by herrsteiner (noreply@blogger.com) at March 29, 2026 06:18 PM
The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the beta release of Ubuntu Studio 26.04 LTS, codenamed “Resolute Raccoon”.
While this beta is reasonably free of any showstopper installer bugs, you will find some bugs within. This image is, however, mostly representative of what you will find when Ubuntu Studio 26.04 LTS is released on April 17, 2026.
As an LTS release, Ubuntu Studio 26.04 will be supported for 3 years until April 2029. We encourage everyone to try this image and report bugs to improve our final release.
The Ubuntu Studio 26.04 LTS disk image (ISO) exceeds 4 GB and cannot be downloaded to some file systems such as FAT32 and may not be readable when burned to a DVD. For this reason, we recommend downloading to a compatible file system. When creating a boot medium, we recommend creating a bootable USB stick with the ISO image or burning to a Dual-Layer DVD.
Images can be obtained from this link: https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/26.04/beta/
Full updated information, including Upgrade Instructions, are available in the Release Notes.
Please note that upgrading from 24.04 LTS before the release of 26.04.1, due August 2026, is unsupported.
A common piece of feedback we hear is that people prefer to start with a lean base and install only the tools they actually use, rather than getting an overwhelming number of pre-installed packages. We hear you.
Ubuntu Studio includes a minimal install option in the installer, and has since 24.10! This gives you the Ubuntu Studio desktop experience: the theme, the audio configuration and the optimized settings without the full suite of creative applications. From there, you can use Ubuntu Studio Installer to add exactly the workflows you want: audio, graphics, video, photography, or publishing; à la carte.
Alternatively, if you’re already running Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, or any other official Ubuntu flavor, you don’t have to reinstall at all. Just install the Ubuntu Studio Installer package and pick the components you need. This has always been an option, but we want to make sure everyone knows about it.
The full install remains available for those who want a complete creative workstation out of the box, and that’s a perfectly valid choice too.
This is an LTS release, which means stability and polish have been the primary focus. That said, there’s a lot that’s new and improved since 24.04 LTS.
There are many other improvements, too numerous to list here. We encourage you to look around the freely-downloadable ISO image.
Please test using the test cases on https://iso.qa.ubuntu.com. All you need is a Launchpad account to get started.
Additionally, we need financial contributions. Our project lead, Erich Eickmeyer, is working long hours on this project and trying to generate a part-time income. Go here to see how you can contribute financially (options are also in the sidebar).
Q: Does Ubuntu Studio contain snaps? A: Yes. Mozilla’s distribution agreement with Canonical changed, and Ubuntu was forced to no longer distribute Firefox in a native .deb package. We have found that, after numerous improvements, Firefox now performs just as well as the native .deb package did.
Thunderbird is also a snap in order for the maintainers to get security patches delivered faster. This is done by the Thunderbird team in cooperation with Canonical.
Additionally, FreeShow is an Electron-based application. Electron-based applications cannot be packaged in the Ubuntu repositories in that they cannot be packaged in a traditional Debian source package. While such apps do have a build system to create a .deb binary package, it circumvents the source package build system in Launchpad, which is required when packaging for Ubuntu. However, Electron apps also have a facility for creating snaps, which can be uploaded and included. Therefore, for FreeShow to be included in Ubuntu Studio, it had to be packaged as a snap.
Also, to keep theming consistent, all included themes are snapped in addition to the included .deb versions so that snaps stay consistent with our themes.
We are working with Canonical to make sure that the quality of snaps goes up with each release, so we please ask that you give snaps a chance instead of writing them off completely.
Q: If I install this Beta release, will I have to reinstall when the final release comes out? A: No. If you keep it updated, your installation will automatically become the final release.
Q: Will you make an ISO with {my favorite desktop environment}? A: To do so would require creating an entirely new flavor of Ubuntu, which would require going through the Official Ubuntu Flavor application process. Since we’re completely volunteer-run, we don’t have the time or resources to do this. Instead, we recommend you download the official flavor for the desktop environment of your choice and use Ubuntu Studio Installer to get Ubuntu Studio — which does not convert that flavor to Ubuntu Studio but adds its benefits.
Q: What if I don’t want all these packages installed on my machine? A: See the “Only Install What You Need” section above. Use the minimal install option and then add only the workflows you want with Ubuntu Studio Installer.
Petri Kuljuntausta: When Birds Dream of Dinosaurs... and Sing a Song to Ancient Times & Aspen
concert 13. February 2026 as part of Block 4 dialogues I at Toinen Kerros / Äänen Lumo, Helsinki (FI)
https://block4.com/dialogues1.php
The impetus for the solo performance is birdsong and the structure of birdsong. We do not know what the birds "say" in their songs. But at least we can imagine the themes that have been passed down from one generation of birds to another. Petri Kuljuntausta: guitar, electronics. Petri Kuljuntausta improvises as a guitarist and with electronic instruments, plays with animals and birds, makes underwater performances, performs in different natural spaces with environmental sounds, compose electronic music and create sound art. Kuljuntausta is currently developing the technique on how to play as an artist with nature and animals: How to connect through sound to the sound processes of the environment equally and without disturbing the nature's own sound processes.
ASPEN The work is based on two soundscape recordings Kuljuntausta made in summer 2025: a huge aspen tree swaying in the wind on the shore of a lake, and early morning bird soundscape. The work begins with the rustling sound field created by the leaves. When the wind blows, thousands of leaves beat against each other. As the protein-rich leaves of the aspen are hard, this produce rhythmic sounds when they hit each other. A wide "clapping sound field" is created. A few dotted water sounds and the splashing of water might tune the ear to the waves. But this is an illusion, it is the sound of aspen. The second sound layer is a modified, abstracted and distanced, bird soundscape. This provided a starting point for new sounds generated with granular synthesis. The work ends as it began, with the sound of a huge aspen tree in the wind.
by herrsteiner (noreply@blogger.com) at March 26, 2026 10:19 AM
An MRI scan is never a pleasant occasion – even if you aren’t worried about the outcome, lying still in a confined, noisy space for long periods of time is at best an irksome experience. For hearing protection and to ameliorate boredom or claustrophobia, the patient wears headphones. Since magnets and wires can’t be used inside an MRI machine, the headphones have to literally pipe the sound in through tubes, which gives them poor sound quality and reduces the amount of noise they can block. [SomethingAboutScience], however, thinks that photoacoustic speakers could improve on these, and built some to demonstrate.
These speakers use the photoacoustic effect, which is mostly caused by surface heating when exposed to an intense light, then transferring the heat to the surrounding air, which expands. If the surface can transfer heat to the air quickly enough, and if the light source is modulated quickly, the rapid expansions and contractions in the surrounding air create sound waves. As a test, [SomethingAboutScience] shone a modulated 5-Watt laser on a piece of gold leaf, which produced recognizable music.
Gold leaf works because it absorbs blue light well and is thin enough to transfer heat to the air quickly. To cut out the absorbing surface, [SomethingAboutScience] also shone the laser directly into orange nitrogen dioxide gas, which produced a somewhat cleaner sound (in a purely auditory sense; nitrogen dioxide is quite dangerous, and calling it “a little toxic” is an understatement). Soot-coated glass also worked rather well, though a soot-coated glass smoking pipe didn’t provide the desired acoustics. He also 3D-printed an earphone shape with a gold leaf-lined cavity inside it, then used a fibre-optic cable to direct the laser light into it. We would be personally reluctant to couple a 5-Watt laser into a reflective cavity centimeters from our eardrums, but it didn’t appear to damage its surroundings.
We’ve seen the photoacoustic effect used before to perform long-range, almost silent command injection to voice assistants. It’s also possible to use lower-power lasers and beam sound directly into people’s ears.
Thanks to [Marble] for the tip!
The GStreamer team is pleased to announce the first development snapshot in the API/ABI-unstable 1.29 release series.
The API/ABI-unstable 1.29 release series is for testing and development purposes in the lead-up to the stable 1.30 series which is scheduled for release in Q4 2026. Any newly-added API can still change until that point.
This development release is primarily for developers and early adopters, and distros should probably not package it.
Highlighted changes:
Binaries for Android, iOS, Mac OS X and Windows will be made available shortly at the usual location.
Release tarballs can be downloaded directly here:
As always, please give it a spin and let us know of any issues you run into by filing an issue in GitLab.
Hi all,
Change-log:
Description:
Website:
Project page:
Downloads:
Git repos:
Wiki:
License:
Enjoy && Keep the fun!
The GStreamer project is thrilled to announce that there will be a spring hackfest on Friday-Sunday 29-31 May 2026 in Nice, France.
For more details and latest updates check out the announcement on Discourse.
We will announce any further updates on Discourse, but you can also follow us on Bluesky and on on Mastodon.
We hope to see you in Nice!
Please spread the word!
The year was 1996. And Trent Reznor and NIN loved id Software so much that they made a deep, dark, legendary soundtrack for the breakthrough game Quake, for no fee — just for “friendship.” At a time when creativity can feel under attack, and the real world is starting to seem a little, uh, Quake-like, […]
The post That time NIN made a perfect ambient industrial soundtrack for Quake appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.
Hi everybody,
The Vee One Suite, the gang-of-four old-school software instruments,
Are here released for the (northern) Early-Spring'26 season update...
All delivered in dual form:
Change-log:
The Vee One Suite are free, open-source Linux Audio software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 or later.
synthv1 - an old-school polyphonic synthesizer
synthv1 is an old-school all-digital 4-oscillator subtractive polyphonic synthesizer with stereo fx.
samplv1 - an old-school polyphonic sampler
samplv1 is an old-school polyphonic sampler synthesizer with stereo fx.
drumkv1 - an old-school drum-kit sampler
drumkv1 is an old-school drum-kit sampler synthesizer with stereo fx.
padthv1 - an old-school polyphonic additive synthesizer
padthv1 is an old-school polyphonic additive synthesizer with stereo fx
padthv1 is based on the PADsynth algorithm by Paul Nasca, as a special variant of additive synthesis.
Enjoy && Have fun.
What if you could remake Ableton Move to do anything, using Max -- the audio engine, I/O, every pad, button, encoder, and even the display? That's RNBO support on Move. It's labeled "experimental alpha," but I've been testing RNBO Takeover Mode on Move, and it's already really usable. There's even a lot you can do without patching at all, like running Robert Henke's now-iconic Granulator III. Here's a first look.
The post Max for Move: run RNBO patches on Ableton Move — like Granulator III appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.
They say you should never throw out old clothes because they will come back in style one day. Maybe they are right. We noted in a recent BBC post that, apparently, wired headphones are making a comeback. Like many people, we were dismayed when Apple took the headphone jack out of the iPhone and, as [Thomas Germain] notes, even Google eventually ejected the normal headphone jack. (Although, in fairness, most of the Pixel phones we’ve seen come with a pair of USB-C earbuds.)
On the face of it, though, wireless seems to be a good idea. You can get cheap Bluetooth earbuds now, although maybe still not as cheap as wired buds. Sure, they sound terrible, but so do cheap buds. It is a pain to charge them, of course, but not having to untangle wires is a benefit. On the other hand, you never have to charge your wired headphones.
So why are people suddenly going back to wires? According to the BBC and analytics firm Circana, the second half of 2025 saw an explosion in wired headphone sales, and sales continued to rise in 2026.
The biggest reason cited was sound quality. While Bluetooth has made huge strides in sound quality, you are still trading something for wireless. We have to admit, we get annoyed when the Bluetooth drops out, but we wonder how many people can really hear much difference in audio quality? If you care about latency, maybe that’s a point in the wired gear’s favor. But if your song starts 250 milliseconds late, you probably don’t care. It is only an issue when you have video or games.
Many people, when using a modern Bluetooth stack, can’t tell the difference in audio quality between wired and wireless, especially with normal source material and in typical listening environments.
According to [SoundGuys], while Bluetooth is technically worse, if you are over 24 or not in a perfectly quiet environment, you probably can’t tell the difference. Another study found that casual listeners could only guess which headphones were wireless 50% of the time. Even two pro audio people got it wrong 30% of the time.
The problem historically with Bluetooth is that it creates a digital stream to the headphones, which is compressed and decompressed using a codec. The original codec was SBC (Subband Codec), and it didn’t sound that great.
However, as technology gets better, so do the codecs. AAC, LDAC, and others sound great. LDAC, for example, transmits audio at roughly 990 kbps and with very little distortion.
So when you are looking at Bluetooth sound, you have to account for several things. If your source or destination doesn’t support modern codecs, it might not sound as good as it could. In addition, you are dealing with the headphone’s internal digital-to-analog converter. If you think your $10 earbuds have a converter that matches the audio output from your phone or motherboard, you will probably be disappointed. But that’s not a fault inherent with Bluetooth. Cheap sound devices sound worse than expensive ones, in general.
There are other reasons to go wired. Apparently, some social media influencers have decided that the right pair of wires dangling from your ears is a fashion accessory. Maybe some of it is like the resurgence of vinyl records or typewriters: nostalgia. Or, perhaps it is just a fad. As a practical matter, it does help people see that you are just sitting at your desk swaying for no reason.
Apparently, even the brand and design of headphones are important to fashionistas. For example, the three-year-old video below shows how old Koss headphones with some color changes went viral. (Although of course you can also get a Bluetooth variant.)
While this might not make sense to a Hackaday crowd, headphones have long been a fashion accessory, and headphones like Beats were, at least at one point, the must-have accessory for some people.
Of course, if you really want to make a statement, you can check whether any of the 10 $135,000 headphones are in stock. Or, try a $750,000 pair of Beats, which probably don’t sound as good as you would hope for that price.
There are people who swear they need gold-plated cables or ones with no oxygen or whatever to get the perfect sound. Tests involving sending audio through a banana don’t back that up.
So, sure, you need to invest in good-quality gear. You really need to make sure the whole setup supports something like aptX, LDAC, or even AAC. You also need a good source. Old movies don’t look better on an 8K TV; after all, why should your headphones improve your 1979 mix tape digitized at 32k?
Unless you are worried about latency or you experience dropouts for some reason, there is very little difference for most people. Of course, if you want to use a wired headphone on a modern phone, you probably need an adapter or USB headphones, which basically have the adapter built in. And your audio will only be as good as that adapter, too, so choose wisely. Don’t forget to pick the right cables, too.
If you are experiencing dropouts, you may need better equipment. Or maybe just take your phone out of your pocket with the keys and the RFID-blocking wallet. Bluetooth can, in theory, travel 30 ft, but reality is something else, and interference from other devices can also be a problem, especially if you have a dual WiFi/Bluetooth device in your computer. We’ve heard, too, that unpairing and repairing can sometimes help, although you wouldn’t think it should matter.
One thing we do suggest. As long as wired headphones are a fad, it is probably a great time to list your old wired gear on eBay, Facebook Marketplace, or a similar site. Fads drive prices up, and the old cans may never be worth so much again.
So what do you think? Can you really tell the difference? What’s your daily driver? Let us know in the comments.
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.
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.
oscmix is a relatively new free/libre control program for RME Fireface audio interfaces. It’s both a desktop application (GTK3) and a web app with the same functionality.
Most vendors of audio hardware either don’t bother with Linux support or, in some cases, provide gear and guidance to FOSS developers. I don’t really know which camp RME is in these days, but oscmix seems to be getting there as a free/libre replacement for RME TotalMix FX.
The project was originally developed by Michael Forney. huddx01 picked up where Michael left off last year and started writing missing code and improving things. Nightly builds are now available and make it easier to test the program.
Much like with some other FOSS applications (Qtpfsgui, anyone?), the name reflects what the program actually does under the hood: use OSC over USB MIDI to control the following audio interfaces:
The lead developer doesn’t have a feature parity comparison against TotalMix FX but states this:
Most things work, but still needs a lot more testing, polish, cleanup. Some things still need to be hooked up in the UI or implemented in oscmix.
If you have one of those in the studio and are interested in helping the developer improve the software, check out nightly builds. oscmix is available for both Linux and macOS, both x86_64 and ARM64. The web version is a separate download there.
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.
15 posts - 13 participants
David García Goñi released a new version of Elektroid, a sample and MIDI device manager for Elektron, Arturia, Eventide, Moog, and Novation devices.
Elektroid 3.3 adds support for several devices:
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.
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:
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.
Here are other changes in this release:
acid chunk) with “tempo:x” and “note:x” search options (using locales)smpl chunk)Elektroid is available in source code and as a flatpak build (not yet up to day on flathub).
We are pleased to announce the release of Ardour 9.1. This is primarily a hotfix release intended to correct a number of bugs in the 9.0 release. Most significantly, we have corrected the behavior of the new bottom pane in the Editor which was notably broken by some last minutes changes before 9.0 was released. 9.1 also contain a couple of notable new features (MIDI note chasing and duplication) and several improvements too.
Full release notes are over here.
Download as usual from the usual place.
16 posts - 9 participants
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:
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:
A touch of music
Audio – Stefan Westerfeld's blog
Audio, Linux and the combination
Blog - Ardour
FreqRush - experiences with shared audiosoftware
GStreamer News
Home on Libre Arts
Hometracked
Internet Archive - Collection: osmpodcast
JACK Audio Connection Kit News
KXStudio News
Linux Archives - CDM Create Digital Music
Linux Audio Conference 2018
Linux Recording
LinuxMuso
MOD Audio website
Musings on maintaining Ubuntu
News – Ubuntu Studio
Nothing Special
OpenAV
PipeManMusic
Robin Gareus
SFZ Format news
SFZTools news
Testbit
Thorwil's
Using Open Source Software For Creative Purposes
aubio
blog4
digital audio hacks – Hackaday
drobilla.net - LAD
fundamental code
harryhaaren
joanillo.org
joebutton.co.uk
linux-audio « WordPress.com Tag Feed
linux_audio – autostatic.com
m3ga blog
process();
rncbc.org - a.k.a. Rui Nuno Capela
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March 30, 2026 06:04 PM
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