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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.

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
• applemedia: vtdec stability, MoltenVK integration and planar video format handling fixes
• audioresample: Fix regression on armv7hf
• bpmdetect: Fixes for stereo and multi-channel modes
• devicemonitor: wait for start thread to finish when listing devices so all the info is there for e.g. v4l2 provider
• fallbacksrc: Add fallback-source and enable-dummy properties
• nvidia: fix cudaconvert performance regression and nvdec device creation regression
• opengl: add GBRA swizzle support, and fix glcolorconvert vertical flip issue on crop
• rtspsrc: include user-agent property in HTTP tunnel requests and fix mikey regression
• threadshare: add leaky mode to dataqueue-based elements
• v4l2: fix negotiation error when trying to force stateful decoders to output dmabufs
• webrtcsink: Add support imx8mp vpuenc_hevc hardware H.265 encoder
• cerbero: Extend gst-plugins-rs melding to Darwin platforms for smaller binary sizes and static linking improvements
• inno Windows installer fixes, including silent install mode via the command line
• macOS: provide script to allow uninstalling the package; relocate absolute paths to Python.framework in wheels
• Various bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

See the GStreamer 1.28.3 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.

For as many speakers as someone can cram into a surround sound system, humans still (generally) only have two ears to listen to those sounds with. This means that, for recording purposes, it’s possible to create incredibly vivid three-dimensional sounds with just two microphones, provided that there’s an actual physical replica of a human ear attached to each microphone. This helps ensure that all the qualities of the sounds are preserved in a way a real human would experience them, and as [David Green] demonstrates, these systems don’t need to be very expensive.

This build doesn’t just use models of human ears for recording sounds through. The silicone ears are mounted on a styrofoam mannequin head as well, which provides some sound isolation between the two microphones, much like a real human head. The ears are mounted in appropriate locations with the microphones installed inside, and the entire microphone apparatus is positioned on a PVC rig with a camera so that binaural audio will be recorded for anything [David] points it at.

Although he had some issues interfacing two microphones using 19th-century technology instead of soldering everything together, the build still eventually came together, and only for around $70 USD. However, this build is a bit dated now, so prices may have changed by now. It’s still a great way to produce realistic stereo sound without breaking the bank, but it’s not the only way of getting this job done.

This project is perhaps the single most passive-aggressive thing we’ve ever seen on this site: rather than tell someone directly to ‘shut up’, [Blytical]’s speech jammer lets you hack their brain from across the room to stop them from speaking. It’s also a bit of an object lesson in why you shouldn’t just copy reference implementations without careful study — by his own implementation, [Blytical] was forced to learn a lot more than he intended going into this project.

The brain hack behind it is called ‘delayed auditory feedback’: by feeding their speech back to the target with a short delay — only 50 to 200 ms — it creates a confounding effect that is apparently very difficult to speak through. The array of ultrasound transducers is used to accurately aim the audio by serving as an inaudible, low-spread carrier wave, as we saw in another project this year. A shotgun mike picks up the audio from the speaker you wish to harass, and an array of audio processing circuitry takes care of the rest.

That’s where problems happen, as [Blytical] admits he just tossed some reference implementations onto a PCB without bothering to think too hard about what he was doing. It’s the datasheet version of vibe coding, and it usually goes about as well — sometimes perfectly, but rarely without a lot of troubleshooting. That troubleshooting is really, really hard when you don’t quite understand why things were laid out the way they were on the datasheet. We don’t blame [Blytical], you can learn a lot when you bite off more than you can chew. The fact that he risked this failure mode rather than do the whole thing in software with a Pi says good things about how he’s conducting his education.

It’s a shame, though, because we’ve been waiting to see another one of these speech jammers in action for quite some time. Perhaps someone will try again; the ultrasonic array portion seems solved, so if the delay circuit was the problem, perhaps a tiny tape loop would suffice.

It's the biggest Commodore Amiga news of the week: Pink Parrot Studio is launching a new "Dynamic Performance Sequencer" with powerful modulation and Trig Tools option, built for jamming right on the computer keyboard. And there's a music album to match. But don't worry: if you have one of those inferior PC or Macintosh machines, you can still get in on the fun with an emulator, no installation or setup required.

The post QuadTrack is a new groovebox for the Amiga (really), plus PC and Mac appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

Ableton Live 12.4 is inbound, with Link Audio support coming to Live, Move, Note, and Push. But Live Audio can also be about routing audio over a network to other hosts, too. Julien Bayle (VOID) has an early, open-source implementation. If you're ready to start experimenting even while this API is still in alpha, you've got a wide variety of sound and visual tools to try, all for free.

The post Link Audio, now in Max, Pd, VCV Rack, TouchDesigner, oF, and plug-ins, free appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

Qtractor 1.6.0 - A Spring'26 Release rncbc Fri, 1 May 2026 - 11:00

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Google has just published the list of students accepted into the Google Summer of Code 2026 program.

Some of the teams usually participating are off this year: Krita and Inkscape are temporarily out of mentors. Let’s take a look at the rest of them.

GIMP

Akascape will completely revamp the keyboard shortcuts configuration dialog and add support for importing and exporting presets, as well as support for multiple shortcuts per action.

blezecon will work on creating an automated infrastructure for validating, publishing, and distributing GIMP extensions.

v4vansh will update GIMP’s text engine to use HarfBuzz directly to extract font data, so that you have better control over formatting and access to various OpenType features.

Waris Maqbool will create PSD-compatible gegl:inner-glow and gegl:bevel operations to use in the PSD importer. They will also port the legacy Sharpen to make it a GEGL meta-operation.

Graphite

This vector/bitmap editor is still relatively unknown, and yet this isn’t the first time they are GSoC participants.

∅space will add currently missing support for SVG features like gradients, patterns, and a text-on-path. They will also create a fallback system so that currently unsupported (as in editing) features would be rasterized and imported as bitmaps.

Ayush Amawate will refactor the on-canvas gizmo code to remove duplicated code and add reusable gizmos (slider, dial, angle) for shape-drawing tools.

Bunnyy aims to improve the text functionality: add a lorem ipsum generator, formatting spans and typographical parameters, text on path, commands to enforce lower-/upper-/title-casing, hyphenation, font fallbacks, flows between text areas, ligatures and vertical typing toggles, and so on.

Timon Schelling will be adding a GPU-accelerated brush engine. The plan is to introduce non-destructive, resolution-independent stroke rendering with support for stylus pressure and tilt.

Yohei Yamasaki will refactor Graphite to create a more generalized graphic representation of paints (colors, gradients, patterns, etc.) as ordinary layers. The net outcome will be dedicated Gradient and Pattern nodes, as well as updated Fill and Stroke nodes.

Synfig

ahmedfathy0-0 will add a lattice-based free-form deformation layer to enable organic deformations like squash-and-stretch or facial movements.

Yukta will add per-character text animation support so that things like a typewriter effect are easy to achieve.

Digikam

Srirupa Datta will add an new interface to the database search engine and hook up a lightweight LLM to translate natural-language requests into the right combination of structured filters.

Blender

Bipin_ will be adding importing and exporting of OpenTimelineIO (.otio) files to VSE.

il4n will add handles to transitions such as crossfades in the VSE, so that users can move the transitions and change their length.

Criss-Ivana will port the following matrix & math utility nodes into the Compositor: Matrix SVD, Bit Math, Boolean Math, Integer Math, Compare, Float To Int, Hash Value, and Random Value.

Evan Luo will improve mesh smoothing by overcome fundamental limitations, such as volume shrinkage, no frequency selectivity, and selection boundary artifacts.

Henry Jiang will improve loop editing: add clone support for Edge Slide, implement edge loop adjustment via spline interpolation, and add loop cut curvature preservation.

Jerry Wei will improve the brush engine: add brush tip roundness for more brushes, customizable pressure curves for all pressure-sensitive parameters, customizable brush toggling and improved toggle display, etc.

Owen O’Malley will introduce the MaterialX standard node library into Blender’s shader editor as first-class native nodes.

Yogeshgouda_Patil will improve regression test coverage.

FreeCAD

Aymi will be working on bridging the 3rd-party Motion workbench with the FEM workbench to created animated multibody dynamics visualizations. It’s going to be a very challenging project, but she has great mentors on her side: long-time FEM contributor Mario Alexis and multi-body dynamics expert Aik-Siong Koh who is behind the assembly solver of FreeCAD and one of the two developers behind MbdFEM.

Morten Vajhøj will be overhauling the user experience in the TechDraw workbench. His focus will be on changing the way you annotate geometry: instead of selecting an object and then choosing the command you will now select what you want to do and then what to apply it to. This will bring TD in line with the rest of FreeCAD. Of course, applicable objects under the cursor will be highlighted, and inapplicable objects will be unavailable for the selected tool.

Nishendra Singh will attempt to revive and modernize the Robot workbench. This is going to be a colossal effort that, I’ve no doubt, will have to continue past the GSoC22026 deadline. This project’s scope is replacing CSV/DH file imports with URDF imports, exporting the joint & trajectory data, Orocos KDL kinematics library refresh (currently years behind the upstream), and updating the documentation.

Parag Debnath will integrate the buildingSMART Data Dictionary into the BIM workbench, so you can search and apply international classification standards from the cloud to selected IFC entities.

YashSuthar983 will create an initial version of the 3D parametric sketching workbench that could be later merged into the existing Sketcher workbench. For that, the student will extend the existing PlaneGCS solver to 3D by adding new primitives and spatial constraints.

Some of the students have been active in the project recently. Morten Vajhøj has 8 pull requests for the Measure tool merged. For YashSuthar983, 25 pull requests have already been merged (mainly around the core, Sketcher, and the Measure tool), another 5 PRs are open (for Sketcher, the Measure tool, and PartDesign).

BRL-CAD et al.

In the Google Summer of Code program, BRL-CAD is an umbrella organization comprised of OpenSCAD, IfcOpenShell, Bonsai BIM (formerly Blender BIM), and BRL-CAD itself.

AnshulPatil2005 will improve Manifold’s CI and benchmarking by adding missing determinism, sanitizer, and performance regression checks.

Bidyendu will add an optional AI assistant for OpenSCAD using either locally running models via Ollama or any OpenAI-compatible server, at user’s preference. The intention is to give users the ability to use the benefits of AI without compromising privacy.

RaghavSharma0125 will add an MCP server to BRL-CAD, so you can interact with the program through any external MCP client.

Kanchan Borole will improve the Geometry Verification and Validation (V&V) user interface in Arbalest, the Qt-based UI for BRL-CAD.

MYoder will enhance Bonsai BIM (formerly Blender BIM) with tools for BIM-type modeling of roadways using the IFC 4.3 schema. TThe scope of the project is vertical alignments (horizontal already implemented), cross-section profiles, and corridor generation.

Pitivi

The video editor has been participating at GSoC for years through the GNOME Foundation org. This year, Michael Calabrese will be rewriting the timeline ruler in GTK4/Rust to make it more robust.

Kdenlive

Yash Bavadiya will improve the UI for three parts of the program: create a tabbed per-channel widget for the Curves effect, implement a gradient editor with arbitrary draggable color stops, and add Bezier handle support on RemapView connector lines with easing presets for the Time Remapping panel.

Mixxx

Ayush Sah will rebuild the LateNight skin as a 100% native QML interface. This is supposed to reduce the CPU overhead and bring cleaner architecture.

Priyanshuwu will add PipeWire support so that audio can be freely routed. They will also attempt to achieve ALSA-comparable latency with the new audio backend.

GRAME

GRAME is not a very well-known org, but if you are into audio, you may have heard of Faust, a functional programming language for sound synthesis and audio processing. There are two very cool GSoC projects this year.

Blake North will be integrating Faust into Bespoke Synth. Essentially, you will be able to edit and run Faust programs in real-time.

Another student, Mithaniel V., will integrate Faust into the Godot game engine. There will be two deliverables: a Faust Godot extension and a command line tool to compile Faust programs into Godot native language statically.

More projects

I don’t usually cover VLC and FFmpeg, but they do have students this year as well.

If you are interested in astronomy and space exploration, check our OpenAstronomy and LibreCube projects.

Vee One Suite 1.4.2 - A Spring'26 Release rncbc Thu, 30 Apr 2026 - 19:00

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Notstandskomitee made a remix for Aalborgs electronic act AU2PILOT, released on the album Fatamorgana - Remixed on the label NOIZ, available as download or CD-R.
https://autofilter.bandcamp.com/album/au2pilot-fatamorgana-remixed

I didn’t have time yet to blog about liquidsfz-0.4.1, which was released two weeks ago, so here is a quick overview of the bigger changes.

The .sfz parser was made more robust, which means that broken .sfz files (there are some files out there which load fine in sforzando but have questionable syntax) can be loaded with a best-effort strategy. These files now produce warnings instead of an error.

Three different problems were fixed that could in some situations cause audible clicks, so updating from a previous version is recommended. A few smaller fixes (and two new opcodes) improve compatibility with more .sfz files. Finally, some improvements were made to the LV2 plugin.

• liquidsfz-0.4.1 source code
• precompiled statically linked linux 64bit binary
• full list of changes (github release)

The experimental electronic project TMS (Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen, Malte Steiner) will perform their piece Occurrences at Lydknust 26 festival in Esbjerg (DK) 19. April.
Occurrences debut was 2024 in Helsinki and for it TMS developed a cybernetic system which registers and processes their sonic inputs coming from metal percussion and tactile resonance via piezo-microphones. The computer responds to their playing and calculates control data, not only for internal sound synthesis but also for an external DIY modular synthesizer and real-time generated visuals.

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
• audioencoder: allow change of channel configuration with avenc_aac
• audioinvert: fix float format handling
• h264parse, h265parse, baseparse: Preserve upstream buffer duration if possible
• compositor: fix segfault with force-live=true and no sink pads (regression)
• fallbacksrc: send select-streams event to collection source element directly
• hlsdemux2: fix seekable range for live HLS streams
• glupload: Fix linking glupload with restrictive caps filter
• nvcodec: Add capability caching to speed up plugin initialization
• RTP and RTCP packet handling fixes
• RTSP server fixes for clean-up of timed out play requests
• video-converter: fix I420/A420 BGRA/ARGB output on big-endian
• qtdemux: fix invalid WebVTT timestamps, and other fixes
• qmlgl6sink: Qt6GLVideoItem caps update handling fixes
• threadshare udp sink and source fixes
• transcriberbin and speechmatics text-to-speech fixes and improvements
• videorate: Fix wrong caps in case of PTS going backward
• vtdec: more Apple VideoToolbox decoder fixes
• wavparse: Fix parsing of RF64 wave files
• wasapi2sink: Ignore transient device errors from default device
• waylandsink: various fixes and improvements
• WebRTC DTLS robustness/stability improvements
• Cerbero: Various inno Windows installer fixes and improvements; new 'gstreamer_bundle' wheels meta-package
• Various bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

See the GStreamer 1.28.2 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.

What Is Imagewmark? How do you embed a secret message into an image that survives cropping, scaling, and compression without needing the original source to decode it? Imagewmark is a Free Software tool that does exactly this. It embeds encrypted invisible digital watermarks (128 bits) into images…

What Is jj-fzf? The Jujutsu VCS has flexible expressions for specifying revision sets and allows non-linear editing of (ancestry) commits. jj-fzf is an interactive TUI that turns the jj log output into a fast keyboard driven control panel. Based on fzf, it allows live revset editing, instant diff…

The main goal of liquidsfz is to implement a library that supports playing .sfz files and is easy to integrate into other projects. We also provide a JACK client and a LV2 plugin.

A new version, liquidsfz-0.4.0 is now available.

• liquidsfz-0.4.0 source code
• precompiled statically linked linux 64bit binary

The release adds support for parametric equalizers and some other new opcodes. It implements some extended CCs and generators (like sample=*sine), as well as parsing and loading programs from AriaBank .bank.xml files. A custom UI for the LV2 plugin was added to be able to select AriaBank programs in the LV2 plugin.

For a full list of changes, see the github release.