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Vee One Suite 1.4.1 - An Early-Spring'26 Release rncbc Wed, 18 Mar 2026 - 18:00

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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.

qpwgraph v1.0.0 - An Early-Spring'26 Release rncbc Tue, 17 Mar 2026 - 18:00

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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.

Quality of Sound

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.

It Got Better

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.

Other Reasons

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.

Back to Reality

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.

Your Turn

So what do you think? Can you really tell the difference? What’s your daily driver? Let us know in the comments.

[Nick] came across an awesome Bluetooth speaker online, only, there was a problem. It didn’t really exist—it was just a render of a device that would be nice to have. Of course, there was an obvious solution—[Nick] just had to build the device for real!

The key to the aesthetic of the build is the external case. [Nick] was able to recreate the rough design of the rendered device in SolidWorks, before having the components produced on a resin 3D printer which provided excellent surface finish. Internally, the Bluetooth audio receiver was cribbed from an old pair of wireless headphones. However, a little more oomph was needed to make the speaker really usable, so [Nick] hooked the audio output up to a small MAX98306 amplifier board and a pair of 3 W speakers. The tiny tactile buttons from the headphone PCB wouldn’t do, either. For a nicer feel, [Nick] hacked in a set of four hall effect keyboard switches to control the basic functions.

The result is a Bluetooth speaker that looks as rad as the rendered unit, only you can actually take it outside and bump some tunes! It recalls us of some fine up-cycling work we’ve seen done to vintage 80s radios in a similar vibe.

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.

Bitwig Studio 6 has arrived after an extended public beta period. A lot of Bitwig users might barely notice, since you switched full time to this release for its polish and workflow improvements — but here’s a refresher, with tips. With all the nuances of little workflow, editing, automation, and interface interaction tweaks, you can […]

The post Bitwig Studio 6 is out of beta, and the “workflow update” is worth the wait appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

The GStreamer team is pleased to announce another bug fix release in the now old-stable 1.26 release series of your favourite cross-platform multimedia framework!

Please note that the 1.26 old-stable series is no longer actively maintained and has been superseded by the GStreamer 1.28 stable series now.

This release only contains bugfixes, and it should be safe to update from 1.26.x.

Highlighted bugfixes:

• Security fixes for the JPEG, H.265 and H.266 video parsers and the DVB subtitle overlay
• Security fixes for the ASF, RealMedia and QuickTime/MP4 demuxers and RIFF library
• Security fixes for the WAV audio parser and the RTP QDM2 depayloader
• avviddec: Handle field/order changes in mixed interlace mode
• awstranscriber2: workaround AWS SDK regression, plus transcriberbin latency reporting fixes
• videodecoder: Handle recovery from temporary reordered output
• Decodebin3 collection handling improvements
• fmp4mux: fragment duration handling improvements for HLS
• Gap event handling fixes in audio/video decoders and aggregator/muxers
• GstPlay stream selection handling improvements
• Input selector fixes
• MPEG-TS demuxer continuity counter handling fixes
• Reverse playback fixes for the MP4 demuxer
• RTP, SRTP, RTCP and RTSP and Transport-Wide Congestion Control fixes
• Webrtcsink: better handling of platform-specific NVIDIA encoder differences, plus other improvements
• Apple macOS VideoToolbox decoder improvements
• Python bindings: more type hinting
• Various bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

See the GStreamer 1.26.11 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.

Picture from Malte Steiners workshop Saturday the 14. February at Äänen Lumo, Helsinki (FI), showing how to process statistical data with Jupyter Lab and Python to make them suitable for datasonification with programs such as Pure Data. Photo by Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen.

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:

• RME Fireface UCX II (supported)
• RME Fireface 802 (WIP)
• RME Fireface UCX (WIP)
• RME Fireface UFX+ (WIP)
• RME Fireface UFX II (WIP)
• RME Fireface UFX III (WIP)

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.

The GStreamer team is pleased to announce the first 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 1.28.0, and we recommend you do so at your earliest convenience.

Highlighted bugfixes:

• Various security fixes and playback fixes
• Add new whisper-based speech-to-text transcription element
• Add new debugseimetainserter plugin for testing SEI meta insertion
• Fix scaling and resizing with UIView on EAGL and Vulkan
• Reverse playback and gap handling fixes in various components
• avviddec: Handle field/order changes in mixed interlace mode
• awstranscriber2: workaround for suspected Rust SDK regression
• cudaupload, cudadownload: Fix CUDA/GL interop copy path
• decodebin3: Fix switch to smaller collections and improve collection change on existing pad
• devenv: Add a subproject for providing the LunarG MoltenVK SDK
• livesync: fixes and reverse playback handling; ignore upstream latency when upstream is not live
• objectdetectionoverlay: add support for rotated bounding boxes
• qml6glsrc: Fix rendering of scene with clipped items
• speechmatics: allow configuring audio events such as detecting applause, laughter and music
• livekit webrtc: emit session-requested only for Producer role
• tsdemux: Fix Continuity Counter handling and handle clock change/resets without skew correction
• v4l2: Add support for AV1 stateful V4l2 decoder
• vpxdec: Support downstream pools with alignment requirements
• vtdec, vtenc: Lots of Apple VideoToolbox decoder and encoder fixes
• applemedia build improvements, patches for tvOS support, tvos cross file
• wavpack: Fix handling of format changes, extend parser with new features, handle non-S32 samples
• webrtcsink: allow specifying custom headers to signalling server
• webrtcsink: negotiate profile and level for input encoded in H.264
• webrtcsrc: add request type pads and allow sending encoded data downstream
• cerbero: wheel: Add a new `gstreamer_meta` package with fewer deps
• Various bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

See the GStreamer 1.28.1 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.

Here is the second 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 soloconcert Petri Kuljuntausta and the impro trio Kuljuntausta - Madsen - Steiner

 

Petri Kuljuntausta

Petri Kuljuntausta

trio Kuljuntausta - Madsen - Steiner

trio Kuljuntausta - Madsen - Steiner

trio Kuljuntausta - Madsen - Steiner

trio Kuljuntausta - Madsen - Steiner

trio Kuljuntausta - Madsen - Steiner

trio Kuljuntausta - Madsen - Steiner

trio Kuljuntausta - Madsen - Steiner

trio Kuljuntausta - Madsen - Steiner

 

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).

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

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.