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Meet oscmix, RME Fireface control app

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Services

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 08:53:22 +0200

I help tech companies navigate the content chaos and build a genuine relationship with their customers through compelling case studies, whitepapers, blog posts, documentation, and video tutorials.

Here is some of my recent public work:

Ondsel

Product/Service: SaaS for mechanical engineers and a polished version of FreeCAD (site)

Scope of work:

Developed a content strategy and maintained a content plan
Wrote and copyedited technical blog posts, release notes, thought leadership pieces, and more
Wrote the initial user guide for the SaaS in Docusaurus

CustomGPT

Product/Service: AI-based chatbot platform (site)

Scope of work:

Did a crash test of the user guide to identify the gaps
Developed a style guide and created help page templates for the internal team of writers
Restructured the user guide on Readme.com

Ardour

Product/Service: digital audio workstation (site)

Scope of work:

Did a major update and maintenance of the documentation: user manual and crash course
Ported the crash course from Jekyll to Hugo and set up i18n for the translation into French
Did bite-sized video tutorials on YouTube
Maintained the FAQ and some of the web pages

PiKVM

Product/Service: Raspberry Pi based KVM devices (site)

Scope of work:

Rewrote the quickstart guides to make them beginner-friendlier
Did a major update of the HTTP API documentation
Wrote several additional help pages

Evidence

Product/Service: data analytics platform (site)

Scope of work: blog posts

Let’s talk!

Do you have an interesting project for me? Let’s chat or get on a call. Please email me to get the ball rolling.

About

Sat, 02 Nov 2024 08:53:22 +0200

Welcome to Libre Arts. This is an online blog for creative professionals using free/libre applications for digital painting, graphic and web design, desktop publishing, photography, architecture, and mechanical engineering.

Free software is a rapidly evolving niche, we feel that this fact should be better represented on the web which is exactly what we do. In many ways foundation of this project was triggered by Ginger Coons’s talk “Ownership and Standards: Why Designers are Slow to Adopt Open Source” at Libre Graphics Meeting 2009.

We sometimes (seldom, really) cover selected proprietary software that works on Linux, if it’s interesting enough, has no direct free software alternative, and/or its developers contribute to free/libre software. A perfect example would be Harrison Consoles’ Mixbus which is a fork of Ardour digital adio workstation, with developers contributing to Ardour in both code and money.

Contacts

We are interested to hear from you what topics you would us to cover next, what new interesting applications we missed, what excellent work was done using free software.

There are different ways to get in touch with us. First of all, you can email. We also actively maintain a Twitter account where we post interesting things related to free software that don’t qualify for a full-fledged article.

The team

The project was founded and is currently managed by Aleksandr Prokudin who is affiliated with several free/libre projects such as Ardour and FreeCAD.

The new website was made possible thanks to the PIXLS.US team:

Pat David
Mica Semrick
darix
Kees Guequierre

Former contributors:

Maxim Barabash, web programming. Contributor to sK1, PrintDesign, UniConvertor. Twitter: @Maxim_Barabash.
Igor Novikov, web programming. Lead developer of sK1 vector graphics editor. Passed away in 2021.
Vera Lobacheva, web programming. Contributor to Open Clip Art Library. Twitter: @summerstyle.

Copyright policy

Unless explicitly stated otherwise, all the content is available under CC BY SA 3.0 Unported license. Feel free to translate and publish it, but please name the original author and link back to the original.

Donate

Thu, 19 May 2011 18:53:22 +0530

Where you can donate

Recurring donations to Libre Arts are currently only possible by subscribing on Patreon.

You can send one-off donations at Buy Me a Coffee.

Thank you for considering support for this project!

Why I ask for donations

Conducting insightful interviews and writing in-depth articles takes a lot of time.

Every interview involves researching the subject, interviewing a person, sometimes transcribing audio, then editing the text.

Every weekly recap means I grab the latest snapshot of most software projects I write about, actually look at the changes, sometimes ask questions to developers and report bugs, then write down all I figured out and make sensible screenshots. I also watch new tutorials and go through dozens of recent artworks made with free software to pick the best ones.

Hence making this project sustainable involves financial support one way or another. I rely on the free software community to fund this work.

How I use your donations

The money covers hosting and domain name ownership expenses, website maintenance, as well as the cost of in-depth articles production (research, writing, preparing illustrations etc.).

A significant part of all donations goes back to the FOSS community. If you feel like supporting software projects directly instead, I particularly recommend Ardour (one-time donations or subscriptions), Olive, Blender Foundation, Krita, and GIMP.

Better yet, please consider donating to a trustworthy charity of your choice instead. Not all wrongs can be righted with money, but helping people in need often requires funding.

Search

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This is the page for the search results

Elektroid 3.3 released

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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).

Weekly recap — 9 November 2025

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 21:12:22 +0300

Not much interesting was happening the past few weeks, so this is a multi-week recap. Highlights: release candidates planned for GIMP, Ardour, and FreeCAD; new releases of LSP plugins, new technical preview of Audacity 4.0.

GIMP

The team is getting ready for the first release candidate of v3.2. This means some interesting features in the works are being postponed till v3.4. One such example is vector masks. Some patches may still come through, though, such as merging paths.

Some neat minor new features merged recently:

Exporting patterns of fill and stroke in vector layers.
Pasting unformatted text in the Text tool.
Importing of PVR textures.

Krita

Dmitry Kazakov recently merged HDR support for Wayland to Krita Next. So far, this has been tested on KWin only.

Inkscape

Martin Owens recently added a new UI for changing the paint order in the Fill’n’Stroke dock:

Meanwhile, the GSoC artwork recolor project by Fatma Omara has been merged and will be part of the next release.

Tavmjong Bah started working on adding support for all color font formats.

FreeCAD

The project has been slowly arriving at the first release candidate of version 1.1. There are fewer than 10 release blockers lately, so we may still see the final release in 2025.

At the moment, there are over 300 pull requests, both open and in draft. A huge part of those are scheduled for inclusion in v1.2, which means a busy post-release time.

Ardour

The Ardour team is getting really close to the first release candidate of v9.0. Upcoming changes include things like much-requested pianoroll windows (see below on the screenshot), a bottom panel editing area for regions and cue clips, cue recording, and various UX/UI improvements.

Most recently, Paul added MIDI note brushing (coming to v9.0, and Robin has been working on a reimplementation of mix tools from Mixbus (probably coming to v9.1 or so).

Audacity 4.0alpha2

This is still more of a technical preview, but with improvements:

Allow track range selection with Shift-Enter.
Record from anywhere.
Export loop region.
Preference for paste behavior: overlapping other clips vs pushing them.
Preference for whether clicking on the ruler should trigger playback

Go get it here if you are curious.

LSP Plugins 1.2.25

This is mainly a bugfix update for another recent release, where Vladimir Sadovnikov implemented a Ring-Modulated sidechain plugin series (regular and multiband), A/B preset switching support, integrated loudness metering for Referencer plugin series, and other great new features and improvements.

See here for release notes and downloads.

Easy Effects 8.0.0

This is a very exciting and yet not very well-known project that simplifies using global audio effects on Linux, among other things. Wellington Wallace et al. released this new version with a port from GTK4 to Qt/QNL-based user interface.

Other changes include:

Built-in tray icon and menu.
Better echo cancellation.
Various preset improvements.
The last used plugin or tab is now restored when the window is reopened.

For the full list of changes, please see here. The recommended way to install it is from Flathub.

Artworks

Shaman House by Dahyun kal, made with a plethora of tools, including Blender:

Awakening by Javen Yuan, made with Zbrush, Blender, and Photoshop:

The Silent Geometry by Sathish Kumar, made with Blender and Photoshop:

神秘小鎮 (Mysterious Town) by 魔灯Modeng, made with Blender, Maya, Zbrush, etc.:

Vampire Castle of Tanagari by Dimitris Tsilavakis, made with Blender and Krita:

Thanks to all patrons!

VST3 becomes open-source, ASIO goes GPL-compatible

Tue, 04 Nov 2025 11:12:22 +0300

Steinberg recently announced that they are changing the licensing of both VST3 and ASIO. VST3 is now MIT-licensed instead of GPLv3+/proprietary, and ASIO is GPLv3+/proprietary rather than just proprietary. Let’s pick the news apart bit by bit.

VST3

This iteration of the plugin SDK has always been available under the dual GPLv3+/proprietary license. Changing the license to MIT means two things:

Companies don’t have to sign any agreements with Steinberg anymore.
Steinberg, therefore, now cannot enforce any ridiculous policies on plugin developers the way they did it with VST2.

Here is what’s not going to happen:

Developers won’t release more plugins for Linux because of that.
Developers won’t release more plugin hosts (such as DAWs) for Linux because of that.

I’m not talking out of my arse here.

Building a VST3 for Linux is not rocket science, especially if you use a crossplatform framework like JUCE.

I was an early beta tester of Sinevibes plugins for Linux. Artemiy only needed to set up an Ubuntu system and a basic build environment, which only took a couple of hours. The rest was adding literally one line of code to define the path to where presets should be stored, launch the build, and write an install.sh. That’s really it.

VST3 availability under the terms of the MIT license is not changing the build process in any way. Nor does it make Linux more interesting all of a sudden.

What will affect plugin developers is availability of more proprietary DAWs on Linux. Something like FL Studio getting a native Linux port would probably make some developers reconsider their position.

As for hosts, nothing prevents DAW developers from releasing native ports, as is evidenced by Bitwig, Presonus Studio One, Reaper, etc. All they need is assurance that this will be worth the effort. Unfortunately, most are stuck in the vicious circle:

DAW developers want more proprietary plugins and more official audio hardware support for Linux.
Plugin developers want more proprietary DAW support for Linux.
Audio hardware vendors want more proprietary DAW and plugins support for Linux.

This really mostly applies to larger companies. Smaller companies and indie devs are more courageous. You can see it by how few Presonus-level companies make Linux releases as compared to how many indie devs build their plugins for Linux (check out this recent blog post by Amadeus Paulussen for an extensive list).

I’m not sure if CLAP’s moderate success affected the new VST3 licensing, but Steinberg’s policies were #1 reason for creating the new plugin API.

ASIO

Audio Stream Input/Output (ASIO) is a driver protocol that provides low latency when using audio interfaces on Windows for recording and playback. For ASIO, Steinberg dropped proprietary-only licensing and moved to the GPLv3+/proprietary combo.

This is where you may see some limited change. This will mostly affect free software that works on Windows. One notable example is OBS: Steinberg is now in a technical partnership with the project.

It’s entirely possible that some FOSS hosts will get a straightforward ASIO support on Windows, although I don’t really know of many. LMMS seems to be using PortAudio that already has ASIO support. Ardour definitely uses PortAudio with confirmed ASIO support, so there you go. Peter Kirn mentions VCV Rack though, and that sounds like a sensible idea.

For Linux users, the relevance of this licensing change is zero.

In conclusion

Personally, I don’t expect any major news for Linux users here. Neither VST3 nor ASIO licensing change will get us more software, FOSS or otherwise. All we realistically can do is vote by our wallets and give money to developers and companies who are friendly to this community. I mean this in the most sincere way.

Focusrite was among the several companies that supported FFADO back when Firewire was still cool, so I got Saffire Pro 24. Years later, they supported Geoffrey Bennett’s work on getting their USB audio interfaces first-class support on Linux, and so my next audio interface will a focusrite again (currently on Scarlett 2i4 gen1).

Pianoteq added Linux support early on, and I’ve been their customer since v5 (2013). The same goes for Sinevibes and a few more developers whose stuff I actually need.

If we all do this sort of thing, this may not tip the scale to get Native Instruments to port their sampler engine and make a ton of orchestral libraries available. But it may give folks like David Healey of Libre Wave an incentive to produce more complex sample libraries and eventually get there.

Weekly recap — 12 October 2025

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 21:12:22 +0300

Week highlights: new releases of GIMP and RapidRAW, new features in darktable and Ardour.

GIMP 3.0.6

This is purely a bugfix release, don’t expect anything new. The release notes are here.

darktable and AgX

The team recently merged a patch by Kofa that adds AgX, a new tonemapper originally seen in Blender. This is not the first photography app to use AgX (Saulala is likely the first one), but definitely the most prominent one so far.

There have been several general tonemapper modules before AgX: base curve, followed by several variations of filmic (later renamed to filmic rgb), followed by sigmoid. I specifically do not mention other tonemappers here, as they were intended for use elsewhere in the processing pipeline.

Rather than emulating the film look, AgX aims for colorimetric accuracy and better chromatic consistency across the dynamic range. Kofa explained the mechanics of AgX in darktable early on in a thread on Pixls, I think you should read it if you are interested.

The module has controls for the input data, base and advanced curve parameters, and the look (slope offset, power, saturation, hue preservation).

My personal impression so far is that while AgX provides a lot of control, just like with other tonemappers, the defaults are not great.

On scenes with a wide dynamic range, details in highlights get flat, shadows/blacks get even darker, and hues change regardless of how much hue preservation you apply in AgX settings. Sigmoid and filmic rgb do a similar thing, but at least they don’t touch hues as much.

So, I guess, we’ll have to continue tweaking tonemapping settings quite a bit for the foreseeable future to get to a decent baseline.

RapidRAW 1.4.2

Timon Käch released an update of RapidRAW with several quite useful improvements:

The Highlights slider doesn’t dull the image as much as it used to
The Exposure slider doesn’t oversaturate and overexpose as much as it used to
Exports now can have optional controllable watermarks

Unfortunately, as you can see, the recent fixes have not improved the situation with pink in overblown highlights.

Nevertheless, here are the usual downloads and release notes.

FreeCAD

A year ago, Paul Ebbers picked up the SearchBar addon, originally created by Suzanne Soy, and started improving it. This is what you know from applications like Blender, GIMP, Olive and probably many others. Paul now proposes to include it in FreeCAD 1.2.

There’s also a pretty substantial patch by tarman3, adding numerous Array command improvements in CAM. It’s currently in draft and will likely be merged for v1.2 as well.

The release blocker needle is slowly moving towards zero and is currently at 27 remaining blockers. It may take a few more months to go all the way left.

Ardour

Robin Gareus investigated the StaffPad’s audio stretcher now used by Audacity, found that it works better than Rubberband in some cases, and added it as an “Any” option in the Time Stretch tool.

Mixer channels now have an RTA (real-time analyzer) toggle:

Finally, Ardour now has support for the iCON V1-M controller, contributed by one of the Mixbus developers.

MIDI CC & NRPN database

This is a recent find of a not-too-recent project. Ben Fox started working on a database for MIDI CC & NRPN of various hardware synths, samplers, etc., and 24 contributors joined over the years. If you have one of the supported devices and need to control it from the DAW, this may come in handy.

All the information lives in CSV files on GitHub and is available under the terms of the CC-BY-SA-4.0 license. You can contribute new descriptions to help make the information more discoverable for other users.

Artworks

Silent Sunday artwork by Sylvia Ritter, made with Krita:

The Old Tibetan monastery by Maxim Petrov, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Tale’s Edge - Snowy Woodland Village by Andy Walsh, made with Blender, 3DCoat, and Photoshop:

Weekly recap — 5 October 2025

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 21:12:22 +0300

Week highlights: new features in GIMP and Inkscape; new release of MuseScore Studio, first alpha release of Audacity 4.

GIMP

Here is some of the ongoing work:

Jehan is reorganizing the Align/Distribute tool options. Probably not a final implementation, as the discussion about UX keeps going.
Jasper is adding new text orientation options: 90° clockwise and counterclockwise rotation.

Additionally, Gabriele contributed a new Preferences option to disable the use of the TAB key to switch all dockable windows on and off. This is one of the maddening aspects of using GIMP for new users who press the key by accident and then struggle to figure out why all the docks have suddenly disappeared and how to bring them back.

Personally, I think the proposed patch is more of a workaround. All shortcuts should be configurable; singling one of them out and adding a dedicated switch in Preferences doesn’t seem like a consistent solution to me. Plus, bringing docks back should not be puzzling in the first place. On the flip side, I’m definitely biased here.

All of the above are unmerge patches at the moment.

Inkscape

Some fun things are happening in Inkscape:

Martin Owens is enhancing the rendering engine so it can work with floating pixel data and a greater number of color channels (think support for CMYKA).
Mike Kowalski is adding a character viewer to the font dock.

BCON 2025

The Blender Foundation has published all the videos from the Blender Conference 2025 on YouTube and Peertube. With over 80 videos in the playlist, there’s something for everyone: architectural visualization, production of animated TV series, simulating real-world camera lenses, recreating historical and cultural legacy, and so much more.

FreeCAD

You know how much I love digging into arcane pull requests and showing exciting new features and quality-of-life improvements. So believe me when I tell you that there is nothing more exciting right now than seeing the number of v1.1 release blockers go down. If the trend continues, a release candidate in November would not be entirely unrealistic.

At the same time, the pile of post-1.1 work just keeps growing. 229 out of 256 submitted pull requests are now scheduled for inclusion in version 1.2. Sure, some of them are in Draft, but I can absolutely see the team pulling double code review shifts shortly after the v1.1 release again.

Among other “fun” things, the team recently had to discuss how they should deal with AI-generated patches.

MuseScore Studio 4.6

The new version comes with many improvements and new features. Many of them are already covered in the release video:

Release highlights:

A metric ton of engraving improvements and fixes.
You can now use any SMuFL-compliant music font.
Localised control over showing and hiding empty staves.
Duration and velocity control in real-time note preview is now available.
Numerous guitar-specific improvements, such as engraving support for hammer-on, pull-off, and tapping techniques.
Brand-new Handbells palette and playback with MuseSounds.
VST3 support on Linux.

A bit silly to use OpenStrings (Rhapsody) when you have MuseSounds around, but just to show a VST3 plugin actually working:

See here for a more complete list of changes and download links.

Audacity 4 alpha1 and the video

Muse Group also released a technical preview of Audacity 4, the upcoming new release with the user interface completely reimagined and rebuilt with Qt. The important thing is not to expect this version to be production-ready yet. Or the project files to be backward-compatible.

Things like importing/exporting audio, cutting, and applying real-time effects already work. Here is the list of v3 features that are not there yet:

Nyquist, LADSPA, VAMP, and the OpenVINO plugins.
Preferences from Audacity 3 are not carried over.
Envelopes and label tracks.
Spectrogram view and the spectral editing mode.
Most built-in effects, including generators and analyzers.
Opening multiple projects at the same time.

You should also probably expects the mixer to be available in v4. Automation is planned but won’t happen in the first v4 release though.

Notably, some of the missing features from the list above will likely not function exactly as they do in v3 today. My gut feeling is that envelopes and spectral editing are likely to undergo redesign. Martin specifically mentioned envelopes in the video he published several days ahead of the release:

The video focused on the various types of debt that the team inherited from the original team and how they addressed them. That list of debt includes the logo, and it’s a topic of its own.

Over the last 25 years, I witnessed dozens, if not hundreds, of logo proposals, because many people were not happy with the original one. I’ve seen symbolic logos, photorealistic logos, and just about everything in between.

Some contributors were adamant that only they have the right vision for the project’s branding. Others were very much self-aware (“Here’s yet another unsolicited logo redesign to add to the pile“). So it’s very tempting to smirk when you read things like “just deliver a logo people like” in the comments section at The Verge.

All in all, I feel it’s somewhat premature to comment on the new Audacity. There are aspects that I absolutely love. There are things I’m just not too sure about. Like the lack of grid lines above waveform visualization in tracks. Or some of the user interface being bloody enormous, like this built-in compressor plugin window:

So let’s wait for the final version to arrive. The current estimation is sometime in 2026.

Artworks

Cyberpunk 2077 fan art by 長門ゆき, made with Unreal Engine, Blender, and Photoshop:

Echo City by UE班的小学生_Cgerjia, made with Substance 3D Designer/Painter, Unreal Engine, and Blender:

Skyshade: La Saga LightLark by Ferdinand Ladera (for Alex Aster’s recent bestseller), made with Blender and Photoshop:

Weekly recap — 28 September 2025

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 21:12:22 +0300

Week highlights: new releases of Krita, RapidRAW, and Gradia; MIDI strumming in Ardour.

Krita 5.2.13

The Krita team released a bugfix update. Some of the notable fixes are targeted at users of Android and devices with touch input:

Background saving has been revamped
Devices running Android v15 with a lot of memory are now supported.
The Transform tool now works with touch input.

See here for a more complete list of changes.

RapidRAW 1.4.x

New RapidRAW releases now take longer, but the pace is still impressive. This version features several notable enhancements. I’ll take a deeper dive in a separate post, so here is the list of changes:

Auto-culling to help you detect similar photos and discard blurry ones (in the screenshot below).
Collage maker that distributes a selection of photos over a configurable grid.
New color calibration panel hidden by default, for tweaking hue and saturation of primary RGB channels.
Preset importer (says “other common photo editors”, but I don’t see any in the list, just the ones by RapidRAW).
New section in Settings to select which functionality to show in the UI (this is where you enable the color calibration panel).
Sorting by Exif data: a small selection of Exif fields is available (Date taken, ISO, Focus length, etc.).
Major improvement ot local contrast tools.

As usual, downloads and the full list of changes are on GitHub.

Gradia 1.11

Alexander Vanhee released an update to his screenshot annotation tool that is growing into something larger, it seems.

Release highlights:

At 100% zoom, scrolling the mouse wheel now changes the tool size.
Highlighter colors are now more transparent.
Images on the home page now have drop shadows.
Additional resizing options for tools like Arrow and Rectangle.
Color and width can now be changed for annotations you already added.
Image background got some new presets.
Angle selector on the gradient background tab has been improved.
Tesseract-based OCR is now available.

I’d love to include a screenshot of the OCR feature and some of the other new features. Alas, the Flatpak build hasn’t been updated yet, and my custom build is faulty and doesn’t really work. Sorry about that!

Ardour

There’s a lot of under-the-hood work happening, but the team recently merged a patch that adds a simplistic MIDI note strumming feature. It’s nowhere as sophisticated as the MIDI Strum filter by Robin Gareus, but it can be enhanced in the future.

Artworks

Coral Ship Wreck by Jan Rozanski, made with Photoshop, 3DCoat, and Blender:

The Gladiators by Ken Li, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Spirit Hollow by Ignacio Bruno, made with GIMP:

Weekly recap — 21 September 2025

Sun, 21 Sep 2025 21:12:22 +0300

Week highlights: GIMP is getting an SVG exporter; Ton Roosendaal is stepping down as executive director of Blender Foundation; Kdenlive is planning exciting new features, FreeCAD is launching a bughunt for v1.1.

GIMP

CmykStudent started working on an SVG exporter plugin. Most of the work has been done: the plugin can export both vector, text, and bitmap layers, as well as layer groups. The merge request currently lists exporting options in the user interface and code cleanup as the missing bits. However, the exporting dialog already allows you to choose how you want to deal with bitmap layers.

Blender

The major news is that Ton is stepping down as the executive director of Blender Foundation and moving into a newly introduced advisory board.

Just as in any good organization, the transition was planned well in advance and began years prior, in 2019.

Ton was also recently interviewed by folks from the Bad Decisions Studio, check it out: https://youtu.be/hx3lnDHeqKs

On the same day, the Blender Foundation released its annual 2024 report. Financially, the foundation appears to be in a stronger position than the year before that, and judging by recent sponsorship announcements, the 2025 fiscal year will be even better.

It could be fun to slice the data over the years, but to give you an idea, the budget has grown from €958K in 2019 (the first time they published a report) to €3.1mln in 2024. That makes a solid average increase of ~26.5% year over year.

FreeCAD

The team has announced that the feature freeze for v1.1 is now on. Small UI changes are still allowed until October, but it’s basically bugfix time. As of today, there are 44 release blockers in the issue tracker.

The previous time, it took the team nearly 5 months to clean up this dreadful queue, as new blockers kept pouring in. If that’s how things will go this time, the final release is likely to happen in early 2026.

Kdenlive

The team did a development sprint in Berlin at the aKademy conference in early September and recently posted a recap and future plans. Highlights:

Jean-Baptiste Mardelle got an NLnet grant to implement dopesheet for users who do a lot of animation.
Ongoing and upcoming menu and terminology changes (Project Bin -> Media, Render -> export, etc.).
Various monitor changes.
Upcoming switch to KDDockWidgets for docking panels in the program.
Animations for the titler (technical discussions still ongoing).

See here for details.

Artworks

Sword of the Sea - Crystal Zone by Eytan Zana, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Strong Pamukkale vibes there!

Desert Ruins Palmyra by Ahmad Al-Aliyan, made with Maya, Blender, Zbrush, and more. It’s a large project with 20 renders, including ones that apparently depict a relief of Queen Zenobia.

[ASTRAVALE] Center of Resonant Astrum by Kan Rongrueangkul, made with Blender and Photoshop:

The Monkey King by Aashutosh Patel, made with Blender:

Weekly recap — 14 September 2025

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 21:12:22 +0300

Week highlights: new releases of Gradia, RapidRAW, and displaycal; new features in GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape; Blender gets another major sponsor.

GIMP

Jehan started working on new infrastructure to pass messages to running GIMP installations. The intention is to notify users on those rare occasions where critical updates are available.

Meanwhile, Ohnishi Yasuo has been working on a 3rd-party plugin for creating parametric luminance masks.

Krita

Wolthera posted a Mastodon thread about her work getting rich text editing into Krita. If you want to test the builds and provide feedback, it’s crucial that you read the thread on Krita Artists, too.

Dmitry Kazakov has been busy with Wayland support for the past several weeks. Most recently, he merged Wayland color management support. The foundation is in place, HDR support is now work in progress (no publicly available patches yet).

I’ve seen some bickering online about how Krita is behind the times and should’ve adopted Wayland ages ago. The fact is, Wayland wasn’t color-managed at all until fairly recently, and that’s a kind of a big deal for Krita’s target audience.

In fact, several issues had to be addressed in both Wayland and KWin to ensure the basics worked in Krita. Similarly, the graphic tablet stack outside Krita wasn’t problem-free on Wayland and had to be patched as well. Not to mention that the latest dev builds of Krita are completely untested on other Wayland compositors. Rabbit hole, here we are.

Gradia 1.10

This screenshot annotation tool just keeps getting better. Here are some of the changes in the latest few releases:

Annotation tools now have convenient single-key shortcuts.
The Censor tool has been improved.
The Text tool now supports multi-line annotations.
The annotation section in the sidebar has been redesigned.
You can now select if you want to copy or overwrite screenshot files on exit.
Tools like Square and Arrow now use Shift to constrain drawing.
The arrow tool shape has been redesigned.
Gradient steps for the background can now be edited manually.

See here for the list of changes and source code archives. You can also install Gradia from Flathub.

RapidRAW 1.3.13

Here’s the latest in RapidRAW:

Clipping warnings in the Curves tool.
Notifications on new release availability.
Enhanced accuracy in the HSL panel
Community members can now share and reuse presets.
High-quality inpainting should now provide results that have nearly the same resolution as the original image.

Downloads and full release notes are here.

Inkscape

Here are two patches I find most interesting:

PBS submitted a patch that increases the input sample rate for several drawing tools from once per frame to whatever the input device allows, to allow for smoother drawing with high-resolution graphic tablets.
Mike Kowalski adjusted the ruler rendering to align more closely with the proposal by Henrique T. M. Perticarati. This is already in the main development branch.

displaycal-py3 3.9.17

A while ago, the original DisplayCAL developer stopped working on this display calibration and characterization tool. As it depended on Python2, someone needed to port it to Python3 to unobsolete it. Erkan Ozgur Yilmaz did that, and he now maintains it as a fork.

Most recently, Erkan updated the code to support ArgyllCMS 3.4.0+. This primarily affects what observer names (e.g., CIE 2012 2° vs CIE 2015 2°) you are going to see in the user interface. Older ArgyllCMS versions are still supported.

See here for release notes and downloads.

Blender

Bolt Graphics has joined the Blender Foundation’s Development Fund as a Corporate Patron. That’s another €240k a year to boost the development:

This support will be dedicated towards general Blender core development, with the goal of continuously improving content creation tools for individuals and small teams.

BaconPaul Two Filters

Paul of Surge XT fame created a quick prototype for the new Filter API as a separate Two Filters plugin. And you know what? People seem to be loving it for what it is today.

Bedroom Producers Blog covered it, Synth Anatomy covered it, and so did a few more outlets.

Here is a quick demo from VU LUFS:

Builds are only currently available through GitHub CI.

OB-Xf

As if it wasn’t quite sufficient, the loosely formed Surge XT team now got another project, and it’s none other than a fork of OB-Xd called OB-Xf. Here is the deal.

Some time after the original source code was released, the FOSS version pretty much stopped being updated (as compared to the DiscoDSP version). So, around March 2025, joeloftusdev took matters into his hands and started making changes.

After introducing some minor improvements, he moved the development over to the Surge XT organization and started refactoring the code, adding new features, and changing the user interface. Here are some of the differences between the fork and the original:

Previously hidden parameters are now exposed in the user interface.
The mixer now has a ring modulator and noise color selection.
The control section now has separate pitch bend ranges for up and down.
An actual second LFO has been added (haven’t tested it yet).
The Voice Variation now has the Levels parameter.

There’s also a lot of under-the-hood work going on, with BaconPaul’s involvement.

Unfortunately, the changes break compatibility with old Ob-Xd presets. Plus, installing the new theme is a bit cumbersome at the moment, and OB-Xf won’t show up properly without it. Still, it’s a really exciting development!

Artworks

Mobile Suit Gundam Wing 30th Anniversary by Yanting, made with Unreal Engine, Maya, and Blender:

Stoneflow Vale by Jonas Nathanael (who is back to his favourite cities topic, it seems), made with Blender and Krita:

The Crab Titan by Deltakosh, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Valley of Dead Trees by Daria Khmelewska, made with ZBrush, Blender, and Photoshop:

Weekly recap — 7 September 2025

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 21:12:22 +0300

Week highlights: new releases of ShineStacker, OurPaint, Mixxx, and LSP plugins; new features in Inkscape and FreeCAD.

ShineStacker 1.3

It’s a relatively unknown free/libre program for focus-stacking by Luca Lista. The workflow is fairly straightforward: point it to a folder with source photos, let it analyze them and merge stacks, use a brush to tweak masks if you like, save to JPEG or TIFF.

(The sample files on the screenshot are by Helicon Focus)

The last couple of releases focus (ahem) on parallel processing, but also ship with the following changes:

Automatic subsample option for alignment, balancing and vignetting (on by default).
HLS and HSV corrections now supported for 16-bit images.
Luminosity correction in the LAB color space now available.
CPU and memory usage monitor widget for running jobs.
Job input can now specify a list of files, not only a folder.
Various GUI improvements.

See here for all recent release notes and builds are available for major operating systems. You can also install the program with pip install shinestacker.

OurPaint 0.5

Yiming Wu recently released a major update of OurPaint, his quite underrated node-based painting program.

The major new feature is spectral blending (some technical background is here) for realistic color mixing. Several other new features have been built on top of that, namely, the Accumulation and the Depletion Speed brush properties, as well as a couple new brushes, Oil and Gouache, specifically designed for the new pigment canvas.

Spectral blending is computationally intensive by design. Brian Dieterle, who introduced this feature to MyPaint about 5-6 years ago, ran into system resource limitations fairly easily and had to find a trade-off between performance and realism (he later left MyPaint to work on FocalPoint, a proprietary macOS/iOS program built on the knowledge he had acquired).

The Krita team did similar work in the late 2000s with Kubelka-Munk’s model for diffuse reflection and eventually dropped the code entirely. There have been two newer patches (MR#1783 and MR#1997) floating around since 2023, neither have been applied yet.

Then there’s Mixbox under CC BY-NC 4.0 that is incompatible with GPL software (yet FlipFluids devs seem to have found a workaround).

What I’m saying here is that there is still interest in this feature. So having another player taking a stab at spectral blending is exciting. I haven’t yet tried mixing colors other than the blue/yellow pair, so I’m curious to see people with actual painting skills putting the new release to the test!

Here are some of the other new features:

Undo support in brush nodes.
Support for custom CMYK profiles for soft proofing.
RGBA canvas now uses non-associated (or non-premultiplied, if you will) alpha to record color values.
EDID data reading to adjust for RGB chromaticity coordinates, white point, and gamma (Linux-only).

For the full list of changes, please see here.

Inkscape

The team recently asked users to test and provide feedback on a new feature: recoloring artwork. Here is the workflow: select a group of objects, click Recolor Selection in the Fill and Stroke dock, then choose a recoloring pair and tweak the new color:

Downloads and the feedback page are here.

Another upcoming change is the updated gradient editor. The changes are somewhat cosmetic:

You will also note that color slider widgets have changed recently.

FreeCAD

A massive patch by David Kaufman has landed to the CAM workbench, with improvements for LeadInOut.

Another major new feature are the newly added gizmos for PartDesign commands, such as Pad, Pocket, Hole, and Fillet. You can now change the values of such commands directly in the viewport, and the corresponding numeric values in the Task panel will change accordingly.

Here you have two controls for the Pad command: Length (drag up/down) and Taper Angle (drag left/right along the arc).

Here is a quick demo for Fillet and Chamfer:

There is an ongoing discussion on Discord about adding on-view parameters so you can use numeric input in the viewport as well, just like in Sketcher.

Mixxx 2.5.3

This new version comes with bugfixes, improvements to the Digital Vinyl System (DVS) support, and updated mappings for Icon P1-Nano MIDI 1, Traktor Kontrol S4 Mk3, Traktor Kontrol S3, and Numark NS6II. All the downloads are here.

LSP Plugins 1.2.23

There are no new plugins this time, but a whole lot of improvements all around. Here are just some of them:

Experimental support of UI for macOS.
Better UI for preset management.
AHDBSSR (Attack, Hold, Decay, Break, Slope, Sustain, Release) envelope control in Sampler and Multisampler.
DC offset control in Clipper and Multiband Clipper.
Frequency inspection mode in the Spectrum Analyzer (click Inspect).
An extended collection of built-in rooms for Room Builder

Downloads and the full list of changes are here on GitHub.

Artworks

Santa Elena Canyon by Elixiah, made with Krita:

Dragon Valley by Philipp Urlich, made with Krita:

Cosmic Church by Quentin Mabille, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Weekly recap — 31 August 2025

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 21:12:22 +0300

Back to recaps after a summer break. What’s new recently: Wacom upgrades its Blender Foundation support; new releases of GIMP, RapidRAW, Kdenlive, and Shotcut; new features in Inkscape and Ardour.

GIMP 3.1.4

The very nearly π release comes with major and minor new features:

Vector layers, a 2006 GSoC project finally merged. Useful on its own accord, but also a prerequisite for shape tools.
Link layers, a hack from a few years ago, now more or less finalized and merged.
Ctrl+B/I/U shortcuts now available when formatting text on the canvas.
The MyPaint Brush tool has been switched to use the v2 engine, sans spectral blending.
The Animation Playback plugin UI has been revamped to look more like a regular video player.

I’ll probably make a separate post about the release.

RapidRAW 1.3.11

I’ve missed a few recent releases, so here’s the overall recap starting at 1.3.9:

New features:

One-click AI sky masks
Faster editing thanks to optimized pipeline
LUT files in .cube, .3dl, .png, .jpg, .jpeg, and .tiff file formats can now be applied
Chromatic aberration correction is available now
RapidRAW will now try to estimate the file size of exports
Various fixes have been applied

I did a quick test of AI sky maps, and the result isn’t great. The algorithm will miss enclosed parts of the sky entirely, e.g., between branches of trees on the horizon.

The mask will also cross over bits of a mountain ridge:

However, since it’s early code, let’s hope things will improve eventually. You can grab downloads here.

Inkscape

The object attributes dialog is really beginning to look like the original proposal, and quite similar to what Figma/PenPot users have grown accustomed to:

Blender + Wacom

When Wacom joined the ranks of corporate sponsors of Blender Foundation with a €30K/year contribution around December 2024, there wasn’t much talk. Now that they’ve upgraded all the way to Corporate Patron, which means €240K/year, it’s all the talk in the community :)

This sponsorship boost will provide the necessary funding for Blender to expand its presence to tablet devices—a project the team announced in July this year.

FreeCAD

There have been some interesting changes in FreeCAD lately.

Kacper Donat delivered the main code of his grant-funded work to add transparent previews in PartDesign. There may be further changes in other workbenches, but for now, here is a quick demo:

You can now create a two-sided extrusion, as well as two-dimensional arrays and multiple spacings in one go. Both features have been added by PaddleStroke. Here is his video:

ArchSite now has interactive sun position and ray visualization, developed by furgo16:

Multiple bodies support is now available by default. The feature was added in v1.0, but it was considered experimental and thus off by default. Seems like it has earned its right to be on for everyone now.

Additionally, Brad Collette finalized the initial CAM workbench roadmap, you can find it here.

The project soon enters hard feature freeze. There’s a possibility we’ll see FreeCAD 1.1 later this year. However, if the v1.0 development cycle is any indication, I’d rather bet on early 2026.

Kdenlive 25.08

This is a pretty exciting update:

Moving and resizing SVGs and images in the titler is now possible
Better system theme support for scopes
A whole lot of UX/UI improvements for project notes, monitor, and guides/markers
NVIDIA 10-bit x265 encoding
10-bit export profiles in the render dialog, with a fallback to 8-bit when using composition or non-avfilter effects
Cleaner UI for the audio tracks mixer

The team also made this somewhat confusing statement in the release notes:

Added Enable Hardware Decoding option in the Config Wizard in preparation for future hardware acceleration features

I asked them to explain what it means, and Farid was kind enough to provide some background:

This feature adds hardware decoding, but you won’t see any huge performance improvement yet because there needs to be more work done in MLT to improve moving frames between GPU and CPU.

See here for full release notes.

Shotcut 25.08

This is mainly a bugfix release. Here are two new features, though:

BT.2020 color space can now be selected in the preview.
You can now embed markers as chapters when exporting a video (see the export job context menu).

Full release announcement is here.

Ardour

There’s been a ton of under-the-hood changes in Ardour in August, but here are some user-visible ones:

You can now easily remove all inactive tracks (hidden from view in the Mixer)
Automation editing from keyboard has been more or less completed (but I’ve yet to test it myself).
basics of tempo & meter fields in region editor(s), regions can create their own tempo map
Now that the bottom panel is available for both MIDI and audio regions, you can select in Preferences where to edit the regions when you click on them.
Another new Preferences option allows disabling implicit grouping in the Mixer window. So if you don’t like selecting multiple channels and adjusting faders by the same amount or batch-toggling Mute/Solo, you can switch that off entirely.

Realistically, I don’t think we’ll see v9.0 this year (although I’d love to be corrected on that). 2026, though? Seems doable to me.

Artworks

Hope by Philipp Urlich, made with Krita:

Occult Ritual by Marcus Östergren, made with Krita:

How To Train Your Dragon (2025) - Dragon Visual Development by Juan Hernández, made with Blender, ZBrush, and Substance 3D Painter for the live action movie:

Weekly recap — 10 August 2025

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 21:12:22 +0300

Week highlights: new releases of RapidRaw, Gradia, Friction, and Handbrake; new features in GIMP.

GIMP

Recent changes are mainly various under-the-hood improvements and fixes. CmykStudent also restored support for HRZ Slow Scan Television Images and added support for JPEG-based file formats by Seattle FilmWorks (designed for digitized film).

Another WIP patch by CmykStudent is bringing support for the LCMS2 Fast Float plug-in. This will speed up 8-bit and 16-bit conversions and floating point precision operations.

RapidRAW

It’s a bit scary (but also impressive) how many changes have accumulated in RapidRaw in the past three weeks since I last mentioned it:

Fuji RAF X-Trans Support (confirmed to work)
Image importer
Batch renaming
Automatic image tagging with CLIP by OpenAI
Color labels for images (plus a corresponding filter)
Image straightening tool + reworked crop & transforms tool
Grow, shrink, and feather AI-generated masks
Simple OpenCV-based panorama stitcher
Non-destructive eraser tool
Better preset organization
More realistic exposure adjustments and better highlights control
Auto-crop when rotating to remove black areas

I think that the program would benefit from greater emphasis on processing quality. You can see the infamous pink tones where the image is overexposed:

You can fetch the latest build from GitHub.

Gradia 1.9.0

Alexander Vanhee made two new major releases of Gradia, a screenshot annotation tool. Here are the most interesting changes:

New on-screen display design
Support for zooming in and out (Shift and Alt work as modifiers for scrolling horizontally and vertically)
Background gradient changes: redesigned color selector, up to 5 movable steps in a gradient, radial and conic gradients now possible
Improved drag-and-drop support for loading from URLs

Get the latest code here or install from Flathub.

Friction 1.0.0rc2

Ole-André Rodlie published the second release candidate for the Friction animation editor.

Here are the major changes:

New horizontal toolbar for tool settings (similar to what you know from e.g. Inkscape, see below fpr a screenshot)
SVG can now by copy-pasted into your Friction project
PNG images now have proper unassociated alpha, and TIFF images now have proper associated alpha
19 various UX/UI improvements and fixes

See here for the full release notes and download links.

Handbrake 1.10

The popular video transcoder got a new update:

New “Social 10MB” presets
Improved metadata passthru, preserving additional metadata including creation date, cover art, and location
New option to choose the encoder color range
SubRip/UTF-8 subtitles are now passed through to MKV without conversion to SSA
Various OS-specific fixes and improvements for Windows, Linux, and macOS

Full release notes and downloads are on GitHub.

Artworks

New Arkandis by Deltakosh, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Ruined Mountain Pass by Doosan, made with Blender, Photoshop, Quixel Megascans, and Unreal Engine:

Hangar E by Mauger Baptiste, made with Blender and Photoshop:

The Station by Brendon Bauman, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Deep in Poison Forest by Andrew Andreev, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Weekly recap — 3 August 2025

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 21:12:22 +0300

Week highlights: new major releases of PixiEditor and Flameshot, new features in GIMP, FreeCAD, OpenSCAD, and Ardour.

GIMP

There were two user-visible changes this past week:

The newly added GEGL API browser by Ondřej Míchal (GSoC2025 student) will help developers use GEGL operations in their own plugins.
The initial support for importing PAA textures by CmykStudent will help game developers who need to open texture files in this format developed by the Bohemia Interactive game studio.

PixiEditor 2.0

Krzysztof Krysiński announced the release of PixiEditor 2.0. This image editor was originally designed for pixel art, but that’s in the past now. The new release brings general image editing features and some vector graphics tools.

Here are some of the major changes:

Node graph compositing
Bezier curves, lines, and vector shapes
Text tool
Frame-by-frame animations
Brush with a pixel-perfect option
Transformation tools: scale, move, skew, rotate, perspective

The developers released a quick overview video (below) and a much more detailed walkthrough.

They are building a business model where the software is free (both LGPLv3 and gratis), and extensions are paid.

Downloads are available for all major desktop platforms.

Flameshot 13

This is a major new release with Qt6 support and various quality-of-life improvements, including these:

Support for more Wayland compositors.
Symmetric resize with Shift is now possible.
JPEG quality can now be selected.
Saving WebP is now available on Windows.

Downloads are here.

FreeCAD

Ryan Kembrey submitted a pretty exciting patch for TechDraw, that replaces the old static view frames with new dynamic ones that autoresize when you tweak the position of dimensions or add new ones, and hide technical details like the frame caption until you hover over the frame. Here is the demonstration:

captain0xff created a draft PR for the project he’s been working on as part of the GSoC program this year: interactive controls for the Part Design workbench. So far, the patch covers the Pad, Additive and Subtractive Loft/Pipe/Helix, Pocket, Fillet, Chamfer, and Thickness commands. Here is an excerpt from his video demonstration:

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Meanwhile, drwho495 started working on a new 3rd-party workbench called Constraint Design. His intention is to create a more stable version of the Part Design workbench that uses custom elements rather than OpenCascade elements and thus has fewer toponaming issues.

OpenSCAD

The OpenSCAD team started posting on Fediverse about the recently added new features. One of them is support for navigation presets, similar to what you can find in e.g. FreeCAD:

Ardour

Paul merged the initial code for displaying the audio editor on the Cue page. This will help with audio clips on live sessions. The implementation still has some issues to be ironed out.

Artworks

Aurora Settlement by Pedro Arnaut (Colapso studio), made with Blender and Photoshop:

Athens by Lucas M. Molina, made with Blender and Photoshop:

The Caelus Station by alex_liangbo, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Weekly recap — 27 July 2025

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 21:12:22 +0300

Week highlights: new releases of Shotcut and Qtractor, the Blender team starts working on an iPad port.

Flameshot 13 release candidates

The Flameshot team started making release candidates for the upcoming v13 of this screen capture and annotation tool. The next big release will ship with Qt6-based builds, better Wayland support, and various other changes. You can help the team test the builds and discover bugs.

Blender on iPad

Dalai Felinto announced that Blender is coming to iPad users, with later versions arriving for users of other touch devices (the post mentions Microsoft Surface, Huawei MatePad, and the Wacom MovinkPad).

The team is planning to release a tech demo in time for SIGGRAPH 2025. Although one might argue that the teaser is already out 🙂

You can follow the project’s progress here.

askNK did a pretty decent coverage of the news, check it out:

Shotcut 25.07

The new version of the editor no longer ships Whisper speech-to-text models inside the build to reduce download sizes. Instead, you should now use the built-in downloader.

Here are some of the other changes:

Various UI theme improvements, mostly to make the UI look more native on Windows and macOS.
A new Outline video filter, mostly useful in conjunction with the rich text filter and images that have an alpha channel.
A new Soft Focus filter set (Mask: From file > Blur: Gaussian > Opacity > Mask: Apply).
The Channels toggle buttons have been added to many audio filters.

For the full list of changes, please see the release notes.

On a related matter, Shotcut seems important enough for Filmora to spend money on the ads targeting (potential) Shotcut users:

Qtractor 1.5.7

Here are some of the new features in this release:

The Aux Send bus now has an I/O matrix (see below for a screenshot).
The waveform is now rendered correctly for audio clips with more than two channels.
All audio clip peaks+rms waveforms are now rendered slightly compressed to make the low-level signal more visible.

Downloads are here.

Ardour

Some websites recently reported that Ardour dropped GTK2 support entirely in favor of its vendored version called YTK. This led to a number of discussions where people became severely confused (sometimes aggressively so) about why Ardour relies on a vendored GTK2 and which parts of GTK the team had to replace with custom solutions.

So, Paul wrote a detailed explanation in a thread on Phoronix. Check it out if you are puzzled too.

Artworks

Realm of Specters: Buried in permafrost by Eugeny Romanov, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Haunted Forest by Mattias Lind, made with Blender and Krita:

European City by Jaechan Gwon, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Weekly recap — 20 July 2025

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 21:12:22 +0300

Week highlights: new Blender, RapidRAW, Gradia, Sigil, and Hydrogen releases; new darktable UI prototypes.

Gradia 1.7.0

I last looked at this new screenshot annotation app about a month ago. Alexander has introduced quite a few changes since then:

New design for the gradient picker.
An option to automatically balance the borders of certain images.
Support for launching with image input from console.
Uploading is now possible, and you can define your own providers.
The font drop-down list now includes all available system fonts.
Text and stamp annotation tools now have optional background colors and outlines.
The highlighter tool now supports pressure sensitivity.
Default export filenames are now more descriptive and include creation time.
Images can now be rotated in 90-degree increments.
Color pickers for annotation tools are no longer modal, so you can now make accurate color selection.

That’s not even the complete list of changes. You can grab the latest release here or install it from Flathub.

RapidRAW 1.2.5

RapidRAW is a new digital photography workflow application similar to darktable, Lightroom, et al. CyberTimon, the developer behind it, says he’s just 18, and it’s his personal software development challenge, aided by AI.

The developer made four releases, mostly with new features just this week, so I guess the AI part is real. Here is a quick overview of what’s new since v1.2.5 released, oh, just last week:

Automatic adjustment in one click
Native titlebar on all platforms
Filters by file type (RAW, non-RAW, All)
Export with metadata, remove GPS metadata on exporting, configurable naming scheme for batch exporting
Adaptive editor theme changes color accents based on the image you opened
Deleting associated JPEG/RAW image is now an option
Smooth zoom slider
Color grading wheels (pretty much the lift/gamma/gain)
Exposure correction now displayed in f-stops
The Film Strip & Folder tree now remembers whether it was collapsed / expanded before.
Luminance calculation improvements in the Color Mixer

My own quick test hasn’t been very successful, mainly because I cannot develop RAF files in the program. You can tell it even from the screenshot:

One more concern I’ve seen discussed on Pixls is that if this is an Electron app, it’s unclear whether color management is functional.

Either way, you can download RapidRAW and see for yourself if it works for you. I’m giving you a general downloads link intentionally, because by the time you read this, there may already be 10 newer versions available.

Darktable

Pixls user rudantu continues to develop prototypes for darktable’s updated user interface. The latest proposal covers the UI of modules.

Personally, I quite like rudantu’s work and really hope the team will implement at least some of the proposed changes

Sigil 2.6.0

The new version of the EPUB authoring tool has a few minor new features, but it’s mostly a bugfix release. So if you rely on this program, absolutely do upgrade.

Blender 4.5 LTS

This is a long-term support release of Blender, which will receive bugfix updates for the next two years. Here are some of the release highlights:

The Vulkan backend is now on par with the OpenGL one (see here for supported platforms).
Geometry nodes can now ingest CSV, Stanford PLY, OpenVDB, STL, OBJ, and text files.
Grease Pencil now supports custom Geometry Node tools.
A ton of new geometry nodes.
Faster startup time (2x on certain systems).
Procedural texture nodes are now available in the Compositor.
Point cloud objects are now available (think 3D scan data or sparse datasets).
Quick capture for previews in the asset browser.

For a vastly more detailed list of changes, please see here. As usual, there’s a video recap:

Hydrogen 1.2.5

The new version of this drum machine features Qt6 support, the deprecation of LASH, the venerable session manager for audio applications on Linux. The rest of the changes are bugfixes.

Artworks

The Mouldering by Josh Norman, made with Blender and Photoshop:

The Bazaar Beneath the Academy by Deltakosh, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Viking Village by ELEVEN TRIS, made with Blender and Unreal Engine:

Song of Alcazar by Max Bedulenko, made with Blender and Unreal Engine:

APOLLO- A.P.H.X by Ta Cheng Lin, made with Blender and Photoshop:

And for an entirely different mood, I’m giving you Anti-Light Pollution Commando by Corentin, made with Krita and a great sense of humour:

Weekly recap — 13 July 2025

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 16:12:22 +0300

Week highlights: new releases of Krita, Bonsai, OBS Studio, and Kdenlive; new features in GIMP, FontForge, and Ardour.

GIMP

Here are some of the latest changes in the development branch:

CmykStudent’s patch that adds support for MyPaint v2 brush engine features (sans spectral blending) is now merged and will be part of GIMP 3.2.
CmykStudent also added support for Sketchbook-specific TIFF files, which means setting layer selection, visibility of the background layer, layer blend mode and color tag, and reading group layers.
Niels De Graef and Michael Natterer (it’s been a while!) have been porting the controller configuration part of the Preferences dialog to use newer widgets.

Krita 5.2.10

This is a bugfix release (with another one likely coming within a week). You can find the list of fixes in this announcement. The team also mentioned that they are now focusing on upcoming releases of Krita 5.3.0 (new features) and Krita 6.0.0 (Qt6 port, initial Wayland support).

FontForge

I haven’t followed FontForge development for some years. So it’s good to know (thanks to Nathan Willis) that the program now renders previews in the Metrics view with HarfBuzz. The same contributor has been working on a GTK3 port for a while, too.

If you’ve been around long enough, you probably recall that there already was an attempt to create a GTK-based UI years ago when the original developer was still around. That didn’t work the last time, so maybe this time it will.

Bonsai 0.8.3

The new version of Bonsai (formerly BlenderBIM) comes with 770 new features and fixes. Here are some of the changes:

Blender 4.5 (currently at RC1) support.
buildingSMART Data Dictionary (bSDD) now supports multiple dictionaries, using dictionaries both in classifications and properties, and a few other new features.
Various small improvements in IFC5D support.
Openings and spatial elements now have support for arrays.
Topology representation items are now editable again.
IfcSQL is now a lot more robust.
IfcApplications can now be managed in the interface.
A new special UI to generically edit any attribute pointing to an object.

See here for the announcement.

OBS Studio 31.1

This release of OBS Studio brings various new features:

Support for Windows on ARM
Preview zoom controls
Support for multitrack video on macOS and Linux
Support for color format/space/range GPU conversion
QVBR rate control for VA-API
Explicit sync support for PipeWire screen capture
Support for hardware-accelerated browser source on Linux

See here for the full list of changes.

Kdenlive 25.04.3

This update brings half a dozen minor bugfixes. Meanwhile, contributor balooii balooii has been steadily submitting various cosmetic user interface fixes, improving UI contrast and HiDPI support. Recently, they also contributed a patch (currently in review) that adds a draggable rotation anchor to do non-centered rotation of clips.

Ardour

Paul continued working on pianoroll windows and related functionality, then switched back to implementing recording audio in the Cue sequencer. He also began extending recently added support for keyboard control for automation points. Now when you press Enter to add a new automation point, you automatically get an input box to type the new value. This isn’t finished yet, though.

Artworks

Alive by Muhammad Fahad, made with Blender and Photoshop:

The Pact by Sravan NCS, made with Blender, Zbrush, and Photoshop Elements:

Weekly recap — 6 July 2025

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 20:14:22 +0300

Week highlights: new digiKam release, new features coming to GIMP, Inkscape, and Ardour.

GIMP

CmykStudent created a patch adding support for MyPaint v2 brushes (1.5+ really) with the exception of spectral blending. There are three additional changes coming with this patch:

A new Posterize blending mode for the MyPaint Brush tool.
Zoom factor and canvas rotation mode are now taken into consideration when painting.
A new tool option named Gain, which is a multiplier for input pressure.

digiKam 8.7.0

The new version comes with multiple improvements:

Optional background face recognition.
The application will now show the next best face match (where applicable) if the user rejects the first match.
digiKam now has a test to discover if it can use OpenCL- or CUDA-based GPU-side processing for running AI pipelines.
The Batch Queue Manager now features a plugin for AI-based automatic rotation.

See here for the full list of changes and some illustrations.

Inkscape

Martin Owens patched the PDF code to correctly apply document ICC profiles as well as device-cmyk with and without ICC profiles on exporting.

Jabier Arraiza is working on Trim Shape LPE — a live path effect that allows hiding parts of strokes. Here is a screenshot from Jabier’s video:

Tavmjong Bah is adding hatch to path functionality.

There are now merge requests from at least two of the five GSoC students. Aarav Oswal is adding on-canvas spellchecking (based on libspelling) and Fatma Omara is adding artwork recoloring functionality to the Fill & Stroke dock.

FreeCAD

The major upstream project news is that WandererFan is retiring from TechDraw maintenance and active involvement with the FreeCAD Project Association. So that’s one less maintainer in the projecе, which sucks. The workbench has seen some great action in the v1.0 development cycle, so hopefully some of those contributors will return to deliver even more and take over.

In other news, Grub created a new addon to track the release of new weekly builds, and Pieter Hijma got an NLnet grant to resume his work on the Ondsel Lens add-on. Both the Ondsel Lens code (a FreeCAD-specific online PDM system) and the Lens addon for FreeCAD are now hosted by the FreeCAD org on GitHub.

Zolko’s Assembly4 workbench has moved from GitHub to Codeberg. When I say “moved”, what I really mean is that he posted a threatening message to the FreeCAD team, and GitHub banned him, so he reopened the shop elsewhere. He also launched a fork of FreeCAD 0.21, “the last that remains compatible with earlier versions of FreeCAD user data”.

Ardour

Most recently, Robin removed the possibility of building Ardour with system-wide installed GTK/GDK2 instead of Ardour’s forks (YTK/YDK). The commit message specifically says:

After patching gtk/ytk to add touch support and macOS rendering, upstream gtk+2 is no longer an option

Some of the conversations around this spilled to the next week, and I’ve seen a lot of completely misinformed opinions, with some people even claiming that this is somehow a retribution for major desktop environments dropping X11 support or for some “political” actions by GTK developers. None of that is remotely true.

Ardour doesn’t use much of GTK in the first place, but they use enough of it to want to avoid another toolkit port. The changes they introduced to YTK/YDK make builds against system-wide GTK2 less functional as compared to official builds. So there you have it.

But most work lately is about pianoroll windows. It’s still too early to talk about the potential v9 release timeline, and it will likely stay that way for at least a few more months.

Artworks

Some practice by Mathieu Boyer, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Talking in the kitchen by npc, made with Krita:

Weekly recap — 29 June 2025

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 20:14:22 +0300

This post consolidates events of the last two weeks. Highlights: new releases of GIMP, darktable, Cardinal; new features in FreeCAD and Ardour.

GIMP 3.1.2

This is the first release in the series leading up to v3.2 expected, oh well, frankly I don’t know when! This year, hopefully?

Here is what’s new:

A switch on Brush, Font, and Palette docks to render the background in the theme’s background color (should be always on, IMO).
New paint mode, Overwrite, to replace pixels without blending source and target transparency values.
The position of the text outline can now be set to outer, inner, and centered. It was always centered before that.
Non-destructive filters can now be attached to separate channels.
The CMYK Color Selector now displays the total ink coverage of the selected color.
Improved support for Photoshop files: GIMP now loads patterns, as well as presets for curves and levels, and exports PSB files.
Loading multi-layer OpenEXR images is available now.

See here for a more detailed list of changes.

darktable 5.2

Main changes this new version:

Side-by-side comparison between snapshots (on the screenshot below)
The metadata module is now fully configurable and allows to add and maintain any tags which are supported by exiv2
New “raster mask import” module to use PFM files and raster masks.
The Sigmoid module is now the default tone-mapper.
You can now export with multiple exporting presets in one go (think full-res and lower-res exports).
OM System 14-bit high-resolution ORFs are now supported.

Here are the release notes.

FreeCAD

There’s a lot going on in the community regarding Werner’s recent public post in the forum, where he voiced various concerns about the project’s operation, including things like the merging of breaking changes. Apparently, there are some behind-the-scenes conversations going on, so I’d rather not elaborate until the dust settles.

In development news, perhaps the most interesting upcoming change is a long-anticipated text tool in Sketcher. Here is a quick demo by Pierre:

This has not been merged yet, there are still fixes to be done based on code reviews.

Also, Kacper Donat is working on transparent previews again (FPA grant from late 2024). Here is one of the recent screenshots illustrating a transparent preview for the Helix tool:

Cardinal 25.06

Felipe Coelho released an update of Cardinal, his fork on VCV Rack. Changes:

Replaced SVModular DrumKit with WSTD-Drums fork (the original developer requested it).
Added the eightfold module, an eight-voice algorithmic sequence generator.
Updated 10 other existing modules.

You can grab the latest release here on GitHub.

Ardour

Paul Davis added a basic implementation of keyboard shortcuts for automation editing seen in Ableton Live 12.2 (e.g., on this video):

Enter adds a new automation point
Right and Left arrow keys move the created point on the timeline
Up and Down arrow keys raise and lower the point

The implementation is not a 1:1 copy, some things are missing. For example, typing a new value directly is not yet available, nor is jumping between prev/next automation points.

Another recent change is the direct response to a user’s request on Reddit for guidance on aligning multiple regions from different tracks on the timeline. There are keyboard shortcuts for that, but they weren’t exposed in the UI and thus weren’t quite discoverable. So Paul fixed that:

There are a few more options than that, they may show up in the menu at a later time.

Artworks

Before the Void by Vadim Sadovski, made with Blender and Photoshop

Nurgle by Coffee Time, made with Krita:

Arches & Ruins by ABluSkittle, made with fixme:

Sea by Philipp A. Urlich, made with fixme:

Weekly recap — 15 June 2025

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 20:14:22 +0300

Week highlights: new release of Audacity and Kdenlive, new features in GIMP, Inkscape, and Ardour.

GIMP

Jehan created a tag for GIMP 3.1.2 in the desktop files, so the first unstable release in the 3.1 series is likely coming soon. This will lead up to a stable v3.2 release sometime in this decade.

Meanwhile, here are some recent changes in git:

Daniel Novomesly added AVCI loading and HEJ2 exporting, which requires a recent version of libheif.
CmykStudent removed the restriction on applying NDE filters to channels in the GUI. Layer masks are still restricted, though, until UX/UI is figured out.
CmykStudent implemented a check for whether the alpha channel should be added when you merge a layer with a filter that requires it into a layer below.
Jacob Boerema implemented the loading of Photoshop patterns, currently limited to RGB and greyscale.
Gabriele patched the Histogram dock to show the number of unique colors. Previously, the way to get this number was from the now obsoleted Colorcube Analysis plugin.

A few more things in merge requests:

Exporting to PSB, a modification of PSD that supports 300,000x300,000px large images (CmykStudent).
Repositioning the on-canvas text formatting toolbar (Gabriele). Way overdue and very much welcome!
An early patch to load EXIF and XMP metadata from PSP v8 files (CmykStudent).

Inkscape

Charlotte Curtis proposed a patch that adds configurable grouping of items when importing PDF files: by XObject (current behavior), by optional content groups (OCGs), by page, or necessary only (ignores XObjects and OCGs).

Anunay submitted a patch for review that adds (configurable) zooming with middle-click/drag. That’s actually really nice!

Kdenlive 25.04.2

This is a bugfix release without any new features. Over 20 issues have been resolved since the previous update. Here is the full list of changes.

Audacity 3.7.4

This is mostly a bugfix release, but with some nice additions:

A new welcome/what’s new screen.
A bunch of changes in OpenVINO effects: availability on macOS, their own category in the Effects menu, anddiscoverability through the Get Effects button.

Ardour

The team is still very far from v9, but there’ve been some neat fixes and improvements. Here are some of the recent ones:

Various pianoroll window improvements and the seemingly never-ending saga of tweaking the rendering of MIDI note lines and the scroomer.
New command to search for tracks and busses in the session, with automatic scrolling to get the found item to the top of the timeline.
Icon colors are now themable.
The real-time analyzer is now available in regular nightly builds.

Artworks

Fantasy Tree by Facundo Mileo, made with Blender and Photoshop:

“Solstice” Concept Art by MauFlores, made with Krita:

Weekly recap — 8 June 2025

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 20:14:22 +0300

Week highlights: new release of RawTherapee, new features in GIMP, and new apps for screenshot annotation and film photography.

The X11Libre drama

It’s hard to avoid this topic. In a nutshell:

Enrico Weigelt started contributing to xserver (X11/X.org) around January 2024. He has over 800 commits to his name to date.
He didn’t test at least some of his patches, which broke things on multiple occasions.
At least one maintainer (employed by Red Hat) complained that his patches added little value, yet the sheer number of them blocked the review of patches by other contributors.
Some contributors, such as Jasper St. Pierre of Valve, complained that Enrico’s patches broke ABI compatibility way too often.
Many of Enrico’s patches stayed unapplied, which he complained about, too.
Enrico also complained that his fixes are not being released (there were actually five xserver releases in 2024 and one in 2025).
Enrico spent some time publicly badmouthing Red Hat / IBM online (in this comments section, for instance), claiming that the company was sabotaging X11 development.
He ended up forking X11, renaming it to X11Libre, and hosting his fork on freedesktop’s infrastructure (now on GitHub).
The FreeDesktop CoC committee reportedly discussed this and—which is an established fact—banned Enrico from the platform and deleted the fork repository, which automatically deleted all unapplied merge requests (because Gitlab).
The person (employed by Red Hat) who pushed the red button posted on Mastodon what some people think was schadenfreude (unlikely).

If all this complaining is not quite sufficient, the story was reported by Bryan Landuke in his usual narrative-twisting style to add extra drama and skip some important details.

I have little interest in discussing the whole X11 vs Wayland topic. I’m neither against nor in favor of either. Overall, I’d happily switch to Wayland since that’s where GNOME is heading. The only reason I’m still an X11 user is that Ardour works less reliably on XWayland for me, and chances of Paul and Robin porting YTK (their vendored version of GTK2) to Wayland any time soon seem extremely slim, same as a port of Ardour to GTK3/GTK4 (however little of that they would use).

I also don’t buy the entire “passionate developer vs big evil dishonest corporation” narrative. I’ve read enough discussions in the issue tracker and merge requests to form my own opinion. Everybody had a problem with his changes: both Red Hat, Oracle, Valve, and NVIDIA peeps. His contribution style and approach to testing his patches didn’t change at all despte multiple confrontations.

What I find more interesting to discuss is that the decision-making is not transparent in many FOSS organizations. It’s hard for me to name a project that has a code of conduct and a public record on any voting to apply its policy.

In this particular instance, we don’t know who posted a complaint to the CoC, who actually participated in the conversation, what CoC rule was deemed broken, and why the committee decided to ban instead of issuing an official warning. As a matter of fact, it’s possible that they did issue a warning, but there’s just no way to tell.

This is not a unique issue. But it’s the kind of growing pains in the community that are educational to watch.

All in all, I think there’s a multitude of lessons to learn from this controversy. For example, if you have a difficult contributor who disrupts the project’s operation and you know he won’t shut up about the ban, maybe try being extra open about the process of ejecting him. Or if a big bad corpo is out to get ya, maybe don’t try to host your fork on the infrastructure they can kick you out of.

GIMP

Okay, this was an eventful week for the project:

Advance Software implemented JPEG2000 exporting.
The Lock Content command is now undoable (CmykStudent).
GIMP can now optionally follow the light/dark theme system switch on systems where thi is supported (Niels De Graef, Hari Rana, Jehan Pages, Isopod).
Some transformations can once again add the alpha channel automatically (CmykStudent).
GIMP can now load JIF (Jeff’s Image Format) images which are a variation of the GIF format that compresses indexed images using zlib rather than LZW (CmykStudent).
When reading and writing OpenRaster files, GIMP now supports two official specification extensions: storing if layers are pixel-locked and if they are selected (CmykSudent). Both extensions are supported by Krita and MyPaint.
The CMYK color selector now displays total ink coverage (CmykStudent, unsurprisingly).

Gradia 1.4

This is a brand-new application to annotate screenshots. Functionally, it’s a lot like Annotator, but with a slightly different approach to UI.

The application lacks some important features, such as cropping and a delay for screenshots, but the developer is quite responsive in the issue tracker, in my experience. Definitely check it out. Officially, it’s only distributed as a flatpak build, but I just built it from git (it’s all in Python, anyway).

RawTherapee 5.12

This is a major update bringing some neat changes, including these:

Dehaze option added to The Raw Black Points.
De-fish option in Distortion Correction to convert fisheye images into rectilinear images.
New Gamut Compression tool to apply ACES Reference Gamut Compression operator.
The Resize tool can now add a single-color border around the image.
New global tone mapper in Shadows/Highlights & Tone Equalizer tools.

See here for the full list of changes.

Filmbook

This is a brand-new application to help film camera users keep track of their rolls. The interface seems to be heavily geared towards phones despite being written in GTK4 (there isn’t an abundance of platforms you can run this on at the moment, it’s pretty much just Phosh).

Björn Adelberg was kind enough to provide some background about this project.

At the moment, the application is still very much geared to my needs. I have several cameras and not all of them have the option of inserting part of the film carton at the back. That’s why I wanted to remember which film is in which camera. It is also sometimes good to remember which films have not yet been developed. I would then take a film of the same type and load it again.

Once this is exposed, I have two films of the same type and can develop them in one developer box. It should also be possible to remember which films you have in the fridge and which cameras are in the cupboard. How much you expand this is another question.

One feature that is not yet integrated is the ability to create image entries for an inserted film. There you could enter the exposure time and which lens you used. Perhaps also a quick little sketch of the image. However, I think that having to document every image there is too time-consuming and not relevant in practice. But maybe I’m wrong.

The source code is over at Codeberg. There haven’t been any releases of this application yet. However, the developer publicly asked film photography aficionados for feedback. So there, consider this a broadcast of that request.

Flowblade 2.22

There are a few interesting changes in this new release of Flowblade, an MLT-based video editor:

32 new options for easing in keyframes.
GUI editors for Alpha Shape, Crop, and Gradient Tint effects.
Text labels for tracks displayed in track headers.
Various minor UI improvements.

See here for the full changelog.

Artworks

Power Beacon by Marat Zakirov, made with Blender:

Amsterdamsche Munt by Laura Kempff, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Weekly recap — 1 June 2025

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 23:14:22 +0300

Week highlights: new features in GIMP, new versions of PDF Arranger, Odin 2, and Tumult; new VAMP plugins.

GIMP

Two interesting patches merged to GIMP this week:

Importing legacy drop shadows in PSD (MR #2297).
Loading layered EXR files (MR #2301).

Other interesting changes in review:

JPEG 2000 exporting, with options for quality, CMYK exporting, and Digital Cinema Specification compliance profile (MR #2291).
Loading Photoshop patterns (MR #2285).

Because it’s LGM week, the team attended the conference, and this seems to have brought back Michael Natterer, who hasn’t been active in the project in the past two years.

PDF Arranger 1.12

This is a convenient little application by Konstantinos Poulios for performing various operations on PDF files. Here is what’s new in this release:

You can now export pages to PNG, JPEG, and rasterized PDF.
There’s a new option to drop document-level information like outline, passwords, and tags when exporting.
You can now do reverse imposition (booklet to pages).
It’s possible to do range selection for pages now.
You can now choose standard paper sizes when inserting a blank page or changing the page size.

There are builds for Windows on GitHub and a Linux build on Flathub.

Odin2 v2.4.0

TheWaveWarden released a new version of this free/libre virtual synth with a complete UI revamp. Already covered this in a few more details on a dedicated post earlier this week, have a read.

Tumult 1.1.0

Consint released a new version of Tumult, a plugin that adds noise to your audio for aesthetic reasons. You can now import custom samples and use 50 more noises added from the “Noise Plethora” sample pack.

Here is an earlier video demonstration of the plugin:

New VAMP plugins

Chris Cannam released two new VAMP plugins:

MERT Vamp plugin extracts feature vectors ( you could call them patterns) that can be used in machine learning for music interpretation.
Lossy Encoding Detector attempts to determine if the audio was ever subjected to a lossy compression algorithm.

Technically, you can use both of them with Sonic Visualiser, but only the lossy encoding detector renders an immediately useful plot.

Ardour and the Linux kernel

Linux 6.x broke support for Launchkey MK4 users in Ardour. This is because the system builds the names of ports from USB iProduct and USB iJack names, and some manufacturers put the product name into both. So instead of a telling port name Ardour sees something like “Launchkey MK4 61 Launchkey MK4” for all available ports and doesn’t know which one to pick.

Paul Davis ended up rolling up his sleeves and submitting a patch to introduce some basic heuristics and make the naming of MIDI ports smarter. Now, instead of non-descript “Launchkey MK4 61 Launchkey MK4”, you get regular port names like “Launchkey MK4 61 DAW In”. The patch has already landed in the kernel v6.14.8.x, and users report that it resolves the issue.

Artworks

Flooded Temple by OOFBurrito, made with Blender and GIMP:

They Will Kneel Soon by Arshad T P, made with Blender, After Effects, and Photoshop:

Entrance to the Research Facility for The Dark Eye by Illarstration, made with Krita:

Disney SpeedStorm: The Castle by Pedro Pitéu, made with Blender, Krita, and Photoshop (all artwork in the series made in pre-production and during development of the game):

Ruins of the Frozen Viking Ancients by YKK, made with Blender, 3DCoat, and Photoshop:

Fantastica Kowloon - Mufant Contest Entry by Alessandro Rocco, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Odin 2 synth gets a UI revamp

Thu, 29 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Odin 2 is a free (GPLv3+) 24-voice polyphonic semi-modular synth with a modulation matrix and microtuning support (imports Scala files). The initial release happened almost 5 years ago. Everyone got pretty excited, and for a good reason: it was a good synth.

Not just that—it also came a few years after the initial release of Surge, which kinda solidified the feeling that things are really getting better for musicians who stick with Linux.

TheWaveWarden kept releasing updates until three years ago when he started working on another synth (Spline), and it felt like this was the last update of Odin. I mean, we’ve seen it with Helm and Vital before, right? But no, here we are with a brand new version of Odin 2.

The main change is a full revamp of the user interface.

The old one was a bit clunky, scaling didn’t work properly, various other things would sometimes go *boing*. So while working on Spline, TheWaveWarden developed a whole new UI engine. Once he fleshed it out, he moved it to Odin and got a dedicated team to do the new design:

It was a costly investment, as the UI assets were created by Voger Design team. I hope Spline will bring back those costs at least. Even if not, I always wanted to give the Odin UI the love it deserves, since it’s still a community favourite. Lets see! :)

The scaling does work much better now, and redrawing after selecting a different zoom factor doesn’t take much time.

One caveat I’ve noticed so far is that the developer has swapped the modulation wheel and the pitch bend wheel in the UI to accommodate for the pitch bend range widget. But that means that the position of controls now doesn’t match what you typically get on a physical MIDI keyboard. Messes up my brain a little. The developer replied (#474) that he’ll listen to more feedback and then decide if he changes things back.

Apart from that, it’s still the good old Odin with its warm sound. The new version is available for Linux, Windows, and macOS. The Linux version is available in LV2, VST3, and CLAP.

If you want to support the developer, I can’t think of any better way than buying Spline. It’s his new baby, a wavetable synth with spectral wave morphing and spline modulators. Not free/libre, but then again, if the stories of Vital and VCV Rack 2 have taught me anything, it’s not like there are business models for FOSS plugins that work for everyone.

Weekly recap — 25 May 2025

Sun, 25 May 2025 21:14:22 +0300

Week highlights: new releases of Sigil, PipeWire, Qtractor, and Millisecond; new features in GIMP.

GIMP

Three notable patches landed in GIMP recently:

CmykStudent added a new option for the Text tool that I wish was there in Inkscape: outline direction (growing outward, inward, or centered).
The Curves and Levels tools can now load respective Photoshop presets, patch also by CmykStudent.
Jehan added a new option for the Brushes and the Palettes docks: “Use theme colors for preview". It’s a toggle at the top right of the respective docks. TBH, I think it should be just always on, depending on whether it’s a light or a dark theme.

Here are both the outline direction and the brush preview options:

Sigil 2.5.0

This is a mixed-bag-of-things kind of release of this EPUB editor, with minor quality-of-life improvements, updated lower-level tech (Qt 6.8.2, Python 3.13.2, pcre2-10.45), and various bugfixes.

If you are a Linux user specifically, you’ll finally find the AppImage build to be on par with the Windows/macOS builds at long last. In other words, upgrading makes perfect sense.

PipeWire 1.4.3

Wim Taymans spent more time hacking on netjack2 support (that’s the part of the JACK server tech that distributes audio over LAN) and made further improvements to MIDI2 support, such as better UMP SysEx handling and fixes to UMP program change conversion to MIDI 1.0.

Qtractor 1.5.5

Rui made a purely bugfix release of his audio/MIDI sequencer. I know this is getting old, but if Qtractor is your choice, upgrading is a no-brainer. Builds for Linux are over on SourceForge.

Millisecond 0.1

This is a brand-new application by Gahel, that runs Jeremy Jongepier’s rtcqs tool to figure out which parts of your Linux system configuration need tweaking. Wehn you click an expander, it tells you what to do and links to the specific part of the Linux Audio wiki. See here for a few more details.

Artworks

Are You Already Asleep? by Karina Onisenko, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Cursed ruins 02 by Ying Lam, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Steel Hunters - Desert Environments by Igor Mariev, made with Blender, Photoshop, and Unreal Engine:

Verdentia City by Atari Refanada, made with Blender and Clip Studio Paint:

Millisecond helps set up Linux for real-time audio

Fri, 23 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Does it take a Millisecond to set up your Linux for real-time audio now? Not really, no. You still need to fiddle with system-level configuration. But this little program by Gahel shows you exactly where your system settings could be improved, gives actionable advice, and links to relevant parts of the Linux Audio wiki.

For diagnostics, it uses rtcqs, a Python script by Jeremy Jongepier.

Once you follow the recommendations, you can click the Update button (top left) to run the diagnostic again and see if the change has taken effect (in some cases, you’d need to log out and back in anyway).

Gahel says:

In future releases, I intend to allow running fixes from the app whenever possible.

The developer is also known for a GNOME extension that helps set the samplerate and the buffer size in PipeWire.

Downloads are available in DEB and flatpak.

Weekly recap — 18 May 2025

Sun, 18 May 2025 20:14:22 +0300

Week highlights: new releases of GIMP, Inkscape and FreeCAD; KDE Plasma is getting an HDR calibration wizard.

HDR calibration in Plasma

KDE’s Plasma 6.4.0 is getting a simple HDR calibration wizard:

Some more information is available in this recent post.

The work was done by Xaver Hugl who is, apparently, one of the people behind HDR support in Wayland. You can read his earlier posts on HDR and color management in KDE on his blog.

GIMP 3.0.4

The new version comes with bug fixes and minor improvements:

The space bar now allows temporarily switching to moving layers (or paths) again. You can also set it to do nothing — that’s a new option in the drop-down list on the Canvas Interaction page of Preferences.
The Difference Cloud filter lost its settings when the team obsoleted it and switched to the GEGL-based implementation of the same functionality. The settings are now available again.
The Screenshot plug-in now uses radio buttons again rather than drop-down lists for selecting the area and the color profile options.
The MyPaint Brush tools options UI has been redesigned to match the layout of other painting tools.

In the meantime, 3rd-party plugin developers continue to port their old plugins. Resynthesizer, most commonly used for editing objects out of photos, is now initially available for GIMP3 in a dedicated git branch. Lloyd Konneker hasn’t finished cleaning things up (e.g., translations are to be brought back), but I tested the port, and it’s functional.

Another recent attempt is the Fix-CA plugin for fixing chromatic aberration in photos. The plugin seems to work on GIMP3 now, but the preview widget has an unholy size on a HiDPI display. I’m not sure where the bug is, but reported it all the same.

It could be useful turning Fix-CA into a GEGL op instead, but the plugin has an extra feature — rendering custom guides in the preview. GEGL ops can totally render handles on the canvas in GIMP (try Vignette), but I’m not sure that goes as far as guides.

An earlier example of a GIMP3 port is the Batcher plugin by Kamil Burda for batch-processing images, where the first GIMP3-capable release was out in February. Or Intel’s OpenVINO plugins for AI-based processing (upscaling, semantic segmentation, and, regrettably, Stable Diffusion).

Inkscape 1.4.2

The team released a new release that, I think, was originally intended to be bugfix-only, but some new features sneaked in.

Release highlights:

Inkscape now displays a splash screen to hint that the program is loading in the background.
Initial support for importing Linearity Curve files (formerly Vectornator).
Improved support for importing Affinity Designer files: better support for vector masks, support for linked and embedded images, support for symbols and additional shapes.
A new extension, Clean up Paths, removes duplicate nodes and nodes closer than a given threshold.
Over 70 major and minor fixes and improvements; also, updated translations.

FreeCAD 1.0.1

This is purely a bugfix release with over 170 commits backported from the main development branch. The release is a bit overdue, and there should be more releases like it. MangoJelly went through the list of commits and did a video on the changes in this release.

Among recently proposed changes, I’d probably pick the new tool library for the CAM workbench, contributed by knipknap:

Artworks

NOOR: The Tragedians (3/3) by Jerry Yu, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Necromanсer by Darya Siarheyeva, made with Krita:

Broken Seal by Dmitriy Parchutov, made with Blender, Photoshop, and Procreate:

Oswald’s Alchemical Aether by Shawn Looyen, made with Blender and Photoshop

Weekly recap — 11 May 2025

Sun, 11 May 2025 20:14:22 +0300

Week highlights: new version of Shotcut, CMYK PDF exporting has landed in Inkscape, GSoC2025 has announced students/projects, LGM2025 program is up.

GIMP

Ondřej Míchal started submitting his first patches that introduce a GEGL filter browser, which is his GSoC project this year. Very early work, a lot more to follow.

Gabriele Barbe is adding a live preview of selected text color.

Inkscape

Martin Owens merged his megapatch that implements a new PDF exporter using CapyPDF. This is what’s bringing initial CMYK PDF exporting support to Inkscape. There’s not much user interface to look at, and it will probably stay that way. Would you like me to do a deeper dive into the topic, though?

Also, dopelover contributed a keyboard shortcuts file that mimics Illustrator CC 2024.

Shotcut 25.05.11

Dan Dennedy released a new version of his video editor with new features:

New video filter: Alpha Strobe.
New Freeze Frame command inserts a 10-seconds video clip that copies the frame your playhead is currently at.
You can now make a track header wider by dragging its right border.
The timeline toolbar now has a New Generator button.
The File menu now has a New submenu where you can create a new project or a generator.

Download options are here.

GSoC2025

Google finalized the list of participants in this year’s Google Summer of Code program. A lot of good projects got students: GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, FreeCAD, Kdenlive, Krita, Synfig, and others. I already covered this earlier in a dedicated post.

LGM2025

The Libre Graphics Meeting program is up on the website. The event will take place at the end of May in Nuremberg, Germany.

Here are some of the talks I’d be interested in attending if I were there:

The Curious Case of Splines in FreeCAD. Ajinkya Dahale is the splines guy in FreeCAD. He recently got another FPA grant to work on that, too.
A View on the Open-Source Video Editing Landscape. Simran Spiller has been very active in the Olive project (which is my personal NLE choice on Linux) for years.
The Elephant in the Room: Who Owns the Image? I’ve been bitten by AI artwork in the artworks section in my weeklies to the point where I won’t even post anything without going through AI detection services now. So I’m curious what Eylul Dogruel has to say about the larger picture with AI, images, and copyrights.
Inkscape UI Vision Going Forward. Henrique Perticarati submitted a UX/UI overhaul proposal last year, and parts of it are being implemented. You can see some of the proposed changes in this video.
Printing Maps with Spot Colors. For no other reason than to verify that Pierre Marchand, former developer of Fontmatrix, has really resurfaced after falling off the face of the Earth over a decade ago.

Oh, and one last thing. The event had been mostly (if not completely) controversy-free since 2006 until this week, when the organizer decided to hand over the keynote mic to Richard Stallman.

I have no foggiest idea why Lasse needed to put himself in a position where he had to pick a side and defend his choice of a guy with this much antics. It’s not like there are no other prominent figures in the FOSS community to deliver the keynote (I could cough up a list of maybe half a dozen off the top of my head). To his credit, Lasse reversed the decision promptly.

I’ve seen at least one call for a complete flush of LGM management over this controversy. The thing is, there is no LGM management per se. People just agree where the next event will take place, and an entirely new team takes over. Right now, the LGM is looking for people to host the 2026 and 2027 events.

Artworks

Atmosphere practice (氛围练习) by HFH, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Ark of Covenant by Tomasz Badalski, made with Blender, Photoshop, and Quixel Bridge:

The Sewers by Nils Drechsel, made with Blender:

Dark Fantasy Concepts Part Two by Max Steksov, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Why Do I Feel Like an Ant by Ahmed Shakib, made with Blender:

Sunflower Field by AstheriArt, made with Krita:

Google Summer of Code 2025 projects announced

Thu, 08 May 2025 23:34:22 +0300

Google Summer of Code 2025 projects have just been announced. As is usual in the last 20 years or so, Google is paying a reward to students for improving free and open-source software.

I went ahead and harvested the list of all the relevant projects so you don’t have to. Let’s take a look at what’s likely coming later this year. I’m intentionally keeping this list concise and linking to project pages so you can explore details when you feel like it.

Graphics and design

Both GIMP, Inkscape, Krita (via KDE), and OpenPrinting (via The Linux Foundation) are long-time participants that gained a lot from the program. For Graphite, this is their second time.

GIMP

Gabriele Barbero will design and implement a GEGL filter browser for GIMP.
Ondřej Míchal will enhance the plug-in/filter development experience by developing a new browser for discovering which GEGL filters are available and how they can be used from a plug-in/filter.
SamIsTheFBI will develop an initial online extensions registry. This would be a mostly static website with essential dynamic components.

Graphite

epestr will implement marquee selection masking.
Firestar99 will develop GPU-accelerated raster operations for Graphite (think adjusting hue, saturation, blurs, etc.)
hawkeye will add advanced vector editing tool modes.
indierusty will develop an efficient API for accessing, manipulating, and performing operations on vector data.
PratyushGovind will enhance the Polygon Tool by introducing a variety of predefined shape nodes—such as Trapezoid, Star, Donut, Pie, Crescent, and more, all with dedicated gizmos.

Inkscape

Aarav Oswal will integrate real-time, on-canvas spell checking.
aayush01x will make it possible to run Inkscape headless for use in automated environments.
Anunay will improve Inkscape’s support for Adobe Illustrator native (non-PDF) file format.
Fatma Omara will develop an easy way to recolor artworks, with live preview.
Muhammad Rafay Irfan will enhance the accuracy and reliability of geometric intersection routines in Inkscape’s lib2geom library.

Krita

Ross Rosales will add a floating action bar for layers to access commonly used actions, especially for non-keyboard users (think running Krita on touch devices).

OpenPrinting

Hubert Guan will port OpenPrinting’s stack to the Zephyr OS. That includes CUPS, libcupsfilters, etc.
Kaushik Vishwakarma will add support for driverless printers to GNOME via the IPP Everywhere architecture in CUPS 3.x.
VididVidid will modernize the printing dialog in GTK with built-in preview in main view.
Tarun Srivastava will update the KDE Print Manager to support various new features in CUPS 3.x, mainly support for IPP print destinations.
Mintu Gogoi and Titiksha Bansal will create Rust bindings for libcups2/3.
Mohammed Imaduddin and Zixuan Liu will add fuzz testing to various OpenPrinting projects.
Rudra Pratap Singh will modernize the OpenPrinting website with Next.js.
Sanskar2303 will implement an image output verification framework based on OpenCV.
Soumyadeep Ghosh will port pyCUPS and system-config-printer to CUPS 3.x API.

3D and animation

This year, there are no rendering engines like Appleseed in the roster.

Blender

Benjamin Beilharz will improve sampling in the compositor.
Ian Yoo will improve regression test coverage for the compositor.
Mohamed-Hassan will enhance Blender’s Glare node by addressing UX and technical limitations, improving usability, and performance.
Namit Bhutani will optimize mesh and multires sculpting performance in Blender, especially for artists working with high-res meshes.
Ramón_1 will make it possible to create keyframes directly in the VSE preview by using the “I” or “K” keys.
Tariq will address Blender’s edit-mode mirror limitations by enhancing its functionality to support multiple axes and operators.
TheKaceFiles will implement pitch correction for sound playback in VSE.
vivz753 will add various features and UI improvements to Flamenco: configuration editor page, mass deletion of render jobs, UI-related bug fixes.

Synfig

Abdelhadi Wael will develop a brush tool and a basic prush profile editor.
Nitish Itankar will create a new macOS app bundle built automatically, to replace the old error-prone Bash script.

CAD

Just like the last year, FreeCAD applied separately from the BRL-CAD umbrella organization. That seems to work for everybody.

BRL-CAD

Andrea Braghin will improve the interoperability between LS‑DYNA and BRL‑CAD by creating converters between k-File and BRL-CAD databases.
Lorenzo Pegorari will improve Arbalest, newer BRL-CAD’s Qt-based GUI.
Simarjot will port the online geomery viewer to Next.js.

FreeCAD

Sayantan Deb (captain0xff) will implement interactive controls in the 3D View, primarily for PartDesign.
chiragsingh1711 will add support for 3D PDF exporting in TechDraw.
theo-vt will make it possible to edit multiple documents in parallel without completing a task in one of them.

IfcOpenShell

Sayan Jyoti Das will develop a web application to create and check BIM project exchange requirements. This will simplify writing Information Delivery Specification (IDS) data.

Manifold

Trzeth will enhance 3D mesh offset for Manifold.

OpenSCAD

Sparsh N will add a modern MSVC build support for Windows.

Video

All three relevant organizations are long-time participants at GSoC. As usual, Kdenlive applied through KDE.

Kdenlive

Ajay Chauhan will improve Kdenlive timeline markers by introducing duration-based markers that define a clear start and end time.

FFmpeg

averne and Geo Ster will develop a ProRes decoder using Vulkan compute shaders.
Jack Lau will implement WHIP (WebRTC-HTTP Ingestion Protocol) support in FFmpeg.

VideoLAN

Abdulrahman Saber will create LibVLC Wayland API so that developers can embed the media player in their programs.
Ahmed Hamed Gaber will improve the libNDI project (add support for sending NDI streams, expand protocol support for NDI-HX2 and a UDP-based NDI variant, improve performance, stability, and security) and integrate it in VLC.
Akhilesh Kumar Yadav will improve the VideoLAN crash reporter in Go and Vue.js.
Arthur Norat will implement parental control in VLC for iOS.
Benny Perumalla will add advanced audio filters, including 3D audio effects, Prologic-II upmixing, audio track mixing and transitions, Lua scripting for custom filters, and LADSPA integration.
Bhargavvz will develop an AI-powered smart media recommendation engine for VLC.
Bob Moriasi will redesign VLC for macOS to modernize the user interface. That includes getting rid of Carbon-era controls and rebuilding the media library with Core Data.
Fahri will develop VLC for Apple Watch, both a standalone app and companion functionality.
GlaucousGlaucus will redesign the Qt interface with QML.
Kartik Dua will enhance Lua integration for VLC Extensions.
Maksym Yemelianenko will make cloud storage services easily accessible using libcloudstorage.
Saifelden ismail will add DVD-Audio support to VLC by implementing a module that decrypts and plays back CPPM-protected audio streams.
Sungjoon Moon will optimize the open-source AV1 decoder, dav1d, for the RISC-V Vector (RVV) ISA by implementing Vector-Length Agnostic (VLA) intrinsics.
Yue (Zelda) Zhang will enhance the user experience of VLC on iOS by improving playback controls and resolving persistent subtitle issues.
Zyad M. Ayad will integrate Radio-Browser.info into VLC to allow users browse and play internet radio stations directly.

Audio / Mixxx

Antonio Giordano will add autocompletion for the Genre track metadata.
Armaan_Chowfin develop more accurate resampling options for Mixxx.
dhunstack will make the Demucs v4 source separation model available in Mixxx for separating mixed audio into stems.

Overall, a very nice selection of projects! Thoughts?

Weekly recap — 4 May 2025

Sun, 04 May 2025 14:34:22 +0300

Week highlights: new releases of Kdenlive, Mixxx, and Giada; new features in GIMP and FreeCAD.

GIMP

CmykStudent implemented a simple palette exporter to KPL, Krita’s palette file format.

The other file format support they added is Over the Air Bitmap. Not sure how to comment on that. I guess if we all die in a nuclear holocaust, cockroaches will be exchanging those with each other on Nokia 3310, and they’ll need a way to open and export those? Well, that’s one way to future-proof GIMP then!

FreeCAD

Dave Carter finished adding initial support for external materials databases. The plan is to make it possible using external web services, for both downloading and uploading material definitions. The feature doesn’t seem to be built by default in weeklies yet, which is fine, as there are no external databases hooked up to the functionality yet.

In other news, the FPA’s general assembly approved spending earmarked EUR 5000 on grants towards various small fixes and improvements in TechDraw and PartDesign. The CAD Working Group will be distributing the bounties. Here is the full list of pre-approved issues to fix and features to implement.

Kdenlive 25.04

The new version comes with a major new feature: automatically creating masks to separate objects from their background. On the inside, the feature uses Meta’s Segment Anything Model 2.

Among other changes:

Faster and more precise audio thumbnails
Completely rewritten OpenTimelineIO import/exporting, should be more robust now
You can now change the duration of multiple selected clips (right-click on the selection, choose Edit Duration, keep “Apply duration to all items” checked)
Vertical zooming in audio tracks, with x1, x2, x4, and x8 presets
Shift+Click now expands/collapses all effects in the stack

See here for full release notes.

Mixxx 2.5.1

The new version of Mixxx brings controller mappings for DJ TechTools MIDI Fighter Spectra, Numark NS6II, Numark Platinum FX, M-Vave SMC-Mixer, Hercules DJControl Inpulse 500, and Reloop Digital Jockey 2 IE controllers. It also adds a mapping for the M-Vave SMK-25 II controller (see here for how its controls are mapped).

The Hercules DJControl Inpulse 300 controller now supports toneplay, slicer, and beatmatch. Other mappings got updates, too. The full list of changes is here.

Giada 1.2.0

Missed this release of Giada a couple of weeks ago. The new version of the loop station allows MIDI input from multiple devices and ships various small fixes. For the downloads and the full list of changes, please see here.

Disflux

This is a new, barely tested free (AGPL 3.0) plugin for smearing transients. Comes in LV2, VST3, and CLAP.

Here is what the developer says:

Disflux is a wild audio effect plugin that takes your transients and smears them through time, adding serious punch and weight. If you’re creating Hard Techno or Rawstyle and need your kicks to hit like a freaking train, Disflux is your new best friend. We’re talking aggressive, distorted, gated kicks that smack like no tomorrow.

Here is my extremely quick demo:

Artworks

The Silence Atlas by IM_FreD, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Ancient Ruined Temple by RunBobFun, made with Blender:

Temple of the Goldenbeard by Olga Rozova, made with Blender and Photoshop:

The City of Others by Deltakosh, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Stylized Fantasy Victorian Environment by Daniel Peres, made with Blender, Photoshop, and ProCreate:

Weekly recap — 27 April 2025

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 15:11:22 +0300

Week highlights: new releases of Helio sequencer and ZLEqualizer, new features in GIMP and FreeCAD.

GIMP

CmykStudent started working on a total ink coverage display filter. For now, you can set a threshold and choose a color to visualize areas where the TIC is larger than that threshold. There is a quick demo in this post and quite a discussion in the comments.

FreeCAD

The integrated assembly workbench hasn’t seen much action since the demise of Ondsel. However, furgo16 recently started contributing to it and improved the bill of materials feature to enable BOM columns to be autopopulated with given properties.

Another useful recent enhancement is a patch by tetektoza to enable selecting a preferred PDF version in Preferences for importing and exporting PDF files. You can choose between PDF 1.4, 1.6, X-4, and A-1b. Previously, FreeCAD was hardcoded to use PDF/A-1b.

Helio 3.15

Peter Rudenko released an update of his distraction-free Helio sequencer. Here are the main changes:

A new option to switch between displaying note names in either C-D-E or Do-Re-Mi notation.
Flats/sharps are now displayed as icons rather than ASCII symbols.
Two colour schemes with higher contrast are now available.
Window position and size are now persistent.
Various improvements for mobile versions.

ZLEqualizer 0.6.1

zsliu98 recently released a new version of their equalizer with new features and improvements:

Multi-band target gain/Q changes.
Pitch note support for slider text editors.
Text editor support for pop-up floating window frequency value.
LR/MS mode performance has been improved.
The top panels are now half-transparent when they are not open.

ZLEqualizer is available as an LV2 and a VST3 plugin, as well as a standalone app.

Anagram

Darkglass Electronics announced Anagram, its first multi-FX processor for the bass last week. Inside, it’s a Linux box with JACK2, LV2 plugins, and an open-source neural amp with support for NAM and AIDA-X models.

Here is a soundcheck with the company’s founder, for maximum insights:

Much of the work on software was done based on the tech by MOD Devices with the help of MOD’s developer Filipe Coelho and co-founder Gianfranco Ceccolini. I covered the news in more detail last week. Read on if you haven’t yet.

Artworks

Recent personal work by Andrew Lee, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora - Story Packs by Mikhail Greuli from Massive Entertainment, made with Blender, Photoshop, and Snowdrop:

The Littlest Guardian by Rene Juul Madsen, made with Blender and GIMP:

Steampunk Dockyard by Jacob Foster, made with Blender, Substance Designer/Painter, and Unreal Engine:

The Pyramid by Deltakosh, made with Blender and Photoshop:

The Old Stage by ABluSkittle / James, made with Krita:

Meet Anagram, a Linux-powered bass FX processor

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Darkglass Electronics, a popular maker of bass-centric equipment (pedals, amps, cabinets), announced their first multi-effects box earlier this week. Anagram is a relatively compact pedal with a touch screen for setting up the signal chain, six endless encoders, and three footswitches.

Inside, it packs a curation of effects, as well as amp and cabinet simulations—through neural models and IRs. Oh, and it’s running embedded Linux.

The UI seems to be well thought-out. FX controls are easy to access. You can even do things like splitting the signal chain, although the narrow display can only show one row at a time.

If punching footswitches and tweaking encoders is not your thing, Anagram is supported by Darkglass Suite, a desktop librarian for other company’s gear (no Linux version, but Android/iOS versions are available).

Anagram’s neural amp can load both NAM and AIDA-X models—both open-source projects, both with various UIs available as plugins for desktop DAWs.

The focus on neural modeling shouldn’t surprise you. It’s the latest tech that people are really excited about, and for a good reason.

Coincidentally, Darkglass and Neural DSP Technologies, the maker of Quad Cortex and Nano Cortex, share a co-founder, Douglas Castro (no longer around at Darkglass). You could probably think of Anagram as a bass-focused sibling in the Cortex family. Well, a cousin twice removed, maybe? At a price point exactly in the middle between the Quad and the Nano.

If you dig a little deeper, there’s a lot of fun trivia there. Yes, Darkglass and Neural DSP Technologies have the same co-founder. Darkglass was acquired by Korg several years ago, but Neural DSP Technologies remains independent. However, Korg also owns Aguilar—another bass equipment household name. An Aguilar DB amp makes a cameo appearance in one of the Anagram product videos. I wouldn’t be too surprised if there was some cross-pollination between the two companies.

There’s already at least a dozen reviews on YouTube. If you feel brave enough, you can start with the official deep dive video (1h+ long).

Anyway, Linux-based?

Ay. It’s running on Linux (Buildroot-based if you care, with the MOD Build System layer on top of it), uses JACK2 for audio server together with mod-host, and relies on LV2 plugins for effects—I’ll get back to that in a minute. Darkglass published extensive information on licenses and source code modifications.

If you’ve been around Linux audio long enough, it shouldn’t surprise you that the latency is really good. With Anagram, you can go as low as 1.3ms of total i/o roundtrip latency at 16 frames / 48kHz with “static” effects like the global EQ, mixer, and looper, and a bunch of extra plugins.

The setup on the screenshot above (courtesy of Filipe Coelho) isn’t exactly telling because you don’t get to see what plugins those are. But that preset runs with around 30% CPU load.

Apart from running proprietary plugins (mostly LV2 versions of Darkglass’s own pedals), Anagram has some open-source ones. The global EQ is fil4.lv2 by Robin Gareus, but you probably wouldn’t recognize it.

The spectrum analyzer is actually modspectre.lv2, also by Robin, together with Filipe.

The built-in looper is based on the sooperlooper by Jesse Chappell, and you wouldn’t recognize it either.

That’s the power of LV2: you can separate the logic from the UI and build entirely new interfaces. And since you are here for the gory penguin details, Anagram’s UI is built with LVGL.

How good is it for 1K EUR?

I don’t have any hands-on experience with it, and gear channels on YouTube are not necessarily a great indicator. But they seem to be loving it so far.

Based on several demos I listened to, the processing quality is convincing. You can check out this video by Nate Navaro; he doesn’t cover the cons much (if at all), but he plays at least as much as he talks:

And because you can load neural profiles for whatever gear, people are already starting to use Anagram for instruments other than the bass. Here is a video by Leo Gibson:

Will this be an open platform?

That remains to be seen. It kinda makes sense that Darkglass would at least try to create a marketplace and thus open the platform to 3rd-party developers. But there is no word on that yet.

Korg, as a parent company, does have experience creating an open platform for plugin developers. You can get 3rd-party plugins for their Prologue, Minilogue XD, NTS-1, NTS-1 mkII, and NTS-3 synths and effect kits. Or develop your own ones. There are some very nice ones available.

MOD Devices, where much of the tech is coming from (I’ll get to that in a minute, too), has a lot of experience building an open platform as well. They developed their own web-based toolkit for LV2 plugins and a toolchain for developers.

Where is this all coming from?

The Anagram team has drawn directly from MOD Devices, a startup company by Gianfranco Ceccolini et al. MOD built several multi-FX boxes, most recently Dwarf, targeted primarily at guitar players but also used by other musicians (Peter Kirn of CDM fame is one of the fans).

MOD Devices came up with the idea that you can build an open platform for loading effects and do it all in a browser. They used embedded Linux, a custom LV2 host application, and a metric crapton of LV2 plugins to build a strong platform. All in all, it was a great concept and a decent implementation (although not without its flaws).

Alas, the company wasn’t very successful. COVID-19 messed up the supply chain really badly, which triggered a multi-year crisis from which the company hasn’t recovered yet and probably never will.

In September 2024, Gianfranco announced on the forum: “We’ve sold some of our software assets to industry peers and our staff is now working part-time on these collaborations”. We now know what he meant by that, exactly.

In fact, you can see both Gianfranco Ceccolini and Filipe Coelho (MOD employee and developer of Carla, DPF, and Cardinal, among other things) in the Anagram back story video.

What do we, as Linux users, get out of all this? Darkglass has already given the code modifications back to the community. But can I interest you in a completely misplaced sense of pride? I mean, Jordan Rudess plays Linux-powered keyboards by Korg. John Petrucci plays a Linux-powered Quad Cortex. So maybe get John Myung to play Anagram, and you could claim that Dream Theater is an all-penguin band. Or not.

Weekly recap — 20 April 2025

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 15:11:22 +0300

Week highlights: cool new features for GIMP, Inkscape, and Ardour in the works; new releases of Scribus and Bonsai BIM.

GIMP

The team is currently working on bugfixes for 3.0 and new features, and they are getting some useful contributions currently undergoing review:

Overwrite mode for painting tools
Vertical alignment for text layers
Initial APNG loading support
Extra options for the New Guide script

Inkscape

The team is preparing for the v1.4.2 release. Meanwhile, there are two notable patches under review:

Animated GIF output
On-canvas controls for offset and vertical orientation of the text on path.

This implementation is not complete yet and is not even in the development branch. Chances are, it will be part of v1.5/1.6.

Scribus 1.6.4

This is a bugfix update of Scribus, fixes are mainly for the importing and exporting of PDF files. See the announcement for details.

Blender Subtitle Editor

If you haven’t tried tin2tin’s subtitle editor addon for Blender, check it out. Most recently, it got faster automatic transcribing with Whisper. The addon is somewhat simplistic, but seems capable enough. Apart from automatic transcribing, it has importing/exporting (naturally), translations, line breaks, and more.

Bonsai 0.8.2

The new version of the BIM authoring addon for Blender comes with 654 new features and fixes. I don’t know how they manage it, but it’s impressive.

Here are some of the release highlights:

Visualization of composite layered walls is now possible in both 3D and 2D (see the screenshot above)
Blender 4.4 support has been added
Drawing and snapping have been improved in a million ways
Clicking on a face now displays its area estimation
Zones, ports, and systems got UI polish
The experimental cutting tool got a new bisect faces mode
The addon got a workaround for loading TIN surfaces made with Revit 2025

See here for details. There’s also a video review by BIMvoice.

Ardour

Paul Davis published a post about the ongoing work and what’s likely coming in Ardour 9.0. Here’s what’s cooking:

Various UI changes
Multi-touch support on Windows and Linux
Region effects
Pianoroll windows
Clip recording and editing in Cue (WIP for MIDI, audio editing could be a post-9.0 feature)
Real-time analyzer, with code from Fons Adriaensens’s JAPA

All of the above items except UI changes are already in the main development branch. However, only the multi-touch support is more or less complete and even now Robin keeps adding some code. So expect a lot more polish. Also, for clip recording, Novation Launchpad surface code will need to be updated.

The UI changes are a bit of a tough cookie to crack. It’s likely that Ardour will inherit at least some of the changes you can see in Mixbus 11:

The two most important changes you are looking at here are 1) the restructuring of the toolbar and 2) the newly added bottom panel in the editor window that displays either plugin controls (track/bus header is selected) or the MIDI region editor (MIDI region is selected).

Overall, it’s a nice batch of changes. However, it comes with some changes that could be annoying for some users. For example, you can’t disable the navigation timeline in the toolbar anymore, and you can only see the varispeed control if you enable the secondary clock. Personally, I’d expect some level of cherry-picking to happen when the team start merging the changes .

Audacity

Martin Keary recently posted some screenshots of what native plugins are going to look like in Audacity 4.

I did some very quick testing of the latest Qt-based build from the main development branch. You can create a new project, import audio, play it back, and do things like trimming, cutting, and timestretching. However, it crashes a lot and still has bits of MuseScore all over the place.

ConvertWithMoss 12.2.x

Didn’t even know this project existed, but Jürgen Moßgraber has been working on this for several years already. It’s a converter between sample file formats, with support for NKI (Native Instruments Kontakt v1-v7), SFZ, DecentSampler, and more.

The latest few releases improved support for Kontakt, Yamaha YSFC, and Ableton ADV files.

Seems like a project I’d love to use to convert some sample libraries from NKI to SFZ or DS. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much luck building and running it on Linux, and the developer only ships a DEB file.

Maybe you’ll have more luck? Here is the code.

Artworks

Nautilus Chamber by Quentin Stipp, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Different Seasons (Autumn) by Reda Kan, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Fading Grace by Rene Gorecki, made with Blender, Photoshop, and Unreal Engine:

The Diesel Cat Pub - Part 1 by Nikita Gritsun, made with Blender and Photoshop:

The Node Tree by Einar Martinsen, made with Blender, Photoshop, and ZBrush:

Iceveil - Inside the Iceberg by Marvin Hillmann, made with Blender, Photoshop, 3DCoat, and Medium:

Weekly recap — 13 April 2025

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 15:11:22 +0300

Week highlights: new releases of Pinta and Elektroid, FreeCAD Project Association announces new grants.

Pinta 3.0

The new version of the image editor comes with a GTK4/libadwaita port, UI revamp with functionality moved to the headerbar, new effects, add-ins support restored, and various quality-of-life improvements. Full review is already available here.

FreeCAD

The FreeCAD project Association members has voted for grants in the first quarter of 2025. Expect this work:

Two new types of curves for Sketcher
Further improvements in the FEM workbench
Modernized rendering and selection systems + new renderer for Coin
The foundation for multi-threading and asynchronous document/objects recomputation

Additionally, a former Ondsel developer will resume his work on Lens, the FreeCAD-centric online PDM system developed by the company, to make it self-hostable. The funds for this project come from a separate source.

Elektroid 3.2

This FOSS replacement for Elektron Transfer has been updated and now ships with Digitone II support. The CLI version now also supports backing up your data (recursively downloading it, really). The rest of the changes are fixes.

If you don’t want to build Elektroid from source code, there’s a flatpak build on Flathub.

Shortcircuit XT

It’s been a while since I last talked about this free and open-source sampler. The Surge XT team refocused on this project around 2022 and dropped active work on Monique and Stochas. A lot has happened since then. The sampler now has rudimentary support for SF2, SFZ, and GIG sample libraries. The UI looks mostly complete but has a ton of placeholders because a lot of the planned functionality is missing.

It’s going to be a long time before Shortcircuit XT can be recommended as a tool of the trade. Still, the fact that you can actually get some sounds out of it is kinda exciting.

Artworks

South of Midnight - Chapter 9 - Of Webs and Woman by Samir Ahmed Yahia, made with Blender, Substance Painter, and Unreal Engine:

Tower by Zp Zhang, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Abandoned Ancient Gate by Greg Westphal, made with Blender:

Verdant Utopia by Yota Tasaki, made with Blender and Unreal Engine:

Pinta 3.0 released

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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 layer, 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.

Weekly recap — 6 April 2025

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 16:11:22 +0300

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.

Weekly recap — 30 March 2025

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 16:13:22 +0300

Week highlights: new releases of GIMP, PhotoGIMP, Shotcut, Flowblade, and Calf.

Spectral JPEG XL

Alban Fichet and Christoph Peters from Intel presented Spectral JPEG XL, an extension of JPEG XL that supports storing data at wavelengths invisible to humans (but useful for scientific data). The new file format does pretty much the same as the spectral version of OpenEXR, except it reportedly compresses the original zipped data x10 to x60 without losing spectral characteristics.

There’s a quite decent coverage of this project over at Ars Technica, check it out.

GIMP 3.0.2

This is a bugfix release that also has the patch for improved graphic tablets support reverted. Apparently, the patch needs redoing. You can download the new version here.

With this release, the team is going back to their old release policy: major (v3.0) and minor (v3.2, v3.4, etc.) releases can have new features, micro releases (3.0.2, 3.0.4, etc.) can only have bug fixes. The rationale for that is that the team wants to make more frequent minor releases. For example, they want to release v3.2 within one year of 3.0.

If they can pull it off (which I hope they can), then this policy makes perfect sense. If they can’t, we’ll end up with another pre-2.10 multi-year development effort where the team has nothing to show for itself, and GIMP will begin to feel like a dead project again. Let’s hope it won’t come to that.

PhotoGIMP 3.0

Gabriel Almir released a new version of PhotoGIMP targeting recently released GIMP 3.0. It’s a pack of presets and graphics to make GIMP look more like Photoshop.

The project achieved seemingly impossible: the PhotoGIMP defaults make the GIMP3 window not fit a HiDPI 2560x1440 screen. I had to tweak the icon size and font scaling in the Welcome dialog to fix that.

LibrePCB 1.3.0

The new version arrives with an interactive HTML BOM export based on the existing code by Open Scope Project, compatibility for KiCad v9 library file format, and initial use of Rust instead of C++. You can read the release notes for more details.

Personally, I find the idea of a Rust port somewhat puzzling. Some developers are very excited about the language, but there aren’t many complex applications written in it. The few ones that I know of are nowhere near completion.

Moreover, there are virtually no complex applications that use Slint—the Rust UI toolkit that LibrePCB is supposed to be ported to eventually. It looks like LibrePCB will be a pilot project of sorts, and in that sense, I don’t really envy Urban.

Shotcut 25.03

Dan Dennedy released a new version of Shotcut with various quality-of-life improvements. Here are some of the release highlights:

It’s now possible to copy just the currently selected filter or all filters in the stack for pasting into another clip.
New switch: Toggle Filter Overlay in the Player menu.
New video filters: 360: Cap Top & Bottom and 360: Equirectangular Wrap.
Timeline clips with filters now have a funnel icon on them.
ITU-R BT.2020 is now available in output properties.

The full list of changes is in the release announcement. You can grab the downloads for your operating system here.

Flowblade 2.20

Janne Liljeblad released a new version of Flowblade, a non-linear video editor based on MLT (same as Kdenlive and Shotcut).

Release highlights:

Numerous sync editing improvements.
Sequence Link Container Clips to easily replace clips in sequences.
Position Scale and Position Scale Rotate filters can now have presets to apply pans and zooms with a single click.
Generators can now have templates.

For the full list of changes, please see the release notes. Only the source code is available officially.

Calf 0.90.6

This once-popular pack of LV2 plugins is slowly getting back to life. There was little development between 2016 and 2020 and virtually no development between 2020 and 2024. Since 2024, new maintainer Johannes Lorenz has been patching things and making new releases.

The only new feature in recent releases is a psychoacoustic clipper plugin:

The rest is pretty much bugfixing and the switch to CMake for the build system. Only source code is available officially, but some Linux repositories track Calf releases closely.

Artworks

Mountain by Philipp Urlich, made with Krita:

Castle on the Highlands by Yuta Shimpo, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Pharaoh of the Desert by Stefan Thadeus Radenkovic, made with Blender:

MTG : Draconic Wastelands by Max Roche, made with Blender and Photoshop:

The Ocult by Johannes Winkler, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Weekly recap — 23 March 2025

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 22:02:22 +0300

Week highlights: new releases of GIMP, Blender, PDF4QT, libwacom, and LosslessCut.

GIMP 3.0

This release was nearly seven years in the making and delivers some long-overdue features:

Layer filters
Multiple layers selection
Layer locks
CMYK exporting / late binding
Color management updates
Text outlines
Better file formats support

I already covered those in a dedicated post, check it out.

The roadmap will likely be revisited sometime after the v3.0 release.

Piranesi

Bruno Postle published his Python script called piranesi which implements the perspective transformation technique by the Italian archaeologist, architect, and artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi (18th century). You probably have seen some of the etchings by Piranesi before:

Source: The Metropolitan Art Museum

As an architect, Bruno has a lifelong interest in veduta (which used to be a thing for people in the Hugin community, check out e.g. the Panini projection). If you want to know more about this particular project, Bruno posted a detailed write-up on his Piranesi perspective research several years ago.

libwacom 2.15

The new version adds data for built-in Wacom units in various Dell, Lenovo, and Fujitsu laptops, but beyond that it ships with support for:

XP Pen Innovator 16, Deco 01 V3, and Deco Pro S tablets;
Wacom Intuos 3rd gen S, M, and L tablets.

Once the new release finds its way to distributions, the GNOME configuration panel will pick the new data to expose the right controls (and so should the KDE configuration panel, but I’m not sure).

PDF4QT 1.5

Completely missed this update of PDF4QT, a PDF editor by Jakub Melka, a couple of weeks ago.

This is mainly a bugfix release with some quality-of-life additions:

Zooming in now anchors to the cursor position.
When you enable the highlighting tool, you now select the highlighter color first (the color was hardcoded before that).
The page order can now be reversed in the PageMaster mode (useful when you scan pages back to front).

For a full list of changes, please see here.

Blender 4.4

The new version arrives with fixes for over 700 reported issues, which alone is very impressive, but also with various new features and improvements:

Newly introduced action slots to easily animate multiple elements together.
VSE now has text editing right in the preview, as well as H.265 and 10/12-bit video support. It has also switched to BT.709 for rendering video.
Various modeling improvements.
The sculpting toolbox got a brand-new Plane brush.
The CPU compositor has been rewritten, several filter nodes are now much (up to x10) faster.
Blender 4.4 is built with libraries that are in the VFX Reference Platform 2025.

See here for the full release notes. There’s a video recap as well:

LosslessCut 3.65.0

This is a convenient video editor designed for one job, which is cutting bits out of videos without re-encoding.

Lots of changes in this new version, here are some of the most interesting ones:

Markers are now available to mark locations (not used for exporting).
You can now play multiple audio tracks simultaneously.
Faster waveform rendering.
Shortcuts for jump & seeking to previous/next segments.

See here for the full list of changes.

Tantacrul on UX

Martin Keary aka Tantacrul gave a talk about UX design at FOSS Backstage Design 2025 in Berlin recently, showcasing his team’s work on Audacity and MuseScore, but also showing some user testing he did for Inkscape (and the devs are listening).

Artworks

The Legend of Ramayana with Amish by Sachin Chauhan, made with Krita:

Winter by Philipp A. Urlich, made with Krita:

Iron Trials - Village by Asher Sobek Israel, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Runic - Aden by KyzosArt, made with Krita:

GIMP 3.0 released

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

After excruciating seven years in the making, GIMP 3.0 is finally here. Let’s focus on just the major changes and then have a grown-up conversation about project’s future plans, funding, and the name change.

Disclaimer: I was a team member until late 2022.

What’s new in GIMP 3.0

Here are some of the release highlights:

Layer filters
Multiple layers selection
Layer locks
CMYK exporting / late binding
Color management updates
Text outlines
Better file formats support
New logo

Most filters available in the program are now non-destructive. Add some text, apply a text style to it, saturate it, then apply the drop shadow effect — all in a single layer.

Then, click “fx” in the Layers panel, toggle the visibility of a filter you applied, change the order of filters by moving them up and down, or double-click to open filter’s settings. Edit the text if you like—and filters will redraw themselves.

Do you want to apply a filter to a layer group the same way? Sure, no problem.

Non-destructive editing is only available for GEGL-based filters, which means most filters available out of the box. There’s also no limitation for higher bit depths. If you want an arbitrary GEGL-based layer filter in the 32-bit per channel image mode, you can have it.

I probably need to spell it out, but this is not all that non-destructive editing is supposed to be in GIMP. Think non-destructive cropping (partially done) or rotation or perspective transformation. This will eventually land to GIMP.

Now, here is a good question: is it slow? Yes. It takes GIMP a noticeable time to replay all the changes when you open an XCF file with layer filters. Here is a very much watching-the-paint-dry kind of demo:

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Since OpenCL is still kinda problematic to use, there are several possible strategies for further improvement here.

You can start saving buffer caches directly to XCF, but that will blow up the size of XCF files.
You can optimize GEGL filters to use advanced processor instructions (something that should be done anyway), but these days you have to optimize for x86_64 as much as for ARM.

Overall, layer filters are a very welcome and long overdue feature that will make workflows vastly more efficient, especially once filters are fast.

Multiple layers selection

You can now select multiple layers or paths and drag them around:

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(Artwork by Fredrik Persson)

Sounds simple enough? It probably does. But Jehan probably still has nightmares about refactoring GIMP’s code to allow for that.

See, GIMP was designed with the idea that only one item can be selected at a time. It was such a deeply rooted concept that it took him three attempts to get it right. This patch touched a lot of GIMP’s code: dozen of files all over the place. And the outcome isn’t something magical: it’s just a program functioning as expected.

Layer locks

The various locks for layers have moved from the toolbar above the layers tree view to the layer rows. Click where a lock icon is supposed to be visible in the Lock column and select the options you need.

CMYK exporting

While you cannot create CMYK images from scratch and do editing in CMYK mode yet, late binding is now available. This means you create an RGB image and then convert to CMYK TIFF, JPEG, JPEG-XL, or PSD.

(Here and once more below, randomly picked artwork by Oleksandra Havrylina)

This topic came up in a GIMP 3.0 conversation on Reddit a few days ago, so let’s reiterate.

There is a lot more to CMYK than being able to export a CMYK TIFF. It’s not just a CMYK mode either. It’s a ton of things.

Some of them, like total ink coverage readout, are fairly easy to implement when you know what you are doing, with GPL code if not to reuse, then definitely to learn from.

Others require some very specific expertise, one that the team members likely don’t have today. Because of that, if would be beneficial for the project to partner with an expert in the community.

Color management updates

GIMP used to be an sRGB-only for a very long time, treating all RGB data as sRGB. Then it became color-aware and started converting AdobeRGB and friends to sRGB. Now it doesn’t even need to do that, you can just open an image in a wide-gamut color space and work in it natively.

And when you start working with that image, your color pickers all show what space they are in:

Additionally, it’s easier to do soft-proofing now: right-click a widget in the lower right corner to open settings, set the profile, then toggle soft-proofing either in the dialog or by left-clicking on the widget in the status bar.

Text outline

The Text tool got two new styles: Outlined and Outlined and filled. It does what it says on the tin. However, the rendering quality is not amazing, and the UI is kinda clunky.

Better file formats support

The team has improved the compatibility with Photoshop, not just the PSD files, but also things that Photoshop embeds into JPEG and TIFF files, including clipping paths and guides.

For game developers, the DDS plugin now supports BC7 compression.

Additionally, GIMP now reads Adobe Color Book (ACB), Adobe Swatch Exchange (ASE), and the open-source Swatchbooker palette file format. To achieve that, the team implemented CIE LAB support in palette code. The native file format, .gpl, hasn’t changed though. It’s still 8-bit per channel untagged RGB data.

New logo/icon

The new logo is a step in the opposite direction of what many users have been requesting. It has become even more cartoonish than before.

There have been numerous proposals in the issue tracker (see these two threads, for example), but Areyom ended up making the one you are likely looking at.

Overall, I find this conversation a little funny. I’ve seen people who claim to be marketing experts bashing the project over the previous logo. Meanwhile making a “serious” logo is simply not how branding works.

Branding is supposed to represent core values of people who represent the brand. If you have developers who are a bit artsy, friendly, and a little dorky, Wilber is what you get.

If you want anything else, then let’s be honest: you just want GIMP developers to be somebody they are not or the project to be developed by entirely different human beings. Tough luck, my friends, tough luck.

On a related matter, the splash screen artwork was done by Fredrik Persson, the guy who casually makes 100+ layers and multi-gigabyte large projects in GIMP.

Caveats

There’s much to discuss here, but I’ll stick with three topics I feel strongly about.

Window layout

The default window layout is virtually the same as 20+ years ago:

The team had numerous conversations about that in the past. It always boiled down to “We can’t change what we have because people use GIMP differently, and we would be forcing a layout on them. We should have job-oriented named workspaces in the first place”. Which is a great idea but probably not at the expense of shipping same ol’ same ol’ for years.

Several years ago, I sourced screenshots of customized layouts from GIMP users to get a better idea what people are used to for different scenarios like painting, photography, etc. The entire screenshot dump and preliminary analysis are still available.

I didn’t go further with this because noone was volunteering to write the code. Plus, the relevant issue in the tracker is now in the Future milestone which basically means “probably never, unless someone volunteers”.

HiDPI issues

The previous version of the toolkit that GIMP used, GTK2, was notoriously bad on HiDPI displays. Even though the team performed some impressive magic to make things work better, users with 4K displays would still regularly complain about the toolbox being too small.

You’d think that the GTK3 port would provide a great out-of-the-box experience. It doesn’t. In fact, it broke probably as many things as it fixed. Here are two major issues I have to deal with on a 14" display at 2560x1440px.

Image view scaling is broken. At 100% zoom level, everything is double the size. I filed the bug report four years ago, got “not a regression” in response. The issue has since been moved to the UX project for discussion.
The screenshot plugin is broken. When you choose to capture one window, it will capture it at half the actual size (1280x720px). And when you capture the entire screen, this is what you get instead:

I filed a bug report two years ago, but this is just one of thousands bug reports, there have been no takers so far.

Options, options, options

Do you dislike the on-canvas text editor? Then open the text editor window. It will not hide the on-canvas toolbar, but you will be writing in a separate dialog.

Do you dislike the on-canvas text editor, but you also kinda hate the text editor window? Sure, here’s another option to hide the on-canvas toolbar.

If you look at Artbox, a soft fork by one of the new contributors, it has even more UI options of that kind. One of the options deals with the overkill in the tool settings UI, you know, where you now get these rows with four buttons:

So the overall trajectory here seems to be adding options rather than streamlining the default experience.

Back when I worked with the Ondsel team, one thing we did on a regular basis is ditch all personal customizations, download the latest weekly build, and go over defaults to see what we could improve to make the initial user experience better.

Our decisions were highly opinionated. Some decisions resulted in code and new options in upstream, but the code changes always came with customizations to improve the UX. And guess what—users loved the result.

What’s next

There are some very good and sorely missing features in progress:

CMYK as an image mode, and possibly LAB coming next.
Layer filters enhancements: editing masks for filters, stacking filters right in the layers dock, etc. (UX proposal)
Vector layers from an old Google Summer of Code project.

So, I’m not worried whether the team has users’ best interests at heart—they absolutely have. What I’m somewhat concerned about is how the project plans its work.

If you didn’t know, this famous clip from Malcolm in the Middle illustrates the last 20+ years of GIMP development with astonishing and painful accuracy:

(A terrible lot of ADHD people will relate to that.)

Can the team switch to shorter release cycles with more focused work? I think so. Will they do it? We’ll just have to wait and see.

Another thing worth pointing out here is that the team seems to be building a UX taskforce (again). It’s unclear how they operate apart from having an issue tracker of their own, but the fact that they started doing this again speaks volumes.

Project funding

The v3.0 release would be a perfect time to revamp the organization and make the development sustainable by hiring team members. Alas, the disappointing non-news is that the project continues to be very non-transparent about what it’s trying to change. So far, there have been only some hints about upcoming changes.

A year or two ago, the team made a fiscal deal with the GNOME Foundation related to handling donations. The nature of the deal was never announced by GIMP, but if you look at the GNOME Foundation’s “2024-2025 budget and economic review”, you will see this:

…we have been workng with the GIMP on financial and legal arrangements to receive approx $1M of historical Bitcoin donations. (And sell them immediately – holding Bitcoin assets creates a regulatory/reporting problem for US nonprofits and our accountants have advised us against it.)

The team moved “about half the coins” (approx. $1,1mln) to GNOME Foundation in January this year, but they still have 9.8333247 BTC which at the moment translates to over $840K USD. That brings the crypto-originated part of the stash closer to $2mln, minus GNOME’s fee as a fiscal agent.

For fiat money, I don’t feel comfortable disclosing the balance from 2021—the last one I have the knowledge of. But to give you idea, the 2022-2023 report by GNOME suggests almost $180K of income and $36K expenses in those two years.

Liberapay brings another approx. EUR400 every week at the moment (that’s not an entirely correct way to phrase it because of how the platform operates, but it is what it is). The Liberapay funds are split two ways, between Jehan Pagès and Øyvind Kolås (Pat David is only formally part of the team at Liberapay).

Patreon currently brings $1,200 to ZeMarmot (part of the proceedings is supposed to fund GIMP development by Jehan Pagès), and approx $1,300 goes to Øyvind Kolås.

All in all, the team is sitting on over $2mln. And even though a huge part of the money was not easily accessible until recently, the rest was perfectly usable for doing paid work. Before you ask: yes, throughout the history of the project, there were contributors interested in doing paid development for the project. That never materialized.

Having said all that, I can’t stress enough that the real conversation here is not about the money. It’s whether GIMP will start planning their work and hiring developers or giving grants. It seems obvious that the team won’t go public at the very least until it’s done moving BTC to GNOME for selling. Again, we’ll just have to wait and see.

The name change

Of course there’s the topic of the name change. The more polarized the world becomes, the angrier people get on both sides of the argument.

The overall sentiment in the team changed over the years from “Hell, no” to “Not particularly objecting, but not wanting to do the work either” to, now, “We’ll keep discussing this”:

We don’t today have consensus in the team to make that change, so posting as GIMP_Official, I can’t say what will happen yet, but we’ve agreed last year to discuss it further.

(Source)

Once again, this is not where pushing the team on the matter will result in swift (or otherwise) action.

Rebranding is not easy. It takes a huge amount of effort. It’s annoying. It makes you frustrated and tired. It hurts people who already rely on the brand name one way or another. It makes tutorials not googlable for all new users. And the list goes on.

If and when the name change happens, it will probably be the single most important change for the project since the full GEGL integration. It won’t get you better UX/UI, it won’t get you any new features, it won’t change anything except one thing: make the use and discussion of GIMP somewhat less problematic.

Weekly recap — 16 March 2025

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 22:02:22 +0300

This is going to be a quick recap. Week highlights: new versions of digiKam, MuseScore Studio, and Audacity.

digiKam 8.6.0

This is not my jam, but it’s great to see this digital photography management program regularly updated. New in this release:

The AI-based face classifier has received an upgrade and now cross-validates results between K Nearest Neighbor (KNN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers.
The auto-tagging engine has been completely rewritten and now uses new pipelines and improvements from the face management engine.
The Image Quality Sorter has been renamed to Image Quality Scanner and is now available from the Labels tab on the left sidebar.
The Red Eye Correction tool has been redesigned with deep learning tech.

See here for the release announcement.

Inkscape

A couple of nice patches in progress recently:

Tav is working on something interesting: on-canvas spellchecking.
Ft Omara contributed a patch that adds ratio and rounding locks to the Rectangle tool.

MuseScore Studio 4.5

It’s a major new release with fairly cool changes:

Much simplified insertion of dynamics markings.
A new panel for inserting percussion.
Several features for Finale refugees, including note insertion by duration, easy copy/pasting of bars, and more.
Some good engraving enhancements, including large time signatures, laissez vibrer ties, text masking through barlines, etc.

See the blog post here in Libre Arts or the release notes. Also, here’s the release video:

Audacity 3.7.3

This one is a purely bugfix release that follows another bugfix release. If you were using 3.7.0/3.7.1, upgrading makes perfect sense.

Ratatouille 0.9.10

Hermann Meyer released a new version of Ratatouille.lv2, a neural model loader and mixer for guitarists. This version comes with a standalone application. If you prefer that over plugins, upgrading sounds like a smart idea. You will need the package that has “app” in the name.

Artworks

Underwater Laboratory by Oleksandra Havrylina, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Some practice with Blender and Photoshop, by 土豆LCZ:

Order of the Dragon by R.A. Steban, made with Krita (painting over a photo):

MuseScore Studio 4.5 released

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Muse Group announced the release of MuseScore Studio 4.5 featuring easy dynamics insertion, a brand-new percussion palette, and new engraving features.

There’s a release video showing off most of the new features:

Let’s take a quick look at the main changes.

Dynamics

You can now select a note, press Ctrl/Cmd+D, and select a dynamics option right below the note, then drag the crescendo/decrescendo hairpin.

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What’s great is that if you already have a dynamics marking, single-clicking it will open the very same panel where you can choose a different marking.

Percussion input

This has been completely revamped. For percussion instruments, you now have rows of pads with human-readable names. Clicking a pad inserts a note in place.

You can switch to notes if you like. To do that, click Layout and choose Notation preview instead.

Easy bar copy/pasting

If you need to quickly copy an entire bar and paste it elsewhere, there’s a new method:

Click to select an entire bar you want to copy
Press and hold Ctrl/Cmd
Drag to the target bar, MuseScore Studio will highlights beats
Release the mouse button

You get some granularity there: you don’t have to drop at the exact start of a bar, you can skip a beat or two. In that case, MuseScore Desktop will insert rests at the beginning automatically to accommodate for that.

New engraving features

There are some new engraving features in MuseScore Studio:

Text elements between two staves now show up above bar lines, masked.
Laissez vibrer ties are now supported (the feature request goes back to 2012)
Courtesy clefs, key, and time signatures at repeats and jumps are now possible (controls are in the Style dialog).
You can finally use the Style dialog to define large time signatures such as ⅞ to use in the composition.

Caveats

I haven’t used notation editors and MuseScore Desktop specifically for quite some time. So my feedback is based on just trying new features in this new version of the program.

While all the changes are really great, there are some issues. I can’t get the Style dialog to open here on Linux: it blinks for a split second and disappears immediately, and the same goes for Page Settings and Transpose dialogs (filed #27128).

The new Percussion panel shows up undocked the first time (someone else already reported it, although for macOS).

The MIDI device selection is still not great. The list only shows devices rather than ports. This is a problem with some modern MIDI devices that expose multiple ports. For instance, I have four ports on Minilab3 and two on Launchpad X here (filed #27127).

Moreover, it’s still not possible to use multiple devices for input. It makes sense to use a grid controller like a Launchpad for adding percussion notation and then a regular keyboard for everything else. Alas, that’s for later, I guess.

Lastly, VST3 support on Linux is still not working in upstream MuseScore Desktop. It appears that there is a technical problem sitting between Qt and VST SDK that hasn’t been solved yet. This has been partially fixed in a soft fork by diedeno (v4.5.0 build is available): it will open user interfaces for VST3 plugins built with JUCE, but not any others.

Overall, I still really like where the project is heading. There have been reasonable complaints that MuseScore 4.x got worse in terms of engraving, but the team is clearly paying attention to this part of the feature set.

Bradley Kunda posted develoment plan for the next year or two back in December last year, check it out!

Weekly recap — 9 March 2025

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 17:02:22 +0300

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:

ALSA Scarlett Control Panel 0.5

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 17:02:22 +0300

Geoffrey D. Bennett released a new version of ALSA Scarlett Control Panel aka “alsa-scarlett-gui”.

This software exposes extra controls over Focusrite’s audio interfaces for Linux users, and it does so in a sensible way: you get the minimum useful controls by default, the rest is displayed in additional windows.

Despite the name, the program supports both Scarlett, Clarett/Clarett+, and Vocaster devices.

Focusrite provides technical information and devices to Geoffrey—a very welcome departure from their past stance of not getting involved with Linux.

The major new change in the release is support for more audio interfaces:

1st Gen: 6i6, 8i6, 18i6, 18i8, 18i20;
4th Gen: 16i16, 18i16, 18i20.

Here is the control pannel running a simulation of 1st gen 8i6 (I’m an humble user of 1st gen 2i4, I can only get you that).

Other changes in the release notes:

Added 3rd Gen 18i8/18i20 S/PDIF/Digital I/O Mode startup controls.
Added peak value display to the level meters.
Highlight useful things on hover in the routing and mixer windows.

Here is what you now get when you hover a PCM output in the Routing window:

Similarly, hovering an rotary control in the Mixer window highlights the mix and the output that connects to it:

Geoffrey makes ready-to-use builds: an RPM for Fedora 38, a DEB for Debian/Ubuntu, and a flatpak.

Weekly recap — 2 March 2025

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 17:02:22 +0300

Week highlights: CMYK image mode is WIP in GIMP, new release of LSP plugins, great changes in Inkscape, Friction, and FreeCAD.

GIMP

Over on Mastodon, CmykStudent demoed the CMYK image mode they developed prior to working on the space invasion project. There is no public code yet (that I know of), so all I can get you is the video itself:

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CmykStudent says:

It’s near the top of my TODO list to work on once the dust settles from the final 3.0 release.

Inkscape

Mike Kowalski revamped the docking system for better UI. Now when you want to move a dockable panel elsewhere and start dragging it, Inkscape displays possible target areas flashing in blue and expanding their size when you are about to drop the panel there.

Panel captions now also have an updated context menu displaying four typical docking targets (top left, bottom left, top right, bottom right) and an option to turn the panel into a window:

Two new merge requests worth mentioning:

Mike Kowalski implemented support for gamut mapping from CSS Level 4 and Okhsv color space.
He also revamped the UI of the Preferences dialog based on Henrique’s design.

Friction

The expressions editor in this animation authoring program now has named presets you can save and restore (the entire top toolbar in the dialog):

Ole-André Rodlie also wrote initial documentation for the software in time for the v1.0 release expected within a week.

FreeCAD

The main development branch now has three-point lighting, so the viewport rendering is now much prettier.

The relevant Preferences page has been updated. You can now set the color and intensity of the main light, the backlight, and the fill light.

kadet1090 also implemented an option to show the placement (or origin) of the object: the center point, normal direction, and axes of the sketch.

LSP Plugins 1.2.21

Vladimir Sadovnikov released a new version of LSP plugins. There are no new plugins this time. However, the changes are still quite important:

The UI is now rendered with OpenGL (the Cairo fallback is still available).
The DSP library got additional AVX-512 optimizations.
The Sampler and Multisampler plugin series received several quality-of-life improvements, such as the ability to import drumkits, SFZ files, and LSPC files by dragging and dropping them directly into a plugin’s window.

See here for the full list of changes.

Artworks

Mysteries of Azeroth by Lionel Schramm, made with Blender and Photoshop:

The Star Well by Yuri Chuchmay, made with Krita:

Hanger by Jordan Soar, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Daily Painting by Wogan, made with Unreal Engine, Blender, and Photoshop::

Weekly recap — 23 February 2025

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 23:02:22 +0300

This has been a very CAD-flavored week. Highlights: new releases of Tahoma2D, JupyterCAD, KiCAD; first builds of Inkscape with CMYK-capable exporting are available; FreeCAD Project Association announces 2025 grant program.

Inkscape

Martin Owens created a merge request that adds a CapyPDF-based PDF exporter. CapyPDF is CMYK-capable, but for now, you’d need to manually edit your SVG files to use device-cmyk(...) instead of RGB values.

If you want to download a build to test the output, go to the Pipelines tab in the merge request, pick a recent pipeline in the list, and click the Download Artefacts button on the right.

Tahoma2D 1.5.1

Mangojohn released an update of Tahoma2D, a fork of OpenToonz. This is mainly a bugfix release. A major UI change is a newly introduced Enable High DPI Scaling option in the Preference dialog. THis option fixes scaling for displays with lower resolution. Build are available for Windows, Linux, and macOS (upstream OpenToons doesn’t have official builds for Linux).

FPA Grant Program 2025

The FreeCAD Project Association has just launched a new instance of its grant program. Things are different this year. For one, there will be four waves of grant application reviews rather than one annual program + out-of-program grants. This should help with batching the reviews.

Another change is how much money the FPA allocates. Last year, they went over the initial budget in terms of funds allocation (you can read my grant program recap in the FreeCAD blog). But teh FPA is till getting more money than it is spending, so this year, the FPA is allocating 20 grand per quarter and anticipating some competition for the funds.

There’s also a separate Ondsel Onward fund (40K euro) for improving any existing Ondsel code to make it more useful for the FreeCAD community. The money came from a private sponsor.

The one current contender is former Ondsel employee Amritpal Singh who developed much of the Ondsle Lens, the product data management system. He wants to decouple Lens from Amazon services (S3 is used mainly for storing files, and Lambda is used to trigger headless FreeCAD for tasks like file conversion).

Dune3D

This new-ish CAD program recently got clone groups, pipe groups, and bitmaps importing. You can use constraints to scale bitmaps so that your sketches drawn over bitmaps are correct.

JupyterCAD 3.0

This is a collaborative web-based CAD program built as an extension to JupyterLab. New in this version:

Color customization for bodies
Embedded Python console
Various UX improvements
6-axis dragger control in the viewport

See here for details. You can install it with pip install jupytercad.

KiCad 9.0

Way out of my league, but KiCad 9 is out with major changes like these:

Predefined jobs outputs.
You can now embed various elements like fonts and 3D models to create fully self-contained KiCad files.
New component class that allows grouping of various symbols and footprints into classes that can have specific design rules applied.
You can now add tables to schematic, symbol library, and footprint library editors.
Mouse wheel scrolling with modifiers now increments under-cursor values in the PCB, schematic, footprint and symbol editors.

You’ll find more details in the release notes.

Meanwhile, a bunch of people on Fediverse are finding out that KiCad has sponsorships with companies from the private defense sector and are really disappointed.

Artworks

Oligodoku Plain by Myan, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Aguarito by Evie Moye, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Portal to Distant Worlds by Tummi, made with Blender and Affinity Photo:

Science Fiction Base by 灰了, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Weekly recap — 16 February 2025

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 17:33:13 +0300

Week highlights: new releases of GIMP, LittleCMS, HDRView, FLAC, and Faircamp; AstoCAD replaces Ondsel ES as a sexier soft-fork of FreeCAD.

GIMP 3.0rc3

This is hopefully the last release candidate before the final release of GIMP 3.0. The update comes with bug fixes, enhanced API, and improved support for various file formats. In particular, the PSD plugin now loads 16-bit-per-channel files in the LAB color space, and the DDS plugin now loads images with BC7 compression.

LittleCMS 2.17

Marti Maria released a new version of his color management module. This is mostly a bugfix release with a few notable changes:

Initial fuzzer implementation developed with financial support from the Open-Source Technology Improvement Fund and Google.
Color management can now apply to memory blocks larger than 4Gb.
Better coverage of pre-multiplied alpha.

There’s just source code available, no binaries are expected.

HDRView 2.2(.1)

Wojciech Jarosz released an update of HDRView with new features, improvements, and fixes. Here are some release highlights:

Support for QOI, JPEG-XL, Ultra HDR jpegs, and HEIF/AVIF files, including multi-image and auxiliary-channel support in JXL and HEIF/AVIF files;
Better support for ICC profiles and colorspaces via LittleCMS;
Support for extracting and displaying more image metadata in the Info panel;
Various emscripten/web version improvements.

Builds are available for Windows and macOS.

AstoCAD

Pierre-Louis Boyer (ex-Ondsel) announced his soft fork of FreeCAD, AstoCAD. Users who buy a subscription will enjoy early access to new features and improvements. Changes will be publicly available (it’s LGPL, after all) and upstreamed. Here is a video where Pierre talks about the project and shows some recent improvements he made (mostly UX-wise).

FLAC 1.5

The new version has one major new feature: multithreaded encoding of FLAC files. Unless you are a developer, you will probably not notice all the other improvements. But here is the changelog.

Faircamp 1.2

Simon Repp released a new version of Faircamp, a static site generator for self-hosting and selling your own audio content, e.g. music. Release highlights:

Track directories and manifests
Differentiation between release and track download access.
Per-track extra downloads.

Simon published a video explaining the new features. All the download options are listed here.

The development of Faircamp is supported through an NGI0 grant by NLNet.

Artworks

Pokemon Fanart by Rodrigo Alvarez, made with Krita:

The Arch by Dmitry Myagkov, made with Blender, Photoshop, and 3DCoat:

Tar-Gorthalion by Prometheus Studio, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Temple of Oblivion by Carlos Ryal, made with Krita:

Colossus Fall by Cyril Mergan, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Weekly recap — 9 February 2025

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 21:02:22 +0300

Week highlights: new release of Bonsai and GCodeWorkShop, PDF import/export improvements in Inkscape, GNOME is getting HDR support.

Inkscape

Tavmjong Bah improved PDF importing. Inkscape now supports character and word spacing values in PDF text import and has more capable code for reading emojis in PDF text.

In the latest weekly video, Martin Owens covered the ongoing work on exporting text to PDF as well.

Martin also stated that the team is planning to hire two developers to do bugfixing and another person to do bug triage.

HDR support coming to GNOME

Phoronix reports that the GNOME team added HDR support for the upcoming v48 release of GNOME Mutter, the project’s Wayland display server and X11 window manager/compositor.

Screenshot courtesy of Phoronix

Bonsai 0.8.1

This is perhaps the largest (so far) release of the project previously known as BlenderBIM. The new version comes with slightly over 1,900 new features and fixes.

The release notes are very descriptive as usual, so here is just a quick rundown of new stuff:

A new item editing mode transforms Blender from a mesh-only editing tool to more of a native solid modeler.
Improved polyline drawing tool, with wall and slab previews, consistent visual style, input formulas, and metric/imperial-parsing input.
Various quality-of-life improvements in the parametric roof tool.
The measure tool now has persistent measures, multi-snap target support, and modes (single / polyline / area).
IFC elements can now be added directly without creating Blender objects first.
Basic visualization for structural loads and reactions is now available.
The web cost UI has been improved and now features adding cost schedules, adding/deleting/duplicating cost items and quantities, updating cost values on the fly, etc..

The project also announced that they have reached their funding target of USD $2,500/month.

GCodeWorkShop 2025-02

I don’t think I’ve ever covered this project before. GCodeWorkShop is an editor for programming CNC.

For this release, the developer fixed several bugs, added support for undo/redo for text replacement operations, and several settings that affect opening and saving files:

file encoding choice;
removing characters from the second half of the codepage when opening files;
removing control characters when opening files;
deleting additional blank lines.

Builds are available for Debian/Ubuntu and Windows.

Artworks

The Lost Tower, a very cool animated short, Ghibli-style, by Florent Lebrun, made with Blender:

Strange Visions 1 by Echostorm, made with Krita:

Frith by Quentin Pointillart, made with Blender and Krita (do check out the entire series):

Magical Adventure by Mythmaker, made with Krita

The Smoldering Bog by Viacheslav Voloshyn, made with Blender and Krita:

Starvault concept art by Lidia Goryachewa, made with Krita:

Weekly recap — 2 February 2025

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 21:02:22 +0300

Week highlights: new releases of Scribus and Krita, a beta release of Pinta.

Krita 5.2.9

This is a bugfix release. Notable fixes:

Fixes for saving EXR files with extremely low alpha values and files with moved layers
Preservation of color space profile when saving EXR of incompatible type
Fix for an infinite loop when a clone layer is connected to a group with clones
Fix for the range of Saturation and Value brush options
Fixes for various tools interrupted by the recorder
New ‘Unify Layers Color Space’ action
G’Mic has been updated to 3.5.0 stable.

The full list of changes is in the release notes.

Pinta 3.0 beta

This is just a beta release for now. I’d rather focus on details when the final release is out. In the meantime, a few words about the major changes.

The port to GTK4 and libadwaita brings major UI changes: no more main menu, all functionality has been moved to the headerbar where image operations, color adjustments, and effects have dedicated buttons that open relevant lists, and the other former menu items are under the hamburger button.

The beta brings back add-ins support. This feature was disabled in the 2.x series for technical reasons. The add-ins manager currently lists just three options, one of which is a demo add-in. That’s less than what you can see here, so I’d guess that some add-ins need code updates.

If you are not fond of dark UI themes, click the hamburger icon and choose View > Color Scheme > Light.

Here is the full changelog. Builds are available for Linux, Windows, and macOS.

Scribus 1.7.0

This is the first release in the new development series. Normally, a major release qualifies for a separate blog post, but the official release notes are descriptive enough and already have nice screenshots.

So, here are the release highlights:

You can now dock panels wherever you like More customizable window layout thanks to a port to Qt Advanced Docking System.
Some panels got a redesign. The new Page pane is really better now, and the Properties panel is still meh (as the “designer” of the original one, I can’t stress enough how much of a mistake it was in the first place).
The New Document dialog got a UI revamp as well and is way, way better than what was there in 1.6.x and before. The same applies to the new color selector.
The TOC generator is now style-based.
Optical margins can now have custom per-document rules (in the Document Settings dialog).
All icons are in SVG now, so that works better for HiDPI folks (waving), and they have been redesigned.
The program now has proper support for light/dark UI themes using Qt6 tech.

You can get the new version here.

Fun

astroterm is a virtual planetarium for your terminal. It displays the real-time positions of stars, planets, constellations, and more.

For example, this command will show you the sky above Mount Everest (-a 27.9881 -o 86.9250), in color (-c), with Unicode symbols (-u), with fewer stars (-t 4), and with some metadata (-m) in the top left corner:

$ astroterm -t 4 -c -u -m -a 27.9881 -o 86.9250

Artworks

A Concept of a Boy And His Adventures by Viktoria Holmqvist, made with Krita:

My Pirate Fish by Clara Denoix, made with Krita:

Underspace Vacation by Justin Barlow, made with Krita:

Luca - exloring by deerblue, made with Krita:

Nebula Castle by 3D_Galazi, made with Blender: