planet.linuxaudio.org

Zrythm v1.0.0-alpha.8.0.1 has been released!

Screenshot: 
https://forum.zrythm.org/uploads/default/original/1X/e29b52f7cb3298f27edef9fe3cd7ae7ea17d3523.png
(by Open Mastering, CC0)

Demo:
https://mastodon.social/web/statuses/105508375031554860
(by Lana Del DK, 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, 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.

Changes in 1.0.0-alpha.8.0.1:

### Added
- Moving region markers is now undoable

### Changed
- Do not attempt to draw regions if visible width is 0
- Refactor each plugin action into a single mixer selections action
- Refactor each track action into a single tracklist selections action
- Add Arch Linux to exceptions in trademark policy

### Fixed
- Fix automation region mute
- Fix crash when cloning from insert into new track
- Fix crash when moving two effects in the mixer and the new position
overlaps one of them
- Fix start/end markers being deletable
- Fix right channel having lower volume after recording audio in mono
- Fix crash when reaching transport loop end and metronome enabled
- Fix crash when moving a plugin to a slot that has another plugin
- Fix crash when deleting all visible tracks
- Fix regions of hidden tracks being shown in the timeline
- Fix crash when holding down ctrl-d for a long time

Additional changes since last announcement:

### Added
- Add reset right click option in categories in plugin browser
- Plugin collections
- Filter by protocol in plugin browser
- Snap to events and snap-and-keep-offset
- Recording modes: overwrite events, merge events, takes (mute
previous)
- Projects are now samplerate agnostic
- Snap length option: last object
- Add `--gen-project` option to generate projects from Guile scripts
- Expose more Guile API
- Filter plugin list during search

### Changed
- Do not show bug report popup within 8 seconds of previous one
- Move snap settings from main toolbar to each arranger
- Disarm transport record after recording
- Reference clip frames directly for audio regions instead of
duplicating the buffers (lowers RAM usage)
- Improved region drawing performance (better caching)
- User manual: Add more info about timeline editing
- User manual: Compact translations into 1 file for each language
- User manual: Use dark theme for html output
- Update Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese (Simplified), Ukranian,
Russian, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Japanese, Galician, German
translations
- Cache audio region fades

### Fixed
- Fix file browser divider position not being loaded properly
- Fix preferences dialog crash when more than 60 audio input ports
exist
- Fix clip not being duplicated when duplicating audio regions
- Fix selected language not being picked properly
- Fix lane regions not being shown when main region is not visible
- Fix MIDI notes being muted when region is looped and note starts
before clip start marker
- Fix crash when quantizing in audio editor
- Fix audio region fades not showing
- Fix not being able to change fade points in lane regions
- Fix plugin browser collection context menu being shown multiple times
- Fix crash when using `--gdb` and more than 100 env variables exist
- Fix compilation errors when building with latest carla-git
- Fix projects not being loaded properly when using JACK
- Fix protocol selection not working in plugin browser when collection
or category is selected

Full changelog:
https://git.zrythm.org/cgit/zrythm/tree/CHANGELOG.md

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

ZPlugins v0.2.1 has been released!

ZPlugins is a collection of LV2 plugins intended to be bundled with the
Zrythm DAW.

The following plugins are available:
ZChordz - plays chords using white keys
ZCompressorSP - compressor
ZLimiterSP - peak limiter
ZLFO - full-featured LFO for CV-based automation
ZPhaserSP - stereo phaser
ZSaw - supersaw synth with 1 parameter
ZVerbSP - reverb based on zita-rev

Changes in 0.2.1:

### Added
- Add carla-single test

### Fixed
- ZSaw: Fix crash on deactivate
- ZLFO: Fix non-unique scale points for sync_rate
- Fix lv2lint/lv2_validate tests

# Links
Home page: 
Issue trackers: 
Git repositories: 

Drumstick 2.0.0 has been released. There are four libraries now:

• drumstick::ALSA (Linux only)
• drumstick::RT
• drumstick::File
• drumstick::Widgets

• Namespaces reorganization
• Code and build systems modernization
• New library: Drumstick::Widgets providing a PianoKeybd widget plugin for Qt Creator and Qt Designer
• New unit tests for Drumstick::Widgets and Drumstick::File
• Removed OVE support from Drumstick::File
• Translations for Drumstick::Widgets and utils
• Documentation of the new API for Drumstick::Widgets
• Drumstick::RT plugins versioning, allowing runtime coexistence between plugins of drumstick-1 and drumstick-2
• License GPLv3 for all components
  

The new library Drumstick::Widgets includes the virtual piano widget used by VMPK and drumstick-vpiano, and also several configuration dialogs related to some Drumstick::RT plugins. The new features are showcased by the drumstick-vpiano application (and also VMPK, of course).

The piano widget has been improved with some new features, like providing a new signal carrying the played MIDI note name and number, new customizable palettes for the keys background and foreground (font) colors, configurable fonts, and many options for showing note names:

• Show note names: Never / Minimal / When activated / Always
• Black keys names: Sharps / Flats / Nothing
• Names orientation: Horizontal / Vertical / Automatic
• Note names: Standard / Custom
• Octave names (MIDI note 60): C / C3 / C4 / C5

There is also a new plugin for QtCreator and QtDesigner with the name 'libdrumstick-vpiano-plugin.so' which is equivalent to the old Qt4 'vpiano' plugin. It provides design-time support for creating Qt applications leveraging the virtual piano component. Needs to be compiled with the exact same version of the associated Qt5 development tools.

Following the new Drumstick release, several programs have been released too:

VMPK 0.8.0
    Depends on drumstick::RT and drumstick::Widgets (also drumstick::ALSA in Linux)
Drumstick Metronome 1.2.0 (a.k.a. kmetronome, Linux only)
    Depends on drumstick::ALSA
Drumstick MIDI Monitor 1.0.0 (a.k.a. kmidimon, Linux only)
    Depends on drumstick::ALSA and drumstick::File
All of the above are hosted in SourceForge. AppImages for Linux x64 are available.

SonivoxEas 1.3.0
    Depends on drumstick::ALSA (Linux only)
This one is hosted in GitHub, and was presented in this blog before.

Finally a note about VMPK For Android. This app has been removed by Google from the Play Store, with some bureaucratic excuses. It never depended on Drumstick. I need to think about releasing it again, but never returning to the Play Store. I hate app stores.

A new version of JACK2 has just been released.
You can grab the latest release source code at https://github.com/jackaudio/jack2/releases and macOS/Windows installers at https://github.com/jackaudio/jack2-releases/releases.

This release focuses on improvements to the macOS and Windows binaries, now with macOS universal builds natively supporting Apple M1 hardware.
On M1 hardware, you can now have native arm64 JACK clients talk to Intel/x64 once and vice-versa.

On Windows, JACK-Router (the special ASIO driver that allows any ASIO-compatible application to talk to other JACK clients) has been brought back, now integrated with the installer so it is much easier to manage.
Also, 32-bit and 64-bit clients can now be mixed without any side-effects to the meta-data.

Please restart the JACK server after updating to 1.9.17 on those systems.

The official changelog is:

• Add jack-router to Windows installer, opt-in
• Fix jack_control stopping after first command iteration
• Fix library compat/current version under macOS
• Fix registry keys for Windows, add 32bit compat ones on 64bit
• Fix return codes of jackd on success
• Ignore DB_VERSION_MISMATCH error on windows, it is expected
• Remove old workaround for asio4all, as it breaks with jack-router
• Support for arm64 macOS builds
• Show welcome and license pages on windows installer
• Update QjackCtl used in macOS/Windows installers to v0.9.0, with some commits cherry-picked from develop branch

PawPaw is an open-source project that builds and packages cross-platform LV2 audio plugins (among other things, but let's focus on this now).

It was created out of the need of many open-source developers to easily build their stuff for macOS and Windows, where usually dependencies are involved which need to be built manually.
In order to make audio plugins self-contained, these dependencies/libraries need to be built statically, which most packaging projects do not do.
Also, most open-source audio plugin projects do not have binaries for macOS or Windows, making it very difficult for users in these platforms to enjoy them.

That last part is crucial.
While on Linux LV2 is king, with so many plugins released as LV2, the same is not true for other platforms.
I want to change that, so that the usual excuse "but there are no plugins, we won't bother with LV2" of audio developers can no longer be used.
It is the typical circular-dependency problem. There are no hosts because there are no plugins and vice-versa.
Hopefully with a big set of plugins, the situation will change.

For the first release of PawPaw we have the following LV2 plugins: (note some of these are big collections of many plugins themselves)

• abgate
• artyfx
• blop
• caps
• die-plugins
• distrho-ports (arctican, dexed, drowaudio, klangfalter, luftikus, obxd, pitched-delay, refine, tal, temper, vex, wolpertinger)
• dpf-plugins (glBars, kars, max-gen, mini-series, mverb, ndc-plugs, nekobi)
• fomp
• mda

Every single plugin has automated meta-data validation and runtime testing to make sure they work correctly.
The quality of the plugins depends on the respective developer and project of course, but they should be safe from crashes.

A big question now is "how can I use them?".
At this moment, from what I am aware, only Ardour/ Mixbus and Carla support LV2 plugins on these platforms.
Some applications like Audacity, Kushview Element and Mixxx support LV2, but usually only in Linux builds.
Carla works as a VST2 plugin, so you can use it as a way to bridge these to regular hosts, but obviously not ideal.
But hey, one step at a time. We have a few more LV2 plugins now on these platforms, and moving forward the list is only going to grow.

Screenshots

Ardour + Windows

Mixxx + macOS, loading ArtyFX plugins

Downloads

You can find the macOS and Windows installers at https://github.com/DISTRHO/PawPaw/releases.
For macOS, 10.12 is required. These are universal builds that already support x64 and arm64 combined.
For Windows, Windows 7 or superior is recommended, and a CPU capable of doing SSE2 operations is required.

Future plans

For the future, I plan to rework the DISTRHO website so it contains all these details.
Mainly so that it is a better overall presentation.
And of course more plugins, though pull-requests are also very welcome for those.
Carla is slowly in the process of using PawPaw for automated release builds, more on that at a later time.

Hello hello, it is release day again!
Keeping up with the cool people, here is a set of plugin updates for the Quarterly Release Pact.
Do note that these are all source-only releases. For binaries, use your Linux distribution packages or the PawPaw project.
With that said, let's begin...

DISTRHO-Ports 2021-01-14

DISTRHO-Ports is a set of GNU/Linux and LV2 ports, imported into the codebase for easy packaging, maintaince and all that.
This is a bug-fix release, getting the project ready for cross-platform builds and automated validation/testing.
Changelog:

• Fix out of bounds buffer write in drowaudio-reverb (leading to memory corruption and/or crashes)
• Fix lv2 export preset meta-data validation
• Fix lv2 ttl generation when cross-compiling (e.g. using mingw and wine within linux)
• Fix exported symbols
• Fix build/compatibility with macOS 11 / arm64

DIE-Plugins v1.1

DIE-Plugins is a collection of plugins imported into the DISTRHO project for easy packaging.
Currently has only Ardour (Community Effect) plugins, mainly so you no longer need to build the entire Ardour codebase to get these plugins.
Changelog:

• Fix a-fluidsynth port names
• Sync with upstream, now features are listed in ttl thus passing plugin checks/validation
• Use -fopenmp for building internal fluidsynth (where possible)

DPF-Plugins v1.4

DPF-Plugins is a collection of DPF-based plugins, including Kars, MVerb and Nekobi.
This is yet another bug-fix release, tagging a release before a big DPF overhaul planned for next month.
Changelog:

DPF:

• Auto-detect compiler target, fixing as-is build with ARM systems
• Allow to use EXE_WRAPPER as makefile option, to help cross-compilation
• Fix build with headers in custom path
• Fix "make install" for macOS and Windows
• Fix exported LV2 metadata to pass checks/validation
• Make mouse-wheel delta independent of window size

Kars:

• Fix audio buffer reuse, causing bad audio in some hosts

Nekobi:

• Set default MIDI CC for all parameters

More releases coming soon, stay tuned!

The GStreamer team is pleased to announce another bug fix release in the stable 1.18 release series of your favourite cross-platform multimedia framework!

This release only contains bugfixes and it should be safe to update from 1.18.x.

Highlighted bugfixes:

• Fix ogg playback regression for ogg files that also have ID3 or APE tags
• compositor: fix artefacts and invalid memory access when blending subsampled formats
• exported mini object ref/unref/copy functions for use in bindings such as gstreamer-sharp
• Add support for Apple silicon (M1) to cerbero package builder
• Ship RIST plugin in binary packages
• various stability, performance and reliability improvements
• memory leak fixes
• build fixes

See the GStreamer 1.18.3 release notes for more details.

Binaries for Android, iOS, Mac OS X and Windows will be available shortly.

Download 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, gst-omx, or gstreamer-docs.

Ganv 1.8.0 has been released. Ganv is an interactive Gtk canvas widget for graph-based interfaces (patchers, modular synthesizers, finite state automata, interactive graphs, etc). For more information, see http://drobilla.net/software/ganv.

Changes:

• Expand canvas automatically to fit nodes
• Fix various compiler warnings

Jalv 1.6.6 has been released. Jalv is a simple but fully featured LV2 host for Jack which exposes plugin ports to Jack, essentially making any LV2 plugin function as a Jack application. For more information, see http://drobilla.net/software/jalv.

Changes:

• Add a command line argument to select a specific UI
• Explicitly support lv2:inPlaceBroken
• Ignore ports with nonsense lv2:control designations
• Remove Jack session support
• Support port events for ui:showInterface UIs

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 release of liquidsfz is now available (under LGPL2.1+):

• liquidsfz-0.2.2 source code
• precompiled statically linked linux 64bit binary

This release adds SFZ style filters, which means fil_type, cutoff, resonance and a lot of other new opcodes are now supported. All SFZ1 filter types are implemented, and a few SFZ2 filter types (lpf_4p, lpf_6p, hpf_4p, hpf_6p), as well as a filter envelope.

The other bigger change is that the LV2 plugin now reports the supported controllers, the names of the controllers, the names of key switches and the names of the keys to the host using a midnam file. For Ardour6 for instance this means that the names of the keys are shown, as well as the names of the supported controllers, which makes sfzs with exported CCs a lot more usable.

The hydrogen loader also passes this information, so for instance you will see that note 36 is called “Kick” in the loaded hydrogen drumkit.

The full list of changes is in the NEWS files.

In an age of streaming media it’s easy to forget the audio CD, but they still remain as a physical format from the days when the “Play” button was not yet the “Pay” button. A CD player may no longer be the prized possession it once was, but it’s still possible to dabble in the world of 120 mm polycarbonate discs if you have a fancy for it. It’s something [Daniel1111] has done with his Arduino CD player, which uses the little microcontroller board to control a CD-ROM drive via its IDE bus.

The project draws heavily from the work of previous experimenters, notably ATAPIDUINO, but it extends them by taking its audio from the drive’s S/PDIF output. A port expander drives the IDE interface, while a Cirrus Logic WM8805 S/PDIF transceiver handles the digital audio and converts it to an I²S stream. That in turn is fed to a Texas Instruments PCM5102 DAC, which provides a line-level audio output. All the code and schematic can be found in a GitHub repository.

To anyone who worked in the CD-ROM business back in the 1990s this project presses quite a few buttons, though perhaps not enough to dig out all those CDs again. It would be interesting to see whether the I²S stream could be lifted from inside the drive directly, or even if the audio data could be received via the IDE bus. If you’d like to know a bit more about I²S , we have an article for you.

It's one of the all-time great chorus effects - and now you can bite off just the chorus of the Roland Juno and use it as an effect, for free, with this giveaway from Arturia. We've got that - and one competing free chorus, for good measure!

The post Arturia’s Juno-6 chorus recreation is free this week as a plug-in appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

Modular Santa Claus is here, just in the Nick of time. Boutique Scottish Eurorack maker Instruo is dropping a big range of modules in virtual form on VCV Rack - for free. Here's what's inside and where to get started.

The post Free Eurorack holiday – all these Instruo modules are now on VCV Rack; here’s a guide appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

We probably don’t need to tell the average Hackaday reader that the ESP32 is a powerful and extremely flexible microcontroller. We’ve seen some incredible projects using this affordable chip over the last few years, and by the looks of it, the best is yet to come. That’s because it always takes some time before the community can really figure out how to get the most out of a piece of hardware.

Take for example the Bluetooth audio player that [squix] was recently working on. Getting the music going was no problem with the esp32-a2dp library, but when he wanted to add some visualizations the audio quality took a serious hit. Realizing that his Fast Fourier transform (FFT) code was eating up too much processor power, it seemed like a great time for him to explore using the ESP32’s second core.

[squix] had avoided poking around with the dual-core nature of the ESP32 in the past, believing that the second core was busy handling the WiFi communication. But by using the FreeRTOS queue system, he wrote some code that collects audio data with one core and runs the actual FFT magic on the other. By balancing the workload like this, he’s able to drive the array of 64 WS2812B LEDs on the front of the Icon64 seen in the video after the break.

Even if you’re not terribly interested in running your own microcontroller disco, this project may be just the example you’ve been waiting for to help get your mind wrapped around multitasking on the ESP32. If you want to master a device with this many tricks up its sleeve, you’ll need all the help you can get.

The GStreamer team is pleased to announce another bug fix release in the stable 1.18 release series of your favourite cross-platform multimedia framework!

This release only contains bugfixes and it should be safe to update from 1.18.x.

Highlighted bugfixes:

• Fix MPEG-TS timestamping regression when playing DVB streams
• compositor: fix artefacts in certain input scaling/conversion situations and make sure that the output format is actually supported, plus renegotiation fixes
• Fix sftp:// URI playback in decodebin/playbin via giosrc
• adaptivedemux/dashdemux/hlsdemux fixes
• rtsp-server fixes
• android media: fix crash when encoding AVC
• fix races in various unit tests
• lots of other bug fixes and memory leak fixes
• various stability, performance and reliability improvements
• g-i annotation fixes
• build fixes

See the GStreamer 1.18.2 release notes for more details.

Binaries for Android, iOS, Mac OS X and Windows will be available shortly.

Download 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, gst-omx, or gstreamer-docs.

 https://notstandskomitee.bandcamp.com/album/strom-2020-remaster

After the 1995 CD 731 I sensed a need for an antithesis to the harsh sound and gritty topic of violence of that album. So I came up with the idea to create retro futuristic songs which are more on the uplifting side, done with modern, mainly digital sounds courtesy of the FZ-1 sampler and TG77 FM synthesizer which was the latest entry that time in the block 4 studio. The TG77 was already dominating the sound on 731 and later the Betriebssystem album by Das Kombinat. Augmented with a choice of analog gear, mostly Matrix6r and Sixtrak, the songs were still created with the Q80 sequencer, vocals were recorded on tape in sync with the sequencer. Hardiskrecording had not arrived nor been affordable for us so everything was mixed in one go and cut directly to DAT. Post mastering was technical not possible in the block 4 studio and the label had no budget to give it to a mastering studio so the CD is a bit rough and uneven. Fast forward some decades, now its easy to treat everything in the computer with modern tools and so I could bring Strom closer to its original vision.

While Strom was 1997 the antithesis, the tracks on the 1999 album Y2K, which was released as a split CD with the Brazil act Cyberthreat, was the synthesis and blueprint of the Notstandskomitee style today.

Malte Steiner | Notstandskomitee 2020

Yeah, what about it? Well, not much really. I have acquired the linuxaudio.org domain name since that is more practical when it comes to DNS changes as I am one of the root admins of the linuxaudio.org servers. When it comes to making music I’m still exclusively using Linux but I’ve shifted to a monolithic approach. I bought a Mixbus32C license a couple of years ago, clicked on ALSA as Audio System and never looked back.

My interest also shifted to the analog domain. Having a busy job in the digital domain I found myself more and more avoiding computers outside of work. In the same time I got more involved in making music and I’ve also dived into the world of analog electronics. I’ve always wanted to know how guitar effects and tube amplifiers work so I just started building effects a few years ago and by now I can also bias my own amps and do simple mods. I’m also learning how to get the most out of my guitars when it comes to intonation, action, pickup height and electronics, that kind of stuff. It’s very gratifying to be able to do those kind of things yourself, to pick up a guitar you’ve serviced yourself and that it plays and sounds like a dream.

So next up is building my own amp, got all the parts and I have two weeks off around Christmas so hopefully I can start the new year with a screaming solo from my own amp. Building my own guitar would be awesome too. A complete DIY setup, I’d love that.

The post And what about Linux audio? appeared first on autostatic.com.