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The Pinta team announced the v3.0 release yesterday. Let’s take a quick look at what’s changed and what still needs to change. Before I continue, here is a disclaimer: I’m not going to mention every single thing that is new or improved. I only cover things that matter to me. Full release notes are available here. What’s great in Pinta 3.0 Add-ins support is back. Image editing programs absolutely need a plugin architecture so that people can go wild and do great (and sometimes ugly) things. At this point, it’s hard to say if this will be popular. Pinta didn’t have a terrible lot of plugins back in its v0.x days, but we’ll see. The [ and ] shortcuts for brush size control. It seems like a minor thing, but it shows that the developers are thinking about efficiency. That said, it would be lovely to have some form of an in-place indicator for the change, especially since there is no brush tip preview on the canvas. Layers and History docks can be collapsed.You can hide either of them or both in the right-side panel. Kinda neat when you want to see more. Things that are OK GTK4 port. I know some people love fixating on toolkits and updates as if there are some jaw-dropping benefits arriving. But GTK4 support doens’t magic new features or better UX/UI into the program desktops. It just keeps the Pinta up to speed with what’s supported down the technology stack. The menu-to-headerbar switch. Generally, I have no problem with designs that rely on headerbars as long as the functionality is accessible. Pinta is a mixed bag there. On one hand, you do get quick access to common image operations and color tools. On the other hand, effects are organized into nested menus that require extra clicking, and that is rather annoying. A search palette (a-la Blender, GIMP, etc.) would really help, especially if the developers expect to add more image manipulation commands and effects (filed #1339). New effects: Dithering, Voronoi Diagram, Vignette, Dents, Feather Object, Align Object, Outline Object. Half of them are marginally useful, others are fine. Dithering could be very useful, except there is literally no control over its blending; it’s all or nothing. Align Object already is useful, but it would make a lot more sense as a tool rather than an effect. Nearest-neighbor resampling mode when resizing is not a terrific option, there are vastly better algorithms out there, some old (Lancos3), some newer (NoHalo, LoHalo), and some very neat AI ones (think Upscayl). But the fact they are thinking about options here is a good indicator. Caveats It’s tricky evaluating Pinta after you’ve spent decades using more complex software like Photoshop and GIMP. To me, the program has some unfortunate limitations and poor design choices: It won’t open 16-bpc TIFFs (like pre-2.10 GIMP), because it relies on GdkPixbuf for simplicity’s sake. Selection tools have no controls over the side ratio (try cropping exactly to 16:9). The best you can get is the Shift modifier enabling the 1:1 ratio (filed #1335). Pinta pastes into an existing l-ayer, although it should really paste into a new layer (filed #1344). Layer properties (blending, opacity) are hidden behind a double-click (or F4). Text objects can’t be edited. Not only that, you have to keep them on a separate bitmap layer, otherwise they are baked into your existing bitmap layer (filed #1337). Displaying a canvas grid is possible (it’s even configurable), but selections don’t snap to the grid’s intersections (filed #1336). Effects have no preview toggle and restart rendering every time you change a setting (filed #1341). Zooming in to 300% and above is slow. The program even crashed several times on me citing a lack of free memory (filed #1342). The developers went the easy road of reusing the desktop tech for making screenshots rather than implementing their own feature for that, so you have no delay controls. In other words, you can’t use Pinta to make screenshots of doing something in Pinta. But maybe the most annoying thing is that color adjustment tools are all in modal dialogs (filed #1334). With GNOME and GTK4, this means the actual image content is dimmed when you are color-correcting, so you can’t make a good choice. Here is a quick demo where the top is dimmed due to a modal dialog and the bottom is what the image actually looks like: Plus, you can’t move a color correction dialog around if your POI is in the center­—the entire program window will unmaximize and move instead. This design decision (if it was one rather than an oversight) is difficult to justify, because e.g. the Add-in Manager window could be modal for all I care, but it isn’t and floats around just fine. We can argue about how much of that—when fixed—would be advanced functionality that is not supposed to be in a simple editor. Personally, I just filed reports and will stick with a different program, at least until they are taken care of. But if none of those things bother you, then more power to you. Closing thoughts There is much to admire about Cameron White’s long-term drive to get Pinta to a state where it works and feels like a modern-day “midpack” image editor that does the job. While he attracted some new contributors lately, most notably Lehonti Ramos, I wish he was more successful in building a larger team. The overall development direction seems completely sensible to me. The team is not spending much time on needless fun effects or anything of that kind. New features are mostly actually needed, plus, the team has done a lot of bugfixing between beta1 and the final release. Downloads Pinta comes with builds for Windows and macOS. For Linux users, there was a static build before (3.0 beta1), but now we are down to Flatpak and Snap, I guess.

Ardour, the criminally underrated free and open source DAW for Mac, Windows, and Linux, has been a little quiet lately. Over the weekend, we learned what's coming in Ardour 9.0/9+, and why the devs have been busy. Not sure where to start? Check out how-to videos, including voice-activated recording(!) The post Ardour, the free and open DAW, is better than ever appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

Although we did a couple of hot-fix releases, it’s been quite a long time since the last planned release of Ardour. We’ve also not been responding particularly effectively to bug reports and user suggestions. This has all been because of a mountain of work going on to get 9.0 ready for release, and I wanted to just outline what we think will be in that version so that people can understand the relative “silence” from the project. There’s still a lot of work to do before we release 9.0, but the following is a list of things we think will likely be there Some of them may not quite make it, and its possible there might be other things added. GUI Rearrangement We can’t say much about this yet, because the work here is not really finished. The main elements of this are that every page (editor/mixer/cue/record) in the GUI now has 5 areas: the transport bar (now always visible), the “main area” (e.g. the editor), 2 sidebars (left and right) and a lower pane that can show a variety of things. You’ll see more about this as we get closer to a 9.0 pre-release. Multi-touch GUI On Linux and Windows, Ardour now supports multi-touch interaction as provided by the operating system. This may come for macOS eventually, but the way multi-touch works there is significantly different and will need more work. Pianoroll window(s) Double click on a MIDI region to edit it in its own dedicated window, or in a pane at the bottom of the main window. Editing in that window will work almost identically to the way it does in the main timeline, but without the distractions of the timeline. You can also see MIDI automation (velocity, CC parameters etc.) overlaid (or not). MIDI Cue Editing The Cue page now allows direct editing of the contents of MIDI cues (“clips” for Live & Bitwig users). Audio Cue Editing This may or may not make it in time for 9.0. If it does, you’ll be able to edit audio cues directly on the cue page, setting loop points and more. Cue Recording You can now record directly into cue slots, making Ardour a “looper” in the same sense that Live, Bitwig and several other contemporary DAWs are. You can pre-specificy the recording duration (e.g. “Record 4 bars”) or you can record until you think you’re done. Whatever you recorded will start playing at the next quantization point (e.g. bar/beat). Region FX Is the answer to the question “how do I add some delay to just this part of my vocal?” Similar to region gain it allows to apply any plugin a given audio region only. The effect and its automation remains with the region, even when it is moved around on the timeline. While the same result can be achieved with channels-strip plugins in the mixer (using bypass automation) applying effects directly to regions on the timeline is convenient for many workflows. The given effect is applied offline, when reading the region from disk and does not add any additional DSP load. Real Time Analyzer A dedicated perceptual analyzer window is the works which allows one to visualize the live spectrum of multiple signals. A key feature is that one can overlay individual sources (tracks and busses) on top of each other. This allows one to see which track contributes a given of frequency range to the overall mix, find conflicting ranges or holes in the spectrum. Faster GUI drawing on macOS Without telling anyone, Apple have subtly changed the way their drawing APIs work for graphical applications over the last 5-10 years. The result has been that a naive graphical app would end up redrawing its entire window even if only a few pixels needed updating. We’re far from the only application to be affected by this. In Ardour 9.0 the GUI drawing speed will be significantly faster, at least on very dense pages like the mixer. Bug Fixes We’ve accumulated a long list of bug fixes during the significant reorganization that has taken place for 9.0. We’ll document them once we get to the release. 8 posts - 6 participants Read full topic

Week highlights: GIMP team started planning v3.2 development, new releases of jc303, Qtractor, and KnobKraft-orm. GIMP When the team released v3.0, they said they’d try to make shorter release cycles. This week, Jehan started going through bug reports and feature requests and changing milestones. Some tickets are now scheduled for v3.2, others are scheduled for v3.4, and others have milestones removed entirely. This is an ongoing process, the triage is not done yet, and there are no promises whatsoever on either specific features for v3.2 or the release timeline. Still, a good step in the right direction. On the dev front, CmykStudent updated an old patch by Massimo Valentini, that implements non-destructive transformations of text layers (rotation, scaling, flipping, but not the perspective transform yet). Here is an editable flipped text layer: I did some quick testing, and there are a handful of issues there at the moment: dysfunctional undo, text layers getting clipped instead of being automatically expanded, and more. I’m also unsure if the overall approach is sound architecturally (think of transform masks in Krita, for example). Nevertheless, it’s a start. FreeCAD The team announced the availability of an opt-in telemetry addon that aims to provide raw data about FreeCAD installations to help identify higher-priority platforms and possible improvements for out-of-box user experience (based on how people customize FreeCAD and what addons they install). You need to update the cache in the addon manager and then install it manually. The official post comes with an FAQ that covers the main questions people could possibly have (mostly based on what concerns people had about Audacity a few years back). Just for fun, I ran two polls, one on Mastodon and one on X/Twitter. It’s not a huge amount of data, but it’s still fun to watch the response. Here are Mastodon results, and here are X/Twitter results. Overall, people are more supportive than not by a large margin. In other news, the project has impressive development activity. There are close to 200 pull requests in the queue. Until recently, this only happened during feature freezes when no new features were undergoing review. Seems like a large PR queue is the new norm. This may require two merge meetings a week. There’s some interesting 3rd-party development going on, too. Aik-Siong Koh and Jose Gabriel Egas Ortuño posted a demonstration of their recent work on multibody dynamics + FEM animation. This work was originally sponsored by Ondsel. Meanwhile, Frank David Martínez is working on FreeCAD-Blender integration. jc303 v0.12 This new version of the TB-303 emulator now features a built-in Overdrive effect based on GuitarML research and BYOD DSP implementation: I did some quick testing, it works nicely and is not too heavy on the CPU: Builds are available for Windows, Linux, and macOS. You can get them here (and read the full release notes). Qtractor 1.5.4 Rui worked some more on the MIDI step input in Qtractor: it now extends clips automatically, plus both step input and overdubbing are now aggregated and fully undo/redo-able. This release has some more improvements and fixes. An AppImage build and an RPM are available on SourceForge. KnobKraft-orm 2.6.2 While I don’t own any vintage synths, I can definitely sympathize with people who buy even fairly recent gear like Sequential Take 5 and then don’t even get to have a librarian application to manage their patches. So KnobKraft is definitely in demand even if you don’t use Linux. Here’s a raw list of synths and other MIDI-capable devices that got support in recent releases: Roland V-Drums TD-07, E-mu Morpheus, Roland Juno-DS, Moog Voyager, Waldorf M, Elektron Digitone, Yamaha FS1R, Yamaha TX81Z. Support for various other synths has been confirmed and moved from alpha to beta. By the way, KnobKraft appears to support Line6 POD series patches now, so you don’t have to be a synth player to be interested. You can download the latest and greatest here. Artworks Marauder Camp and Sunken Ruins by Terraform Studios, environment concept art made with Blender for Skydance’s Behemoth game: Goddess Temple by Shiro 2049, made with Blender, ZBrush, 3DCoat, and Photoshop: Mountain Ridge by Philipp Urlich, made with Krita: Clantonburg: the Floating Factory by Muru Zhou, made with Blender and Photoshop: The Gate of Whispering Stones by Adam Galambos, made with Blender, Unreal Engine, etc.

Qtractor 1.5.4 - An Early Spring'25 Release Hi everyone, Qtractor 1.5.4 (early-spring'25) released! Change-log: Fixed non-zero clip offset conversion on tempo(BPM) time-scale changes. MIDI clip step input and overdubbing now aggregated and fully undo/redo-able. Allow MIDI step input to extend the clip length automatically; also avoid step input event duplicates (eg. playing chords in quick succession) leading to potential double-free segfault or crash. Fixed MIDI track state when clips under record/overdubbing are simply removed. Fixed all empty/void audio clips that are created when aborting an armed recording session. MIDI clip editor (aka. piano-roll): simply allow a MIDI track to be a ghost of itself. In addition to clips and markers, automation curves and tempo-map nodes now also contribute to the total session length and status. Fixed command line parsing (QCommandLineParser/Option) to not exiting the application with a segfault when showing help and version information. Description: Qtractor is an audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer application written in C++ with the Qt framework. Target platform is Linux, where the Jack Audio Connection Kit (JACK) for audio and the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) for MIDI are the main infrastructures to evolve as a fairly-featured Linux desktop audio workstation GUI, specially dedicated to the personal home-studio. Website: https://qtractor.org Project page: https://sourceforge.net/projects/qtractor Downloads: https://sourceforge.net/projects/qtractor/files source tarball: qtractor-1.5.4.tar.gz source package (openSUSE Tumbleweed): qtractor-1.5.4-11.1.rncbc.suse.src.rpm binary package (openSUSE Tumbleweed): qtractor-1.5.4-11.1.rncbc.suse.x86_64.rpm AppImage packages: qtractor-1.5.4-11.1.x86_64.AppImage Flatpak package: https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.rncbc.qtractor Git repos: https://git.code.sf.net/p/qtractor/code https://github.com/rncbc/qtractor.git https://gitlab.com/rncbc/qtractor.git https://codeberg.org/rncbc/qtractor.git Wiki: https://sourceforge.net/p/qtractor/wiki/ static rendering: https://qtractor.org/doc user manual & how-to's: qtractor-manual-and-howtos.epub qtractor-manual-and-howtos.pdf License: Qtractor is free, open-source Linux Audio software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 or later. Enjoy! rncbc Fri, 4 Apr 2025 - 17:00 Add new comment

Vee One Suite 1.3.1 - An Early-Spring'25 Release Greetings, The Vee One Suite, the gang-of-four old-school software instruments, synthv1 as a polyphonic subtractive synthesizer; samplv1 a polyphonic sampler synthesizer; drumkv1 as yet another drum-kit sampler; padthv1 a polyphonic additive synthesizer. Are here released for the New-Year'25 recycle... All elivered in dual form, still: a pure stand-alone JACK client with JACK-session, NSM (Non/New Session Management) and both JACK MIDI and ALSA MIDI input support; a LV2 instrument plug-in. Change-log: Fixed command line parsing (QCommandLineParser/Option) to not exiting the application with a segfault when showing help and version information.   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 1.3.1 (early-spring'25) is out! synthv1 is an old-school all-digital 4-oscillator subtractive polyphonic synthesizer with stereo fx. LV2 URI: http://synthv1.sourceforge.net/lv2 website: https://synthv1.sourceforge.io http://synthv1.sourceforge.net project page: https://sourceforge.net/projects/synthv1 downloads: https://sourceforge.net/projects/synthv1/files source tarball: synthv1-1.3.1.tar.gz source package: synthv1-1.3.1-8.1.rncbc.suse.src.rpm binary packages (openSUSE Tumbleweed): synthv1-jack-1.3.1-8.1.rncbc.suse.x86_64.rpm synthv1-lv2-1.3.1-8.1.rncbc.suse.x86_64.rpm AppImage package (JACK stand-alone only): synthv1-jack-1.3.1-8.1.x86_64.AppImage git repos: https://git.code.sf.net/p/synthv1/code https://github.com/rncbc/synthv1.git https://gitlab.com/rncbc/synthv1.git https://codeberg.org/rncbc/synthv1.git   samplv1 - an old-school polyphonic sampler samplv1 1.3.1 (early-spring'25) is out! samplv1 is an old-school polyphonic sampler synthesizer with stereo fx. LV2 URI: http://samplv1.sourceforge.net/lv2 website: https://samplv1.sourceforge.io http://samplv1.sourceforge.net project page: https://sourceforge.net/projects/samplv1 downloads: https://sourceforge.net/projects/samplv1/files source tarball: samplv1-1.3.1.tar.gz source package: samplv1-1.3.1-8.1.rncbc.suse.src.rpm binary packages (openSUSE Tumbleweed): samplv1-jack-1.3.1-8.1.rncbc.suse.x86_4.rpm samplv1-lv2-1.3.1-8.1.rncbc.suse.x86_4.rpm AppImage package (JACK stand-alone only): samplv1-jack-1.3.1-8.1.x86_64.AppImage git repos: https://git.code.sf.net/p/samplv1/code https://github.com/rncbc/samplv1.git https://gitlab.com/rncbc/samplv1.git https://codeberg.org/rncbc/samplv1.git   drumkv1 - an old-school drum-kit sampler drumkv1 1.3.1 (early-spring'25) is out! drumkv1 is an old-school drum-kit sampler synthesizer with stereo fx. LV2 URI: http://drumkv1.sourceforge.net/lv2 website: https://drumkv1.sourceforge.io http://drumkv1.sourceforge.net project page: https://sourceforge.net/projects/drumkv1 downloads: https://sourceforge.net/projects/drumkv1/files source tarball: drumkv1-1.3.1.tar.gz source package: drumkv1-1.3.1-8.1.rncbc.suse.src.rpm binary packages (openSUSE Tumbleweed): drumkv1-jack-1.3.1-8.1.rncbc.suse.x86_64.rpm drumkv1-lv2-1.3.1-8.1.rncbc.suse.x86_64.rpm AppImage package (JACK stand-alone only): drumkv1-jack-1.3.1-8.1.x86_64.AppImage git repos: https://git.code.sf.net/p/drumkv1/code https://github.com/rncbc/drumkv1.git https://gitlab.com/rncbc/drumkv1.git https://codeberg.org/rncbc/drumkv1.git   padthv1 - an old-school polyphonic additive synthesizer padthv1 1.3.1 (early-spring'25) is out! 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. LV2 URI: http://padthv1.sourceforge.net/lv2 website: https://padthv1.sourceforge.io http://padthv1.sourceforge.net project page: https://sourceforge.net/projects/padthv1 downloads: https://sourceforge.net/projects/padthv1/files source tarball: padthv1-1.3.1.tar.gz source package: padthv1-1.3.1-8.1.rncbc.suse.src.rpm binary packages (openSUSE Tumbleweed): padthv1-jack-1.3.1-8.1.rncbc.suse.x86_64.rpm padthv1-lv2-1.3.1-8.1.rncbc.suse.x86_64.rpm AppImage package (JACK stand-alone only): padthv1-jack-1.3.1-8.1.x86_64.AppImage git repos: https://git.code.sf.net/p/padthv1/code https://github.com/rncbc/padthv1.git https://gitlab.com/rncbc/padthv1.git https://codeberg.org/rncbc/padthv1.git   Enjoy. rncbc Thu, 3 Apr 2025 - 17:00 Add new comment

Another day, another Internet-connected gadget that gets abandoned by its creators. This time it’s Jooki — a screen-free audio player that let kids listen to music and stories by placing specific tokens on top of it. Parents would use a smartphone application to program what each token would do, and that way even very young children could independently select what they wanted to hear. Well, until the company went bankrupt and shutdown their servers down, anyway. Security researcher [nuit] wrote into share the impressive work they’ve done so far to identify flaws in the Jooki’s firmware, in the hopes that it will inspire others in the community to start poking around inside these devices. While there’s unfortunately not enough here to return these devices to a fully-functional state today, there’s several promising leads. It probably won’t surprise you to learn the device is running some kind of stripped down Linux, and [nuit] spends the first part of the write-up going over the partitions and peeking around inside the filesystem. From there the post briefly covers how over-the-air (OTA) updates were supposed to work when everything was still online, which may become useful in the future when the community has a new firmware to flash these things with. Where things really start getting interesting is when the Jooki starts up and exposes its HTTP API to other devices on the local network. There are some promising endpoints such as /flags which let’s you control various aspects of the device, but the real prize is /ll, which is a built-in backdoor that runs whatever command you pass it with root-level permissions! It’s such a ridiculous thing to include in a commercial product that we’d like to think they originally meant to call it /lol, but in any event, it’s a huge boon to anyone looking to dig deeper in to the device. The inside of a second-generation Jooki But wait, there’s more! The Jooki runs a heartbeat script that regularly attempts to check in with the mothership. The expected response when the box pings the server is your standard HTTP 200 OK, but in what appears to be some kind of hacky attempt at implementing a secondary OTA mechanism, any commands sent back in place of the HTTP status code will be executed as root. Now as any accomplished penguin wrangler will know, if you can run commands as root, it doesn’t take long to fire up an SSH server and get yourself an interactive login. Either of these methods can be used to get into the speaker’s OS, and as [nuit] points out, the second method means that whoever can buy up the Jooki domain name would have remote root access to every speaker out there. Long story short, it’s horrifyingly easy to get root access on a Jooki speaker. The trick now is figuring out how this access can be used to restore these devices to full functionality. We just recently covered a project which offered a new firmware and self-hosted backend for an abandoned smart display, hopefully something similar for the Jooki isn’t far off.

Music consumption has followed a trend over the last decade or more of abandoning physical media for online or streaming alternatives. This can present a problem for young children however, for whom a simpler physical interface may be an easier way to play those tunes. Maintaining a library of CDs is not entirely convenient either, so [JakesMD] has created the Yaydio. It’s a music player for kids, that plays music when a card is inserted in its slot. As you might expect, the cards themselves do not contain the music. Instead they are NFC cards, and the player starts the corresponding album from its SD card when one is detected. The hardware is simple enough, an Arduino Nano with modules for MP3 playback, NFC reading, seven segment display, and rotary encoder. The whole thing lives in a kid-friendly 3D printed case. Some thought has been given to easily adding albums and assigning cards to them, making it easy to keep up with the youngster’s tastes. This isn’t the first such kid-friendly music player we’ve seen, but it’s certainly pretty neat.

Both VCV Rack Free and VCV Rack Pro 2.6 are out, including the ability to Zoom to fit / Zoom to fit modules and drag multiple cables stacked on a port. It's a nice upgrade for this free and open source modular tool (and its partly-proprietary Pro package, too) - while we wait on upcoming v3. The post VCV Rack 2.6: multilingual, drag multiple cables, fit in view – all for free appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the beta release of Ubuntu Studio 25.04, codenamed “Plucky Puffin”. 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 25.04 is released on April 17, 2025. We encourage everyone to try this image and report bugs to improve our final release. Special Notes The Ubuntu Studio 25.04 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/25.04/beta/ Full updated information, including Upgrade Instructions, are available in the Release Notes. New Features This Release This release is more evolutionary rather than revolutionary. While we work hard to bring new features, this one was not one where we had anything major to report. Here are a few highlights: Plasma 6.3 is now the default desktop environment, an upgrade from Plasma 6.1.PipeWire continues to improve with every release.. Version 1.2.7The Default Panel Icons are now back. The default panel now populates depending on which applications are available, so that there are never empty icons if you choose the minimal install, and then install one or more of our featured applications. This refresh to the default is done every reboot, so it’s not a live update. Additionally, it must be refreshed manually from the User side either by selecting the Global Theme or removing the panel and adding “Ubuntu Studio Default Panel”.While not included in this Beta, Darktable will be upgraded to 5.0.0 before final release. Major Package Upgrades Ardour version 8.12.0Qtractor version 1.5.3Audacity version 3.7.3digiKam version 8.5.0Kdenlive version 24.12.3Krita version 5.2.9GIMP version 3.0.0 There are many other improvements, too numerous to list here. We encourage you to look around the freely-downloadable ISO image. Known Issues The installer was supposed to be able to keep the screen from locking, but this will still happen after 15 minutes. Please keep the screen active during installation. As a workaround if you know you will be keeping your machine unattended during installation, press Alt-Space to invoke Krunner (this even works from the Install Ubuntu Studio versus the Try Ubuntu Studio live environment) and type “System Settings”. From there, search for “Screen Locking” and deactivate “Lock automatically after…”.Another possible workaround is to click on “Switch User” and then re-login as “Live User” without a password if this happens.You will be prompted, upon first login of any new user, to reboot to apply proper audio configurations for audio production. This is intentional and is a workaround for the installer’s inability to configure the first user as part of the “audio” group or for new users to be added to the audio group automatically.The Installer background and slideshow still show the Oracular Oriole mascot. This is work in progress, to be fixed in a daily release sometime between now and final release. Official Ubuntu Studio release notes can be found at https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-studio-25-04-release-notes/ Further known issues, mostly pertaining to the desktop environment, can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PluckyPuffin/ReleaseNotes/Kubuntu Additionally, the main Ubuntu release notes contain more generic issues: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/plucky-puffin-release-notes/ How You Can Help 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). Frequently Asked Questions 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 this cycle in order for the maintainers to get security patches delivered faster. 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 out 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. However, if Audacity returns to the Ubuntu repositories before final release, then you might end-up with a double-installation of Audacity. Removal instructions of one or the other will be made available in a future post. 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: We now include a minimal install option. Install using the minimal install option, then use Ubuntu Studio Installer to install what you need for your very own content creation studio.

The next live concerts of Malte Steiner's soloprojects:Elektronengehirn will play 19. April at Noiseberg Berlin, GermanyNotstandskomitee will play 17. May Object Permanence Festival at Caisa Culture Centre Helsinki, Finland

The GStreamer project is thrilled to announce that there will be a spring hackfest on Friday-Sunday 16-18 May 2025 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 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 1.26 release series adds new features on top of the previous 1.24 series and is part of the API and ABI-stable 1.x release series of the GStreamer multimedia framework. Highlights: H.266 Versatile Video Coding (VVC) codec support Low Complexity Enhancement Video Coding (LCEVC) support Closed captions: H.264/H.265 extractor/inserter, cea708overlay, cea708mux, tttocea708 and more New hlscmafsink, hlssink3, and hlsmultivariantsink; HLS/DASH client and dashsink improvements New AWS and Speechmatics transcription, translation and TTS services elements, plus translationbin Splitmux lazy loading and dynamic fragment addition support Matroska: H.266 video and rotation tag support, defined latency muxing MPEG-TS: support for H.266, JPEG XS, AV1, VP9 codecs and SMPTE ST-2038 and ID3 meta; mpegtslivesrc ISO MP4: support for H.266, Hap, Lagarith lossless codecs; raw video support; rotation tags SMPTE 2038 ancillary data streams support JPEG XS image codec support Analytics: New TensorMeta; N-to-N relationships; Mtd to carry segmentation masks ONVIF metadata extractor and conversion to/from relation metas New originalbuffer element that can restore buffers again after transformation steps for analytics Improved Python bindings for analytics API Lots of Vulkan integration and Vulkan Video decoder/encoder improvements OpenGL integration improvements, esp. in glcolorconvert, gldownload, glupload Qt5/Qt6 QML GL sinks now support direct DMABuf import from hardware decoders CUDA: New compositor, Jetson NVMM memory support, stream-ordered allocator NVCODEC AV1 video encoder element, and nvdsdewarp New Direct3D12 integration support library New d3d12swapchainsink and d3d12deinterlace elements and D3D12 sink/source for zero-copy IPC Decklink HDR support (PQ + HLG) and frame scheduling enhancements AJA capture source clock handling and signal loss recovery improvements RTP and RTSP: New rtpbin sync modes, client-side MIKEY support in rtspsrc New Rust rtpbin2, rtprecv, rtpsend, and many new Rust RTP payloaders and depayloaders webrtcbin support for basic rollbacks and other improvements webrtcsink: support for more encoders, SDP munging, and a built-in web/signalling server webrtcsrc/sink: support for uncompressed audio/video and NTP & PTP clock signalling and synchronization rtmp2: server authentication improvements incl. Limelight CDN (llnw) authentication New Microsoft WebView2 based web browser source element The GTK3 plugin has gained support for OpenGL/WGL on Windows Many GTK4 paintable sink improvements GstPlay: id-based stream selection and message API improvements Real-time pipeline visualization in a browser using a new dots tracer and viewer New tracers for tracking memory usage, pad push timings, and buffer flow as pcap files VA hardware-acclerated H.266/VVC decoder, VP8 and JPEG encoders, VP9/VP8 alpha decodebins Video4Linux2 elements support DMA_DRM caps negotiation now V4L2 stateless decoders implement inter-frame resolution changes for AV1 and VP9 Editing services: support for reverse playback and audio channel reordering New QUIC-based elements for working with raw QUIC streams, RTP-over-QUIC (RoQ) and WebTransport Apple AAC audio encoder and multi-channel support for the Apple audio decoders cerbero: Python bindings and introspection support; improved Windows installer based on WiX5 Lots of new plugins, features, performance improvements and bug fixes For more details check out the GStreamer 1.26 release notes. 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.

Ardour 8.12 is now available. This is a hot-fix release, intended to fix two issues. the bug fix introduced in 8.11 turned out to be incorrect, and broke several other things in subtle ways. 8.12 is a completely new approach to fixing the problem with region lengths after certain operations could cause sessions to be unloadable. for several previous versions, the packaging of translation files on macOS was broken. This has been corrected, and translations should work again on that platform. Note that 8.12 will also correctly load sessions suffering from the problem referred to in #1 above. All users of earlier 8.x versions should plan to upgrade as soon as possible. Apologies for the problems the bug in #1 has caused people - we hope this is a permanent, correct fix this time. Download   5 posts - 5 participants Read full topic

Last year Malte Steiner learned that there is an antifeminist movement. Female antifeminists. Further research lead to the art installation The Tradwives: Three color e-paper screens generate and show unsupervised and uncensored collages of material which was data-scraped from Tradwife influencer profiles on Instagram. The material was first decomposed with Machine Learning into smaller bits which within the installation are rearranged to ever changing collages.First shown at Oksasenkatu 11 Helsinki (FI) last September. Part of Steiner's art project Absolute Power.

The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu Studio 24.04.2 LTS. This is a minor release which wraps-up the security and bug fixes into one .iso image, available for download now. Among the changes, we have updated the support and help links in the menu, fixed bugs in Ubuntu Studio Installer, and more. As always, check the Ubuntu Studio 24.04 LTS Release Notes release notes for more information. Please give financially to Ubuntu Studio! Giving is down. We understand that some people may no longer be able to give financially to this project, and that’s OK. However, if you have never given to Ubuntu Studio for the hard work and dedication we put into this project, please consider a monetary contribution. Additionally, we would love to see more monthly contributions to this project. You can do so via PayPal, Liberapay, or Patreon. We would love to see more contributions! So don’t wait, and don’t wait for someone else to do it! Thank you in advance! Donate using PayPal Donations are Monthly or One-TimeDonate using LiberapayDonations areWeekly, Monthly, or AnnuallyDonate using PatreonBecome a Patron!Donations areMonthly

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I haven't been sure what to do about the software pages here for quite a while. Most of them were essentially just stale versions of the README files from their projects, and for better and worse, most of the projects I maintain are libraries that don't have as much of a need for a homepage as user-facing software. It's easy to just ignore things that don't really matter in day-to-day work, but the embarrassingly bad state of things became really clear when I sat down to actually poke through this site. Since it's much more important for me right now to streamline maintenance duties and eliminate as much overhead as possible, I've simply removed all of the software pages, and redirected those addresses to the corresponding Gitlab projects where possible. I might bring them back at some point, but for now, no pages are better than stale pages that really only serve to make things look bad. I don't have traffic metrics here, but I seriously doubt anyone will either notice or care. I'm not sure about the utility of the software release posts or tarballs either. Ideally, the effort required to make a release could be reduced to simply pushing a git tag, and cross-domain posting hugely complicates that. Besides, the tarballs are made manually on my personal machine, so they're absolutely less trustworthy than the signed tags in git anyway, and, I assume, not reproducible. At the same time, for many reasons I'm wary of fully investing in some git forge or another, the automatic tarballs provided by all of them leave much to be desired (the silly "v" names for example), and I don't want to disrupt things for packagers. We'll see, but for now I'll leave the mechanics of actual releases as they are. Ultimately, pages and posts are largely a waste of time for libraries and similar things that only support other projects anyway. So, a more radical simplification of the release process would be a good idea, but for now I'll just take out the trash and reduce the amount of things I need to consider in that process.

(This post is geekery of, if not the highest order, then fairly high order. It doesn’t contain any useful information about Ardour itself, but might be interesting for … people interested in such arcana) The packaging issue that broke translations in our initial release of 8.11 for Linux and macOS was almost a cool bug. I thought I’d quickly describe it here for the geeks among us. The problem came from a combination of two things: an actual error in our packaging scripts, and the subtle and generally not-considered behavior of the Unix find command. Our wonderful translators work on files that end in “.po” and connect the original english strings in the source code with their translated versions. During the build process, tools from the GNU translation system are used to convert the .po files into .mo files (aka “message catalogs”), which contain the same information but in a binary format that can be more efficiently used by the program when it is running. During packaging Ardour for distributions, we copy all the .mo files into a new location in preparation for “bundling” (e.g. as a DMG file for macOS or a .run file for Linux). The copy also requires a renaming, because the organization of the message catalogs for use by the program needs to be fairly different than the way they are organized in our source code. So the first bug was that we used find(1) to locate all the .mo files and copy/rename them. We start in several locations within the source code, including the directory that holds the GUI source code (gtk2_ardour). The files we’re looking for are in the po folder, and we use find because we don’t want to hard-code the languages that have translations. However, it turns out that there are another set of message catalogs associated with the RedHat/Fedora “appdata” system, and these files not only also are somewhere under gtk2_ardour but also, because of the way the translation software works, they have the same name. So, if find finds the “real” message catalogs first and copies/renames them during packaging, and then later finds the “appdata” message catalogs, the latter will overwrite the former in the package being built. This is a bug - the appdata message catalogs are placed in the packaging at a separate step of the process, and we should not have been using a command that was so generic. This was easy to fix (and has been). But wait a minute … didn’t this work just fine for Ardour 8.10 and other releases? It did. How could that be? Well, recall that at the beginning of the previous paragraph I wrote “if find …”. It turns out that that the order in which find will find files, unless told otherwise, depends on the filesystem the files are located on. Consequently, if you use two different types of filesystem (e.g. on Linux the ext4 or xfs filesystems), find may very well return files in a different order on each. However, it does deeper than this. Certain directory operations can also cause the filesystem to change its state in a way that will change the order in which find finds files. It turns out that this had happened within the build systems we use for macOS and Linux. At the time we released 8.10, find would locate the (unintended) appdata message catalogs first, copy/rename them into the package and then later repeat this for the real message catalaogs. Result? The package has the correct translation files and everything works. When we released 8.11, the ordering had changed, and the real message catalogs were found first, and then overwritten by the “appdata” ones. Result – translations do not work. I thought this was an example of a fairly cool and unusual category of bug. There was an error in our packaging scripts - we used an unnecessarily generic command to find message catalogs that needed installing, which found files it should not have. But this mistake by itself did not matter on systems where the unintended files were found first. It only caused problems when the unintended files were found second. This is not a perfect example of what programmers called “Abstraction Leakage”, but it’s not a bad one. We generally like to think of filesystems as things where the details of their internal organization do not really matter, and for the most part that is possible. But combine the fact that their internal organization does affect the order that a program like find will list files in, and the bug in our packaging script, and all of a sudden the internal details of how filesystems work becomes a thing we have to think about. 3 posts - 3 participants Read full topic

I don't suppose inactivity from me will be terribly surprising to anyone after the past several years. Still, since I was working on emptying my bug-fix and maintenance queue, making releases, and finally getting to some significant forward progress again, an update: Unfortunately I got violently ill last week with some horrible flu-like thing, the worst I've ever had (and I'm a COVID casualty, so that's saying quite a lot). Somehow, it's still going strong. So, aside from maybe a few minutes a day of idle tinkering, everything I was doing is on pause for a while. Hopefully a short while, but so far so not good, so we'll see. As an added bonus, Google just bricked my phone with a botched forced update, so I'm locked out of 2FA and many other things besides (I suppose I had to learn the hard way that I've gotten lazy and too dependent on that horrible device). So, yeah, things aren't going great, to put it lightly. On the bright side, I do have some exciting things in the queue, but since I don't do vapourware or hype (to a fault, really), and have a huge amount of "infrastructure" work to do first anyway, you'll have to stay tuned for that. Assuming I don't die first, anyway. ... if I do, it would be pretty funny that this was my last post though, so I've got that going for me, which is nice. [Edited on 2025-02-16 to remove broken link]