Week highlights: Blender-made Flow gets an Oscar, PipeWire gets MIDI 2.0 support, Kdenlive is getting better OTIO support.
Flow
Feature film animation Flow got Academy Award. It’s the first Blender-made film to do so. It’s also the first Latvia’s Oscar ever.
Production took over five years. Animation director Silly-Pélissier Léo did a talk at Blender Conference last year about the project. If you haven’t watched it yet, there are a lot of production details there.
The project was big news even before the Oscar, here is an interview by 3DVF with the film director Gints Zilbalodis.
Kdenlive
The Kdenlive team has been busy recently implementing OTIO support. The most recent patch adds import/export progress dialogs. They covered this general part of development in the fundraising report last month, check it out.
ALSA Scarlett Control Panel 0.5.0
Geoffrey D. Bennett’s control panel for Focusrite’s audio interfaces got support for eight more units, from the first and the fourth generations. See the dedicated post here on Libre Arts for more details.
PipeWire 1.4.0
The latest release brings a few interesting changes:
- Initial MIDI 2.0 support
- New JACK control API
- DSD playback in the ALSA plugin now available
- RISC-V architecture support
You’ll find the full list in the release notes. I’d like to make a quick stop at the first list item here.
While having MIDI 2.0 support sure is exciting, even if it’s just UMP support, there’s just no way you can benefit from this today or even later this year.
First off, PipeWire doesn’t seem to support MIDI-CI, while ALSA developer Takashi Iwai specifically mentioned that it would rather be implemented in the user space.
Secondly, I don’t know of any DAW available on Linux that does anything meaningful with MIDI 2.0. Some of the commercial ones, like Bitwig and Studio One, probably are MIDI 2.0 ready in the core to some extent, but don’t really expose it in the UI.
This isn’t the usual “Linux is behind the market again” thing: Windows got MIDI 2.0 support in February 2025 (a preliminary announcement was out in October 2024). Plus, you won’t find MIDI in either Ableton Live or FL Studio. The new tech is currently best served for Logic Pro users on macOS, although only two vendors seem to be making regular MIDI 2.0 capable keyboards, NI and Korg.
I don’t know of any free/libre DAW developers working on this either. It’s not coming to Qtractor (I did ask Rui), there seems to be no related activity in Muse Sequencer or Rosegarden, and Zrythm’s developer is busy refactoring the hell out of his program. Nor is this planned for Ardour. I’ll give you a direct quote from Paul Davis:
It just doesn’t buy most people very much. MIDI 1.0 opened up an entire new world of possibilities. MIDI 2.0 is like another cocktail after you’ve already had eight: maybe still fun, but perhaps you’ve had enough already?
And there you have it: a nice feature to have for the future, not useful any time soon.
Sonic Visualiser 5.2
Sonic Visualiser is Chris Cannam’s more popular brainchild, a program for visualisation, analysis, and annotation of music audio recordings. This update comes with several bugfixes. On macOS specifically, you should get a much better responsiveness when scrolling and zooming waveforms and histograms.
Artworks
The Great Excavation by Nekozarou, made with Blender:
Homecoming by Max, made with Krita:
Mushroom Kingdom by Louis-Pierre Valcourt, made with Krita:
Honnai Fortress by Alex Dekeyser, made with Krita:
Winter Dream by maxkemal, made with Blender:
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