSplit into the mix, which is a software tool that separates you from background. I just use this to apply a modest blur in the background. It’s nowhere as nice or consistent as a good lens with shallow depth of focus, but it works pretty well for what it is and doesn’t need a huge lens, so my camera can still perch on top of my monitor and move with the desk.

Besides that, I’ve not done much. I tinkered with LUTs a bit to do colour correction but found that if I get the white balance locked off I don’t really need it.

Audio

Audio I did a lot on.

I’m an audio nerd at heart, and as I was getting into synths and wanting more in the way of flexibility, I opted to go fairly high end on this stuff.

In the end I replaced the NT1-A with a Shure SM7B on a desk-mounted arm – the classic “streamer/vlogger” mic for good reason, since it’s a dynamic mic with a good pickup pattern and nice and robust. It doesn’t pick up much background noise.

This needs a really good preamp with lots of gain to work, though, since it’s dynamic. The traditional approach is to use a phantom powered box like a Cloudlifter to add in another 20dB of gain, but this adds noise and another bit of kit, so I opted to just get some better preamps, since I also wanted to add some more audio inputs to my PC.

I did this by adding a Solid State Logic SiX mixer, which is not something I’d generally recommend to anyone not also doing music stuff. It’s a stupidly versatile desk with incredibly good preamps, tons of routing options, great built-in compressors, lots of monitor control options, and also costs several arms and legs. Much cheaper options are available, like SSL’s new USB interfaces. This did a great job of replacing some of the functions of the Focusrite and providing some superb preamps. It’ll last me for decades to come and also accommodates all my current synths as inputs with room to spare.

I’d originally run this into the Focusrite but finally tired of all the crashes and glitches and replaced that with a RME Fireface. Again, high end, but very solid and reliable which is what I wanted. I don’t run it in its highest-end mode – I use 96kHz/24-bit which lets all the aliasing filters have plenty of space without delving to madness like 192kHz audio. The preamps are actually good enough to directly use the SM7B, so I could skip the SiX for that, but for now I’ll stick to the SiX preamps.

The headphones I’ll probably upgrade – the 250s are pretty good all-rounders but aren’t great for all-day wear.

Software

I haven’t changed a lot – I still use OBS and VAC to make everything apper as virtual inputs. However, I now use NVIDIA’s new noise reduction filtering in OBS, along with a Solid State Logic native VST plugin to de-ess and de-pop. This removes the worst silibances from my speech and worked out a lot cheaper than buying a hardware unit to do the same.

XSplit keeps improving, so that’s worked out pretty well.

What I’d recommend

There’s lots of good advice on the budget/low-end of things, so I’ll stick to what I’d recommend if you wanted a “really good” setup that was going to give you a superb output.

• Video: Logitech Brio or Canon’s EOS-M videoconferencing kit, and whatever lighting makes sense for your environment
• Audio: SSL 2/2+ with Shure SM7B, or a Shure/Rode lapel mic kit
• Software: OBS, NVIDIA’s noise-removal plugin, and the built-in plugins or VSTs of your choice for any audio compression etc

The Canon EOS-M based VC kits are pretty solid as a step up from a webcam and are actually light enough to mount on a monitor if you wanted to. They’ll give you much better video than a webcam could ever do. However, the Brio is pretty solid.

Lighting is the biggest thing to upgrade for most people. I’d avoid ringlights – get LED panels, or COB lights that can accept diffusers. There’s tons out there which will work great, even the cheap ones are a whole lot better than having nothing.

For noise, get a good interface like the SSL 2/2+ or RME Fireface/Babyface that can handle the SM7B. Alternatively, Shure now have a SM7B-alike which has USB built in, which makes matters easier. My partner uses a Rode USB mic which works very well, too. These USB mics will have built-in headphone amplifiers that’ll suit most headphones and in-ear options, and let you put a bit of sidetone in so you can hear yourself without latency.

Software – OBS is unbeatable, I think. It’s certainly so widely used that it’s the best supported thing out there.

For multiple cameras there are things like VMix, but honestly I’ve done mad things with OBS. I can use NDI over our VPN to pull in video from our lab’s camera system and switch my own video out for it – I’ve used this to remotely pan/tilt a camera over to a demonstration unit on the wall, switch my face for the lab camera, and talk engineers through problems they’re having, for instance. You can do an awful lot with free software (though do donate to the OBS team).

Zrythm v1.0.0-alpha.18.2.1 has been released!

Screenshot: 

https://www.zrythm.org/videos/mylofy-window-into-the-air.png

Demo:

https://www.zrythm.org/videos/mylofy-window-into-the-air.webm
(by MyLoFy, CC-BY-SA 4.0)

Zrythm is a digital audio workstation designed to be featureful and
easy to use. It allows limitless automation through curves, LFOs and
envelopes, supports multiple plugin formats including LV2, LADSPA,
DSSI, SFZ, SF2, VST2 and VST3 (via Carla), works with multiple backends
including JACK, PulseAudio, RtAudio/RtMidi and SDL2, assists with chord
progressions via a special Chord Track and chord pads, and can be used
in multiple languages including English, French, Portuguese, Japanese
and German.

Zrythm is free software written in C using the GTK+3 toolkit and can be
extended using GNU Guile (Scheme).

Zrythm is currently in alpha and we are working towards stabilizing the
project format and entering the beta phase.

Main changes since last announcement:

- Fader and piano roll highlight buttons are now themable
- "Bar" and "Beat" snap options
- Track bounce options: bounce pre-inserts, pre-fader, post-fader or
with parent tracks
- Plugin author filter in plugin browser
- Ability to batch solo/mute/listen multiple tracks
- Ability to batch set color on multiple tracks
- Ability to change monitor output device ports (new Monitor tab)
- Channel listen functionality (dim volume of other channels)
- Ability to specify global mute/listen/dim levels
- Improved/fixed support for various LV2 features
- Ability to choose icon and CSS themes from preferences
- Toggles to follow playhead and auto-scroll when playhead goes off-
screen
- Bass note highlighting in piano roll
- Ability to disable tracks and option to disable tracks after bounce
- Cut/copy/paste/delete/select all/deselect all for plugin slots
- Automatic adjustment of timeline length
- Bash completions for CLI options
- Removal of unused audio pool files during save
- Use of FLAC to save imported clips if no bit depth loss occurs
- Faster saving of audio pool
- Ability to bind MIDI device controls to track
mute/solo/listen/mono/record toggles
- Experimental AppImage build
- Various translation updates
- Various other minor improvements (see changelog)
- Fixed many many bugs/crashes (see changelog)

Full changelog:

https://git.zrythm.org/zrythm/zrythm/src/branch/master/CHANGELOG.md

Pending features for beta:
https://todo.sr.ht/~alextee/zrythm-feature?search=status%3Aopen+label%3Abeta

Pending fixes for beta:
https://todo.sr.ht/~alextee/zrythm-bug?search=status%3Aopen%20label%3A%22beta%22

# Announcement
Zrythm is participating in FundOSS (fundoss.org), a campaign to fund
free software projects using what they call democratic funding. This
round has a matching pool of $75,000 donated by sponsors. If you would
like to support development, you can supercharge your donations below:
https://fundoss.org/collective/zrythm

(FundOSS will likely have more rounds in the future so other developers
are encouraged to apply for their projects as well)

# Links
Home page: 
Installer downloads: 
Git repositories: 
User manual: 
Developer reference: 
Issue trackers: 
Mailing lists: 
Releases: 

It's five years in the making, and easily the most important touch controller app release in a decade. It's the all-new TouchOSC, and it's a touch controller that runs basically everywhere.

The post TouchOSC next-generation is here, and it’s an awesome touch controller for everything appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

Those of us who have been working from home through video calls for the past year can attest to the rising demand for conferencing gear such as webcams and microphones. Not wanting to spring for a boring off-the-shelf solution, serial hacker [Andy Brown] decided to design his own USB solution from scratch and show us the process from start to finish.

Deciding to go for a full digital design for the circuitry, the peripheral is based off of a MEMS microphone and an STM32 microcontroller doing the heavy lifting between it and a USB connection. [Andy] notes that MEMS microphones are very delicate and you have to design the PCB around the hole where the sound enters, which is why he went with a breakout board which has the component already soldered onto it.

As for the MCU, he reasons that since this is a off-one project which won’t be produced in large numbers, the 180 MHz ARM core shouldn’t be seen as overkill, since it also gives him more than plenty of headroom to do signal processing to make the sound clearer before sending it through to a computer by the USB audio device descriptor.

Once the components are chosen and the board designed, [Andy] goes into detail explaining the firmware he wrote for the STM32 to translate the PCM samples from the microphone’s I²S interface into a format better suited for the computer. He also describes how it then processes the audio, applying a graphic equalizer to reduce noise and then ST’s own Smart Volume Control filter, which works more like a compressor than a simple amplitude multiplication.

Finally, all files for the project, including board gerbers and the STM32 firmware are available at the bottom of his post, and to boot, a video demonstrating the project which you can check here after the break. [Andy]’s choice of microcontroller for this project is no surprise to us, given he’s already made his own development board for the STM32 G0 series. But if this digital microphone project is a bit too modern for you, why not try your hand at building a ribbon microphone instead?

The Link-enabled products page has gotten busy, but here's one you may have heard of - Avid Pro Tools. It's the latest to support Live's tech for jamming together across apps, software, and hardware.

The post All versions of Pro Tools now support Ableton Link appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

The GStreamer team is pleased to announce the first development release in the unstable 1.19 release series.

The unstable 1.19 release series adds new features on top of the current stable 1.18 series and is part of the API and ABI-stable 1.x release series of the GStreamer multimedia framework.

The unstable 1.19 release series is for testing and development purposes in the lead-up to the stable 1.20 series which is scheduled for release in a few weeks time. Any newly-added API can still change until that point, although it is rare for that to happen.

Full release notes will be provided in the near future, highlighting all the new features, bugfixes, performance optimizations and other important changes.

This development release is primarily for distributors and early adaptors and anyone who still needs to update their build/packaging setup for Meson.

Packagers: please note that plugins may have moved between modules, so please take extra care and make sure inter-module version dependencies are such that users can only upgrade all modules in one go, instead of seeing a mix of 1.19 and 1.18 on their system.

Binaries for Android, iOS, Mac OS X and Windows are also available at the usual location.

Release tarballs can be downloaded directly here:

• gstreamer-1.19.1.tar.xz
• gst-plugins-base-1.19.1.tar.xz
• gst-plugins-good-1.19.1.tar.xz
• gst-plugins-ugly-1.19.1.tar.xz
• gst-plugins-bad-1.19.1.tar.xz
• gst-libav-1.19.1.tar.xz
• gst-rtsp-server-1.19.1.tar.xz
• gst-python-1.19.1.tar.xz
• gst-editing-services-1.19.1.tar.xz
• gst-devtools-1.19.1.tar.xz,
• gstreamer-vaapi-1.19.1.tar.xz
• gst-omx-1.19.1.tar.xz
• gstreamer-docs-1.19.1.tar.xz

As always, please let us know of any issues you run into by filing an issue in Gitlab.

Hello all, another monthly report about the KXStudio project is here.
I skipped last month as there was not much to report.
Mainly there were new releases, but those had their own announcement (specifically, Carla v2.3 and JACK2 v1.9.18).
Afterwards there was a small personal situation (that is still unfolding) that took all my free time, so that was it.
There are a few updates related to the month of May though!

DPF updates

The main thing to report today is all the work that I've been putting in DPF recently.
This has been a long-time coming, but better late than never.
For those unaware, DPF is a very small C++ framework to create audio plugins with.
It has UI support, but it is intentionally not a fully-fledged UI toolkit, same for its DSP side.
It can export as LV2, VST2 and other plugin formats, but it does not try to do much more than that.
Native OS events is handled behind the scenes via pugl.

One major task to do was updating to latest pugl, because it supports many more things compared to old versions.
pugl had its event system completely reworked though, so we can't just update and use it as-is.
In the end, this update work is something that took several weeks.
I took the chance to rework some core components of DPF UI handling together with this, as there were a few parts of the code that proved confusing to other developers.
Also added in testing units and demo applications to help test several parts of DPF, though this is still very much work-in-progress.
This was specially useful to ensure core parts were working before proceeding with the rework.
Related to pugl update and rework, the Cairo backend of DPF is now pretty much on-par with its OpenGL one.
The Demo tool (where we test images, events, resizing, etc) has consistent behaviour between the two.

Continuing with the rework, special attention was given to resizing.
Resizing in LV2 UIs has always been something very painful, which still does not work correctly in many hosts.
One culprit of this was the bad initial decision to use an LV2 extension to deal with UI resizing.
Turns out, we do not need this at all!
So the next version of DPF will no longer make use of LV2 UI resize extensions.
We will need to accommodate hosts to this, which is a breaking change.
But it is not like LV2 plugin-side resizing was working well in the first place anyway.
I already did this for Carla. Likely will do similar things to suil if no one else does.

On even more DPF news, I created a new open-source code repository meant for reusable DPF UI widgets.
It has come to my attention that developers struggle with DPF having very little common widgets they are used to.
I have made a few ones based on images for the DPF-Plugins collection, but some developers struggle to create individual widgets from scratch.
This code repository will evolve over time, obviously as a new project which is only a few days old there is not much to see.
One common request has been a resize handle, so that for plugin formats like VST2 which do not allow user-side resizing we still have a way for the user to resize the UI.
There is one generic resize handle in the repository now, usable for both Cairo and OpenGL backends.
The first real widgets I am contributing to the repository are a port of oui-blendish which provides blender-style looking widgets.
I am still setting up the whole thing, but initial impressions are very good. It even works with High-DPI / custom scale factors!
(ignore the bitmap icons on the screenshot below, those are only used in testing, I will later either replace them or remove them)

Finally on DPF side, as contributions by Jean Pierre Cimalando, CMake is now supported for building DPF and using it in plugins targeting DPF.
As a second step on top of CMake, it is now possible to build DPF with MSVC on Windows.
I tried this myself and was able to build a DPF VST2 plugin with MSVC and run the output binary inside Carla.
This is not my development workflow by any means (it was the first time I used MSVC!) but it opens up the process for many more people, which always great.

One last bit of news regarding DPF is that I started testing the waters for VST3 support.
There is almost nothing to see just yet, as there is enough to do in DPF regarding polishing, fixing bugs and handling requests so that VST3 work is not a priority.
It is something that I have took an interest on lately though, as a potential way to attract commercial developers/vendors to DPF.
(and perhaps some well needed funding? who knows..)

Work on DPF will continue, you can grab all these changes from its develop branch.
Expect more news about it next month.

Other updates

While most of my time and attention was given to DPF, a few other things happened.
There is the whole "Audacity was bought up by Muse Group and added CLA, plus telemetry coming soon" thing...
I did some tests with building Audacity with mingw, and succeeded in setting up scripts to build required dependencies and then build audacity itself.
From what I tested on Windows everything seems to work.
(screenshot below is from Wine, but I also tested on real Windows via Virtual Machine)


Most mingw needed fixes were submitted upstream, but them now requiring a CLA means the PR will likely stay open indefinitely.
Also did some tests with building Audacity with wxQt and while it kinda works, still has some obvious issues - the wxWidgets Qt backend is not feature complete so it is normal for those to happen.
It is very likely I will end up maintaining some custom builds for Audacity once more network features creep in (analytics is coming to Audacity for sure, it is just a matter of when and how).
I am not interested on a fork, only in a way for casual users to get similar builds to the official ones without user-data tracking.

There are some other random things too, for example adding a new "-w" argument to the new jack2 zalsa tools so that it waits until the requested soundcard is available instead of failing to start.
This is very handy when adding it as part of some boot process.

Carla has also seen some pipewire-related fixes.
It is still not working 100%, but already know of a solution for them, just need to put that into code.
Expect a v2.3.1 release soon with these fixes, and also the LV2 UI resize handling mentioned above.

Finally I added support for FFmpeg JACK output. Seems to work well from what I tested, but I no longer have a need for it.
Once I am done with DPF and other things, I will try to submit this upstream. Feel free to grab the code and submit it yourself

Regarding packages in the KXStudio repositories, there are some small updates. Those are:

• Added bjumblr
• Added bslizr-uwu (custom skin to bslizr)
• bslizr updated to 1.2.14
• lsp-plugins updated to 1.1.30

 

That is all for now.
If you appreciate the kind of work I do, please consider a donation.
Thank you in advance for your support, and stay safe out there!

Robert Kiyosaki is most famous for his book Rich Dad Poor Dad. Among the most common financial books that also recommend here. In this book he explains how he was brought up by two very rich fathers. They taught him a totally different way on the best way to lead life. One of these even mortgaged his house to cover Robert’s college and another made him head chef in his own restaurant. He basically was made to feel that he is royalty and should act that way.

Kiyosaki explains in this book how he thinks about running a small business. First of all he identifies the four major types of people who run businesses. Then after making sure everybody falls into one of those categories, he explains what his philosophy of life is based on. The four categories of individuals are money hungry, money-conscious, productivity mindful, and cashflow oriented. Robert Kiyosaki uses the cashflow quadrant of direction to explain why some people are successful and others aren’t.

He uses the passive income method to describe ways to make passive income without having to work for it. Robert Kiyosaki says that with this passive income you don’t have to worry about working for something. In this passive income technique, Robert Kiyosaki uses the story of his father poor Dad who worked long hours and never enough to make ends meet but always had enough to provide for his loved ones.

Robert Kiyosaki says that by being honest with yourself and with others you can determine what your true purpose is in life and you will be able to help other people accomplish what they want out of life. Robert Kiyosaki explains that most people are searching for meaning but don’t know where to find it and they’re scared to ask for assistance. This is the most important main difference between the successful people in life and the unsuccessful individuals in life. The most successful people in life are people who ask questions and are honest with themselves.

The most important thing you can learn from Robert Kiyosaki and life lessons from Napoleon Hill is to always growing and expanding your mind and your opportunities. Robert Kiyosaki says you could transform your wallet from poor to rich if you would like to be rich. Robert Kiyosaki says if you would like to be successful then you have to enlarge your beliefs and constantly growing. Robert Kiyosaki’s and Napoleon Hill’s books are fantastic resources for learning about yourself and how to use the law of attraction to manifest your dreams.

Robert Kiyosaki explains many of these secrets in his new book, Rich Dad Poor Dad: How to be Rich and at the Same Time Be Really Poor. He explains many of these secrets through stories from his own experiences and from his work with other millionaires. Robert Kiyosaki shows you ways to avoid making the mistakes so many people do and why these mistakes keep happening to so many people. Robert Kiyosaki also explains why most wealthy people don’t seem to have any regrets, even after making millions of bucks. He also tells you how you can use the same power to manifest abundance in your life and earn money even if you don’t have a lot of spare time.

You will find many other interesting and practical ideas in Robert Kiyosaki’s financial publications, Rich Dad Poor Dad and the law of attraction. These financial books are really helpful if you want to achieve financial freedom and to eliminate debt. Kiyosaki says that all you’ve got to do is to change your mindset and begin using the principles that will allow you to create a more positive financial future. He explains how these principles will let you create endless wealth, even in your retirement. This book will also inspire you to become actively involved in creating wealth and financial freedom for your future and for your children as well.

Robert Kiyosaki says that there’s no such thing as a fantastic mistake, only bad decisions. If you make a great decision, you will end up somewhere better than where you started. If you make a poor decision, you will most likely end up worse off than before. This book teaches you how you can prevent failure by making the proper decisions and making smart choices. Robert Kiyosaki wants you to realize that you can’t live the life you want if you don’t understand financial basics and how to apply them towards creating financial abundance to your loved ones.

Robert Kiyosaki is most famous for his book Rich Dad Poor Dad. One of the most popular financial books which also recommend here. In this book he explains how he was brought up by two very wealthy fathers. They taught him a completely different way on how best to lead life. One of them even mortgaged his house to pay for Robert’s college and the other made him head chef at his own restaurant. He basically was made to feel that he is royalty and should act like that.

Kiyosaki explains in this book how he thinks about running a business. First of all he explains the four major types of people that run businesses. Then after making certain everybody falls into one of those categories, he explains what his philosophy of life is based on. The four categories of people are money hungry, money-conscious, productivity mindful, and cashflow oriented. Robert Kiyosaki uses the cashflow quadrant of direction to explain why some people are successful and others are not.

He uses the passive income strategy to explain ways to make passive income without having to work for it. Robert Kiyosaki says that with this passive income you do not have to worry about working for something. In this passive income technique, Robert Kiyosaki uses the story of his dad poor Dad who worked long hours and never enough to make ends meet but always had enough to provide for his family.

Robert Kiyosaki says that by being honest with yourself and with others you can determine what your true purpose is in life and you’ll have the ability to help other people accomplish what they want out of life. Robert Kiyosaki explains that most individuals are searching for meaning but do not know where to find it and they’re scared to ask for assistance. This is the most important primary difference between the successful people in life and the ineffective people in life. The most successful people in life are those who ask questions and are honest with themselves.

The most important thing you can learn from Robert Kiyosaki and life lessons from Napoleon Hill is to always growing and expanding your mind and your opportunities. Robert Kiyosaki says that you can transform your wallet from poor to rich if you want to be rich. Robert Kiyosaki says if you want to be successful then you have to expand your beliefs and constantly growing. Robert Kiyosaki’s and Napoleon Hill’s books are great resources for learning about yourself and how to utilize the law of attraction to manifest your dreams.

Robert Kiyosaki explains many of these secrets in his new book, Rich Dad Poor Dad: How to be Rich and at the Same Time Be Really Poor. He explains many of these secrets through stories from his own experiences and from his work with other millionaires. Robert Kiyosaki shows you how you can avoid making the mistakes so many people do and why these mistakes keep happening to so many men and women. Robert Kiyosaki also explains why most wealthy people don’t seem to have any regrets, even after making millions of bucks. He also tells you how you can use this same power to manifest abundance in your life and make money even if you don’t have a great deal of spare time.

You will find a number of other interesting and practical ideas in Robert Kiyosaki’s financial books, Rich Dad Poor Dad and the law of attraction. These financial books are really helpful if you want to attain financial freedom and to eliminate debt. Kiyosaki says that all you have to do is to change your mindset and start utilizing the principles that will allow you to create a more positive financial future. He explains how these principles will enable you to create endless wealth, even in your retirement. This book will also inspire you to become actively involved in generating wealth and financial freedom for your future and for your children also.

Robert Kiyosaki says that there is no such thing as a fantastic mistake, only bad decisions. If you make a great decision, you’ll wind up somewhere better than where you started. If you make a poor decision, you will most likely end up worse off than before. This book teaches you how you can prevent failure by making the right decisions and making smart decisions. Robert Kiyosaki wants you to understand that you can’t live the life you want if you don’t know financial basics and how to apply them towards creating financial abundance for your family.

Due to a series of events within the Freenode organization that ran the IRC servers used for the #ardour channel, we are moving the channel to the libera.chat IRC network instead.

If you use an IRC client, then point it at irc.libera.chat (use port 6697 with TLS enabled, or port 6667 for plain text) and connect to the #ardour channel there. There is a bridge between Matrix and IRC that can also be used.

We have also set up a redirect https://ardour.org/chat that will always point to the current “chat” system in use (even if that were to change entirely). You can click on this in any web browser.

We are leaving the #ardour channel on Freenode in place for the time being, because it is directly referenced by Ardour releases before 6.7. But please be aware that the channel will only be lightly monitored in the future.

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mini interview Notstandskomitee in Italian:

https://luponair.wordpress.com/2021/05/07/micro-intervista-notstandskomitee

Drumstick Multiplatform MIDI File Player 1.3.0 has been released this week, right after the Drumstick Libraries 2.2.0 and VMPK 0.8.3; business as usual: we write programs, we release stuff. This post is about the first program, a MIDI file player (reloaded). Let's start by the beginning...

10 years ago, there was not a fully featured MIDI file player for Linux. Of course, there was Linux software that could (barely) play MIDI files, but nothing comparable to the vanBasco MIDI Karaoke player (which is a Windows 32 bit application, updated the last time in 2006). This program can be run in Wine, by the way. The key features of the vanBasco player are described in its site, and anyone with a musical background can identify its value, beyond the entertainment use case:

• lyrics can be displayed in a resizable window or full-screen
• control window: ability to change tempo, volume, key of song
• real-time MIDI output window: shows notes, volumes, and instruments, can mute or play solo individual instruments
• piano view: displays notes on a big piano keyboard

The KDE 4 desktop was starting to become mature and stable at the time, so I've decided to scratch my itch rewriting the old and abandoned KMid  application, adding my favorite features from vanBasco. This was already told on this blog a few times. KMid2 was a total rewrite almost from scratch, with the additional goal to make it multiplatform. Indeed, it was possible to build and run it on Linux, macOS and Windows, but there wasn't an easy way to deploy KDE programs on macOS and Windows at the time, so the only viable target was Linux. On the other hand, because the chosen architecture, it  was difficult to maintain and port the program to other platforms. Then, several Linux distributions boycotted this application, with the total indifference of the KDE community. Good riddance.

Fast forward to the roaring twenties. Nothing changed for Linux. The vanBasco player is still the king in the Windows world. In spite of most Windows 10 users running a 64 bit Operating System, vanBasco is rotting its 32 bits. The only alternative fulfilling the four mentioned features is Falcosoft MIDI player. I don't know about native macOS alternatives, either. Of course there are players for macOS, and WinAmp for Windows, and even VLC plays MIDI files, but that is not what I'm talking about...

I prefer to avoid hard use cases. Someone asked me once about my VMPK program: how it would be classified? Is it a Game? No, it is not a game, it is a toy! A game has a set of rules that the player must follow to reach the final goal: to win the game. On the other hand, a toy has no written rules. The player can explore, learn, and have fun on its own. No winners, no losers. Sometimes a good game may be repurposed by the users, like Wolfenstein 3D, but it is uncommon. It is in the definition of free software: the freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.

Anyway, here is an usage example for this program: there is a choir, with a conductor or composer that arranges or edits pieces using some MIDI software like Rosegarden, MuseScore, Frescobaldi, or similar. He prints the scores (or exports PDF files for electronic distribution) for the singers. He also exports the pieces as MIDI files, that can be loaded by dmidiplayer, and used by the singers to learn and practice the lyrics and music of each voice. The examples in dmidiplayer include some choral music, edited in Rosegarden and directly exported as MIDI files.

You can download this program for free, either as sources that you may study, modify and build, or an AppImage for any Linux distro, or as ready to install packages for Windows, and macOS, from Sourceforge and GitHub.

There is also a Flatpak available at Flathub. And thanks to deb-multimedia, there are also deb packages for Debian and Ubuntu users.

performance protocols present Nordic Sessions # 2: Walking Protocols II – "Gå-protokoller, on May 8. and 9. 2021 at Lokale, Griffenfeldsgade 27, 2200 Copenhagen (DK). The event is running both days from 10.00 to 17.00 CET and features performative processes by the artists: Mette Kit Jensen – Kristoffer Ørum – Tomas Skovgaard – Anette Friedrich Johannessen (score). Curated by Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen/performance protocols.