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Recent updates for the visual programming environment plugdata (a wrapped for Pure Data) and the powerful object library cyclone are keeping the goodness going. Whether you're looking to do patching and development in a graphical tool or just enjoy the free stuff people are making with Pd, that's great news.

The post plugdata, cyclone get major updates — free stuff for patchers and end users appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

Here is the first 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 concerts Elektronengehirn and Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen,

Elektronengehirn

Elektronengehirn

Elektronengehirn

Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen

Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen

We released Ardour 9.2 today, a quick hotfix for a silly problem with ruler visibility. It also has a fix for an uncommon (we hope!) crash on Windows. The main release notes have been updated, and you can download at the usual place.

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If you haven't tried Ardour in a while -- or if you're new to the idea that a DAW could be free and open source -- you might be surprised. Major updates and a lot of listening to users means you don't have to sacrifice features like clip recording and editing (including looping), piano roll windows, and more. Plus you get things a lot of tools can't do, like region effects. Ardour is worth downloading on macOS, Windows, or Linux -- any of them.

The post Ardour 9.2, free and open DAW, grants user wishes — Region FX, anyone? appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

Malte Steiners first painting this year: The Taking Of Greenland
40x30 cm airbrush and oil on canvas

part of the art project Absolute Power 

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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QjackCtl 1.0.5 - A Mid-Winter'26 Release rncbc Mon, 16 Feb 2026 - 18:00

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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!

The GStreamer team is excited to announce a new major feature release of your favourite cross-platform multimedia framework!

As always, this release is again packed with new features, bug fixes and many other improvements.

The 1.28 release series adds new features on top of the previous 1.26 series and is part of the API and ABI-stable 1.x release series of the GStreamer multimedia framework.

Highlights:

• AMD HIP plugin and integration helper library
• Vulkan Video AV1 and VP9 decoding, H.264 encoding, and 10-bit support for H.265 decoder
• waylandsink: Parse and set the HDR10 metadata and other color management improvements
• Audio source separation element based on demucs in Rust
• Analytics combiner and splitter elements plus batch meta to batch buffers from one or more streams
• LiteRT inference element; move modelinfo to analytics lib; add script to help with modelinfo generation and upgrade
• Add general classifier tensor-decoder, facedetector, and more analytics convenience API
• New tensordecodebin element to auto-plug compatible tensor decoders based on their caps and many other additions and improvements
• Add a burn-based YOLOX inference element and a YOLOX tensor decoder in Rust
• applemedia: VideoToolbox VP9 and AV1 hardware-accelerated decoding support, and 10-bit HEVC encoding
• Add new GIF decoder element in Rust with looping support
• input-selector: implements a two-phase sinkpad switch now to avoid races when switching input pads
• The inter wormhole sink and source elements gained a way to forward upstream events to the producer as well as new fine-tuning properties
• webrtcsink: add renegotiation support and support for va hardware encoders
• webrtc WHEP client and server signaller
• New ST-2038 ancillary data combiner and extractor elements
• fallbacksrc gained support for encoded streams
• flv: enhanced rtmp H.265 video support, and support for multitrack audio
• glupload: Implement udmabuf uploader to share buffers between software decoders/sources and GPUs, display engines (wayland), and other dma devices
• video: Add crop, scale, rotate, flip, shear and more GstMeta transformation
• New task pool GstContext to share a thread pool amongst elements for better resource management and performance, especially for video conversion and compositing
• New Deepgram speech-to-text transcription plugin and many other translation and transcription improvements
• Speech synthesizers: expose new "compress" overflow mode that can speed up audio while preserving pitch
• ElevenLabs voice cloning element and support for Speechmatics speaker identification API
• textaccumulate: new element for speech synthesis or translation preprocessing
• New vmaf element to calculate perceptual video quality assessment scores using Netflix's VMAF framework
• decodebin3: expose KLV, ID3 PES and ST-2038 ancillary data streams with new metadata GstStream type
• New MPEG-H audio decoding plugin plus MP4 demuxing support
• LCEVC: Add autoplugging decoding support for LCEVC H265 and H266 video streams and LCEVC H.265 and H.266 encoders
• RTP "robust MPEG audio", raw audio (L8, L16, L24), and SMPTE ST291 ancillary metadata payloaders/depayloaders in Rust
• Add a Rust-based icecastsink element with AAC support
• The Windows IPC plugin gained support for passing generic data in addition to raw audio/video, and various properties
• New D3D12 interlace and overlay compositor elements, plus many other D3D12 improvements
• Blackmagic Decklink elements gained support for capturing and outputting all types of VANC via GstAncillaryMeta
• GstLogContext API to reduce log spam in several components and `GST_DEBUG_ONCE` (etc) convenience macros to log things only once
• hlssink3, hlscmafsink: Support the use of a single media file, plus I-frame only playlist support
• Webkit: New wpe2 plugin making use of the "WPE Platform API"
• MPEG-TS demuxer can now disable skew corrections
• New Qt6 QML render source element
• qml6gloverlay: support directly passing a QQuickItem for QML the render tree
• unifxfdsink: Add a property to allow copying to make sink usable with more upstream elements
• dots-viewer: Improve dot file generation and interactivity
• Python bindings: more syntactic sugar, analytics API improvements and type annotations
• cerbero: add support for Python wheel packaging, Windows ARM64, new iOS xcframework, Gtk4 on macOS and Windows, and more plugins
• Smaller binary sizes of Rust plugins in Windows and Android binary packages
• Peel: New C++ bindings for GStreamer
• Lots of new plugins, features, performance improvements and bug fixes
• Countless bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

For more details check out the GStreamer 1.28 release notes.

Many thanks to everyone who contributed to this release!

Binaries for Android, iOS, macOS and Windows will be provided in due course.

You can download release tarballs directly here: gstreamer, gst-plugins-base, gst-plugins-good, gst-plugins-ugly, gst-plugins-bad, gst-libav, gst-rtsp-server, gst-python, gst-editing-services, gst-devtools, gstreamer-vaapi, gstreamer-sharp, gstreamer-docs.

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.

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 contains both bug fixes and new features.

Highlights:

• Initial 64-bit RISC-V support
• Add 64-bit LoongArch support
• Implement release and reuse of temporary registers for some targets
• x86: Implement EVEX encoding and an opcode validation system
• x86: Opcode refactor, improved constant handling and various other fixes
• x86: add missing rounding operands for AVX and SSE
• x86: Implement 64-bit single move constant load
• includes: stop exporting the private compiler and OrcTarget definitions
• Use hotdoc instead of gtk-doc to generate the documentation
• ORC_DEBUG_FATAL environment variable allows abort on log messages of a certain level
• Error message improvements and NEON backend clean-ups
• Fix a few valgrind issues
• Build: enable tools such as orcc and orc-bugreport by default
• Various build fixes

Direct tarball download: orc-0.4.42.tar.xz.

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.

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