Weekly recap — 30 April 2023

Sun Apr 30, 2023 by Alexandre Prokoudine

Kdenlive 23.04 gets nested sequences, Audacity 3.3.0 introduces musical time

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Week highlights: new releases of Kdenlive, Ardour, Audacity, Brickworks, Dragonfly Reverb, new features in GIMP, Krita, FreeCAD, Mayo.

GIMP

GIMP is still getting small improvements despite the shift of the focus towards stabilizing for v3.0. Two new features this week:

Middle Gray option for automatic filling of new layer, uses CIELAB’s 50% lightness (18.42% luminance)
Photoshop-specific data like clipping paths and guides can now be loaded when opening JPEG and TIFF files

After a lot of help and review from @jacobboerema, the next version of GIMP will import PSD metadata from JPEGs and TIFF files! This includes clipping paths, guides, and (some) TIFF layers. I'm really happy we got this done in time! pic.twitter.com/vGhLtULcGA
— CMYK Student (@CmykStudent) April 30, 2023

Krita

The Krita team is pretty much in bugfix mode. One notable patch this week was eliminating the slowdown when adding mesh transform as a transform mask.

There are two more interesting patches in the works. One makes the Transform tool work on multiple layers, another adds a separate Dockers menu to control the visibility of dockable dialogs.

Krita 5.2 is scheduled for a release later this year, there will be at least one beta version first.

darktable

A new version of filmic (v7) was added by Aurélien Pierre. Two major changes in the algorithm are: removal of the color preservation mode and a new slider to control the highlights saturation.

FreeCAD

Not a terrible lot of user-visible changes to talk about this week:

Jolbas refactored the navigation cube, fixed some bugs and improved the UX
More i18n fixes by Chris Hennes et al.

Meanwhile, Yorik van Havre continued hacking on NativeIFC. Highlights from his weekly update on Patreon:

Upon creating a new project you are now asked whether you want FreeCAD to create a default project structure for you, with Site, Building, and Storey.
NativeIFC now supports IfcSpaces — bounded areas or volumes. Shape of an IfcSpace is displayed in wireframe view mode, and objects can be added.
Initial loading of orphan objects now available, more work is left to do.
It’s now possible to edit geometry of some IFC objects, these are just the first steps.

(Screenshot courtesy by Yorik van Havre)

Zolko recently released v0.50 of Assembly4 workbench. Not a lot of fancy stuff: “Model” root element in the project tree is now called “Assembly” following the recent discussion on default assembly workbench, and it looks like Zolko is about to dust off the A2+ solver port.

Mayo

Completely missed Mayo 0.7.0 release last month. This version brings a number of very welcome improvements:

Reading and writing OFF files
Reading VRML files
Support for point clouds in PLY
Better support for HiDPI displays
New “Turn 3D View cw/ccw” commands

Linux (AppImage) and Windows builds are available.

The next version is likely to feature a configurable grid in the 3D view, the patch is already in the main development branch:

Screenshot: RC Car 1:8 two-speed transmission model by Nagy Imre

Kdenlive 23.04

This is a major update featuring:

Nested sequences to simplify working on complex projects
OpenAI’s Whisper support for subtitles generation
Optional duplication or splitting of subtitles at the first line when cutting them
New timer effect
New transitions

See the official release notes for more information.

Ardour 7.4

Paul Davis et al. cut a new release that mostly fixes various bugs and adds several improvements:

Support for MIDI subgroup busses
Volume control to the clip picker (in the Clips sidebar)
A new preference for the PPQN value in exported MIDI files
An option to use a neutral color for new tracks & busses
A Lua script to downmix 5.1 audio to stereo

Work on adding support for Launchpad Pro is temporarily on hold, most likely until work on tempo maps editing is complete.

One patch that also didn’t make it to this release is support for the Softube Console 1 control surface (patch by Holger Dehnhardt). It is currently undergoing code review (fingers crossed).

Audacity 3.3.0

I already covered this release in a dedicated post here, so to reiterate:

Beta version of musical time support features: ruler, global BPM setting, snapping to musical time units
New Shelf filter
New Linear (dB) vertical ruler
Built-in Bass & Treble, Distortion, Phaser, Reverb, and Wahwah effects are realtime-capable now

Here is a review from Learn Audacity:

Brickworks 0.4.0

Stefano D’Angelo released a new version of Brickworks, the open-source music DSP toolkit that is a major part of his Orastron startup. Changes:

New modulation, delay (except reverb), and resampling modules
Support for MIDI over UART on the Daisy Seed board
Faster math and buffer utility routines

Dragonfly Reverb 3.2.10

There hasn’t been a new release of this amazing Reverb plugin by Michael Willis for a while. The new version has just one yet important change: denormals protection.