planet.linuxaudio.org

Malte Steiner is going to show art works from 2017 - 2026 at his exhibition Assorted Realities at XM3 Aalborg (DK) from 24. June - 27. June 

 

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
• audioaggregator: fixes for conversion of in-progress buffers when input caps change
• audioresample: more armv7 fixes
• camerabin: Fix caps negotiation failure when starting video capture
• Debug logging performance improvements
• fmp4mux: Fix draining in chunk mode after partial GOPs were drained
• gldownload: fix handling of directly imported dmabufs from glupload
• matroskamux: Write ReferenceBlock for non-keyframe video in BlockGroups
• rtp2: session: add "stats" property
• rtspsrc2: handle parse errors with TCP interleaved more gracefully where the server just drops data
• rtspsrc2: implement support for SRTP, authentication, HTTP tunnelling, keep alive, stream selection, TLS validation, latency configuration
• st2038combiner: only forward video pad segment, fixing issues for cases where the ST2038 segment differs
• Wavpack audio: Various channel and channel-mask related fixes
• webrtc, sdp: set level in negotiated caps only if level asymmetry not allowed, fixing an H.264 negotiation regression with higher resolutions
• androidmedia: add various new codec mime / profile mappings (WMV, VC1, AC3/EAC3/AC4, AAC, H265) and support decoding FLAC
• d3d12decoder: Fix decoding on Qualcomm GPUs on ARM64 Windows
• wasapi2src: fix hang when using loopback-target-pid (regression from 1.26)
• cerbero: update to Rust 1.96, plus glib-networking OpenSSL backend fixes
• Various bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

See the GStreamer 1.28.4 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.

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

Changes:

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

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

Changes:

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

TMS (Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen and Malte Steiner) are performing their piece Occurrences at Linux Audio Conference 2026 at University Maynooth Ireland 19. June 2026
and a concert 15. August 2026 at Sydhavnens Festival Aarhus (DK)

At attention! Unfiltered Audio has taken their deep drum synth and favorite effects and remade them as VCV Rack modules. This is instabuy territory ($10-20 a la carte or an intro pricing of $30 for the set, compatible with the free Rack).

The post Unfiltered Audio Battalion drum synth, FX in VCV Rack are a revelation appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

QmidiCtl 1.0.3 - A Mid-Spring'26 Release rncbc Wed, 3 Jun 2026 - 06:00

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QmidiNet 1.0.2 - A Mid-Spring'26 Release rncbc Wed, 3 Jun 2026 - 05:00

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Epic layoffs in March cut deep into the audio and music teams. But there's hope that their work will live on in Unreal Engine and MetaSounds, via what is arguably the most innovative sound work built into any game engine. Unreal Engine 5.8, now in preview, features a bunch of powerful tools for working with sound, one of the biggest sound releases yet. Here's a look at what's in that roadmap.

The post Unreal Engine 5.8 is a major audio release, despite Epic staffing cuts appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

In 2018 I recreated this blog with an SSG (Static Site Generator) in Python based on pandoc (asciidoctor for older pages), git timestamps and Jinja2 templates. Even though it cached pandoc invocations, building still took too long for my taste and lately I didn’t really feel at ease with modifying…

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.

Ubuntu Studio’s web presence has been spread across several Canonical-hosted systems for a long time: the main website on an old Canonical web server, the Ubuntu Community Help Wiki at help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuStudio, and the Ubuntu Developer Wiki at wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuStudio. Those platforms served their purpose, but each had become a poor fit for how the project actually works today.

What’s Moving

The main Ubuntu Studio website has already moved away from Canonical hosting and onto its current home. That move was driven by necessity: Canonical shut down the old web server that had hosted the site, so Ubuntu Studio needed a new home for its primary web presence. This has been a mostly transparent process and most users would never have noticed a difference.