Linux-audio-dev March 2018

linux-audio-dev@lists.linuxaudio.org

12 participants
9 discussions

by Tim Goetze

http://quitte.de/dsp/caps.html The latest release of the caps audio plugin suite contains a number of bug fixes and improvements as well as changes intended to make it more suitable for low-power systems. http://quitte.de/dsp/caps.html#CHANGES Most notably, support for a variety of little-used features has been dropped, reducing the binary size by roughly a third. There's also a new plugin implementing simplistic linear emulation of several guitar amplifier loudspeaker cabinets with reduced computational complexity: http://quitte.de/dsp/caps.html#CabinetIII The compressor plugins now report current gain reduction: http://quitte.de/dsp/caps.html#Compress http://quitte.de/dsp/caps_0.9.24.tar.bz2 Cheers, Tim

6 years, 1 month

PipeWire

by Wim Taymans

Hi everyone, I'm Wim Taymans and I'm working on a new project called PipeWire you might have heard about [1]. I have given some general presentations about it during its various stages of development, some of which are online [2]. PipeWire started as a way to share arbirary multimedia, wich requires vastly different requirements regarding format support, device and memory management than JACK. It wasn't until I started experimenting with audio processing that the design started to gravitate to JACK. And then some of JACKs features became a requirement for PipeWire. The end goal of PipeWire is to interconnect applications and devices through a shared graph in a secure and efficient way. Some of the first applications will be wayland screen sharing and camera sharing with access control for sandboxed applications. It would be great if we could also use this to connect audio apps and devices, possibly unifying the pulseaudio/JACK audio stack. Because the general design is, what I think, now very similar to JACK, many people have been asking me if I'm collaborating with the linux pro-audio community on this in any way at all. I have not but I really want to change that. In this mail I hope to start a conversation about what I'm doing and I hope to get some help and experience from the broader professional audio developers community on how we can make this into something useful for everybody. I've been looking hard at all the things that are out there, including Wayland, JACK, LV2, CRAS, GStreamer, MFT, OMX,.. and have been trying to combine the best ideas of these projects into PipeWire. A new plugin API was designed for hard realtime processing of any media type. PipeWire is LGPL licensed and depends only on a standard c library. It's currently targeting Linux. At the core of the PipeWire design is a graph of processing nodes with arbirary input/output ports. Before processing begins, ports need to be configured with a format and a set of buffers for the data. Buffer data and metadata generally lives in memfd shared memory but can also be dmabuf or anything that can be passed as an fd between processes. There is a lot of flexibility in doing this setup, reusing much of the GStreamer experience there is. This all happens on the main thread, infrequently, not very important for the actual execution of the graph. In the realtime thread (PipeWire currently has 1 main thread and 1 realtime data thread), events from various sources can start push/pull operations in the graph. For the purpose of this mail, the audio sink uses a timerfd to wake up when the alsa buffer fill level is below a threshold. This causes the sink to fetch a buffer from its input port queue and copy it to the alsa ringbuffer. It then issues a pull to fetch more data from all linked peer nodes for which there is nothing queued. These peers will then eventually push another buffer in the sink queue to be picked up in the next pull cycle of the sink. This is somewhat similar to the JACK async scheduling model. In the generic case, PipeWire has to walk upstream in the graph until it finds a node that can produce something (see below how this can be optimized). Scheduling of nodes is, contrary to JACKs (and LADSPA and LV2) single 'process' method, done with 2 methods: process_input and process_ouput. This is done to support more complex plugins that need to decouple input from output and to also support a pull model for plugins. For internal clients, we directly call the methods, for external clients we use an eventfd and a shared ringbuffer to send the right process command to the client. When the external client has finished processing or need to pull, it signals PipeWire, which then wakes up the next clients if needed. This is different from JACK, where a client directly wakes up the peers to avoid a server context switch. JACK can do this because the graph and all client semaphores are shared. PipeWire can't in general for a couple of reaons: 1) you need to bring mixing of arbitrary formats to the clients 2) sandboxed clients should not be trusted with this information and responsability. In some cases it would probably be possible to improve that in the future (see below). This kind of scheduling works well for generic desktop style audio and video. Apps can send buffers of the size of their liking. Bigger buffers means higher latency but less frequent wakeups. The sink wakeup frequency is determined by the smallest buffer size that needs to be mixed. There is an upper limit for the largest amount of data that is mixed in one go to avoid having to do rewinds in alsa and still have reasonable latency when doing volume changes or adding new streams etc. The idea is to make a separate part of the graph dedicated to pro-audio. This part of the graph runs with mono 32bit float sample buffers of a fixed size and samplerate. The nodes running in this part of the graph also need to have a fixed input-output pattern. In this part of the graph, negotiating the format becomes trivial. We can preallocate a fixed size buffer for each port that is used to send/mix data between nodes. Exactly like how JACK works. In this scenario it would be possible to bring some of the graph state to trusted clients so that they can wake up their peers directly. As it turns out, the generic scheduling mechanism simplifies to the JACK way of scheduling and the option to do some optimisations (can directly start push from the sources, bundle process_input/output calls, mixing on ports is simplified by equal buffer sizes, ...) There is a lot more stuff that I can talk about and a lot of things that need to be fleshed out like latency calculations, an equivalent of JACK transport, session management, ... But this mail is already getting long :) I would very much like to hear your ideas, comments, flames, thoughts on this idea. I think I'm at a stage where I can present this to a bigger audience and have enough experience with the matter to have meaningful discussions. PipeWire is currently still in heavy development, many things can and do still change. I'm currently writing a replacement libjack.so[3] that runs jack clients directly on PipeWire (mixing and complicated scheduling doesn't work yet). Hope to hear your comments, Wim Taymans [1] pipewire.org [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Xgx7cRoS0M [3] https://github.com/PipeWire/pipewire-jack

6 years, 2 months

[ANN] Qtractor 0.9.0 - An Early Spring'18 Release!

by Rui Nuno Capela

Hello? Qtractor 0.9.0 (early spring'18 beta) is now released! The change-log for this spring-time release goes as follows: - New View/Options.../Plugins/Experimental/Show plugins on track list/left pane option is in effect on tracks that are tall enough in height for their plugins list to fit on the Bus column. - Fixed a day-zero bug over the MIDI Insert (Send/Return) pseudo-plugin, which was duplicating MIDI events onto the next LV2 plugin in chain, causing strange hanging notes, mutes, retriggerings and what not. - MIDI track and clip note min/max range display now fixed. - MIDI Program Change events (PC) now have their proper program number as parameter, instead of value, on the internal MIDI event representatio n. - Merging MIDI clips while on SMF Format 0 has been fixed: was merging always onto the same MIDI channel (2), most often the wrong one, resulting in an empty or blank clip. - When importing from standard MIDI files (SMF), set track names from Mtrk TRACKNAME meta-events instead of filename. - Avoid asking to save as to existing or just newly created clip file-names, whenever possible. - Disable singleton/unique application instance setup logic when the display server platform is not X11. - Whether to use native file browser/requester dialogs is now an effective option when launching under NSM session management (was once disabled initially). - Content files are now saved as symlinks when saving to JACK and/or NSM session directories/folders. - Trying to get CC14 MSB+LSB (course+fine) running status on, no matter whether each pairing event are under 200ms apart. - Possible VST plug-in GUI reparenting hack/fix on Qt5/Xcb. Description: Qtractor [1] is an audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer application written in C++ with the Qt framework [2]. Target platform is Linux, where the Jack Audio Connection Kit (JACK [3]) for audio and the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA [4]) for MIDI are the main infrastructures to evolve as a fairly-featured Linux desktop audio workstation GUI, specially dedicated to the personal home-studio. Website: http://qtractor.org http://qtractor.sourceforge.net https://qtractor.sourceforge.io Project page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/qtractor Downloads: http://sourceforge.net/projects/qtractor/files - source tarball: http://download.sf.net/qtractor/qtractor-0.9.0.tar.gz - source package (openSUSE Tubleweed): http://download.sf.net/qtractor/qtractor-0.9.0-35.rncbc.suse.src.rpm - binary package (openSUSE Tubleweed): http://download.sf.net/qtractor/qtractor-0.9.0-35.rncbc.suse.x86_64.rp m - AppImage [7] packages: http://download.sf.net/qtractor/qtractor-0.9.0-5.x86_64.AppImage Git repos: http://git.code.sf.net/p/qtractor/code https://github.com/rncbc/qtractor.git https://gitlab.com/rncbc/qtractor.git https://bitbucket.org/rncbc/qtractor.git Wiki (help wanted, always!): http://sourceforge.net/p/qtractor/wiki/ - static rendering: http://qtractor.org/doc http://qtractor.sourceforge.net/doc - user manual & how-to's: http://download.sf.net/qtractor/qtractor-manual-and-howtos.epub http://download.sf.net/qtractor/qtractor-manual-and-howtos.pdf License: Qtractor [1] is free, open-source Linux Audio [5] software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL [6]) version 2 or later. References: [1] Qtractor - An audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer http://qtractor.sourceforge.net http://qtractor.org [2] Qt framework, C++ class library and tools for cross-platform application and UI development http://qt.io/ [3] JACK Audio Connection Kit http://jackaudio.org [4] ALSA, Advanced Linux Sound Architecture http://www.alsa-project.org/ [5] Linux Audio consortium of libre software for audio-related work http://linuxaudio.org [6] GPL - GNU General Public License http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html [7] AppImage, Linux apps that run anywhere http://appimage.org/ See also: http://www.rncbc.org/drupal/node/1899 Enjoy && Keep the fun. Always. -- rncbc aka. Rui Nuno Capela rncbc(a)rncbc.org

6 years, 8 months

[ANN] hexter DSSI softsynth 1.1.0 release

by Sean Bolton

I'm pleased to announce the 1.1.0 release of hexter, a DSSI softsynth plugin that models the sound generation of a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer. This release provides support for DSSI hosts which don't support run_multiple_synths(), for example, Carla and Renoise. Each instance of the plugin is run separately, and support for the global polyphony limit has been removed. Several bugs and numerous compiler warnings have been fixed. Find hexter here: http://smbolton.com/hexter.html The distribution tarball is here: https://github.com/smbolton/hexter/releases/tag/version_1.1.0 More information on the DSSI plugin standard, available hosts and plugins can be found here: http://dssi.sourceforge.net/ hexter is written and copyright (c) 2018 by Sean Bolton, and licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later. Thanks to Andreas Müller for contributing a bug fix. Have fun! -Sean

6 years, 8 months

rosegarden doesn't use system qt5 font

by Nikita Zlobin

It seems, that rosegarden forces gui font to be Sans. On my system default sans seems to be droid. In qt5, with russian locale, russian bold letters are drawen by some kind of Courier New. Regular font is still Sans, and this bug seems to affect all qt5 stuff - i noticed it first time in Converseen. After i changed to Deja Vu, and yet later began to search for more interesting fonts (up to tomorrow i had Exo), problem disappeared. For qt5 config i use qt5ct. Today i assidentally discovered font pair, which imho looks awesome with programs like MuseScore and Rosegarden. I don't know, is it intended to force some specific font... so i want to propose as variant to use any Serif font. Last time i tried CMU fonts: http://cm-unicode.sourceforge.net/ CMU has very interesting (imho) serif variants (though simple sans style also presents). Especially i want to note: - Contrete - as easy to read as any Serif, but more interesting, than its own CMU Serif - i.e., it looks much sharper. - Pair of two fonts: - - CMU Serif Upright Italic: regular ornamental font - - CMU Classical Serif: former's italic kind (both have bold kinds) And i would note, there is some mess in names. Thus, upright italic is not really italic (just looks ornamental), while simple classical looks like "CMU Serif Upright Italic" Italic :). Would be better for them, of course to be in one "CMU Classical" font, providing as usually - 4 kinds. This of course, is for aesthetes :) Screenshot with musescore, with CMU Classical font: https://musescore.org/sites/musescore.org/files/2018-03/musescore_2018-03-1… I guess (it is still my imho+taste), all these Serif/Concrete/Classical fonts would look much better in rosegarden. Can't tell about other (even musical) software, but for now i made "CMU Serif Upright Italic" default font - in qt5ct, desktop appearance settings (xfce), and now trying to get for qt4. It exactly works with qjackctl and musescore. ________________________________ About qtractor, if Rui Nuno Capella reads, there are few places, where, where sans is forced: - clock on toolbar, - files list and track list use sans italic. I don't know, is it sideback of setting to italic, but track list ruler uses regular sans. But still, BPM display, near of clock, followes system font.

6 years, 8 months

Some news and Linux Audio Programmer job position at MOD Devices

by Gianfranco Ceccolini

Greetings gentlemen It has been quite some time since I last wrote here. Please forgive me for using this channel for such communication but we have some news that are particularly interesting for this community in special. MOD Devices is growing. You can read a bit here: https://forum.moddevices.com/t/mod-devices-is-growing-up/2140 We're opening a job position specifically targeted to Linux Audio. Since this is the place were most of the matching profiles communicate, I thought it might be a good place to publish it here. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HKdWwhjeSPWywu-3gasz7OThbUClQ7dq/view?usp=… Please contact us if interested and feel free to pass on to friends from the Linux Audio community that you think might be interested. Best regards Gianfranco Ceccolini +49 160 646 9313 +49 030 555 70435 gianfranco(a)moddevices.com MOD Devices Wilhelm-Kabus-Straße 21-35 10829 - Berlin

6 years, 8 months

[ANN] Vee One Suite 0.9.0 - The End of Winter'18 release

by Rui Nuno Capela

Ahoy there! The 'Vee One Suite' of so called 'old-school' software instruments, synthv1 [1] as a polyphonic subtractive synthesizer, samplv1 [2] a polyphonic sampler synthesizer, drumkv1 [3] as yet another drum-kit sampler and padthv1 [4] as a polyphonic additive synthesizer, are once again released just before the season ends. As before, all available in dual standard forms:<ul> - a pure stand-alone JACK client with JACK-session [5], NSM (Non Session management [6]) and both JACK MIDI and ALSA MIDI [7] input support; - a LV2 instrument plug-in [8]. The changes for this end-of-season goes as follows: - Introducing Scala micro-tuning classes, borrowed, stirred and refactored from original Nick Dowell's amsynth code, all under the GPL umbrella, of course. - An internal note-key/frequency indirection table is now in place, as a baseline for any micro-tuning implementations. - Whether to use native file browser/requester dialogs is now an effective option when launching under NSM session management (was once disabled initially). - Initializing and/or requesting a New blank preset doesn't open a sample file picker dialog anymore as it was more than nagging while under on NSM sessions. (applies to samplv1 [2] only). - Trying to get CC14 MSB+LSB (course+fine) running status on, no matter whether each pairing event are under 200ms apart. - A little hardening on the configure (autoconf) macro side. In order of (historical) appearance: **synthv1 - an old-school polyphonic synthesizer [1] ** synthv1 0.9.0 (end-of-winter'18) released! synthv1 is an old-school all-digital 4-oscillator subtractive polyphonic synthesizer with stereo fx. LV2 URI: http://synthv1.sourceforge.net/lv2 website: https://synthv1.sourceforge.io http://synthv1.sourceforge.net downloads: http://sourceforge.net/projects/synthv1/files - source tarball: http://download.sf.net/synthv1/synthv1-0.9.0.tar.gz - source package: http://download.sf.net/synthv1/synthv1-0.9.0-37.rncbc.suse.src.rpm - binary packages (openSUSE Tumbleweed): http://download.sf.net/synthv1/synthv1-0.9.0-37.rncbc.suse.x86_84.rpm - AppImage packages (JACK stand-alone only): http://download.sf.net/synthv1/synthv1-0.9.0-4.x86_64.AppImage git repos: http://git.code.sf.net/p/synthv1/code https://github.com/rncbc/synthv1.git https://gitlab.com/rncbc/synthv1.git https://bitbucket.org/rncbc/synthv1.git **samplv1 - an old-school polyphonic sampler [2]** samplv1 0.9.0 (end-of-winter'18) released! samplv1 is an old-school polyphonic sampler synthesizer with stereo fx. LV2 URI: http://samplv1.sourceforge.net/lv2 website: https://samplv1.sourceforge.io http://samplv1.sourceforge.net downloads: http://sourceforge.net/projects/samplv1/files - source tarball: http://download.sf.net/samplv1/samplv1-0.9.0.tar.gz - source package: http://download.sf.net/samplv1/samplv1-0.9.0-37.rncbc.suse.src.rpm - binary packages (openSUSE Tumbleweed): http://download.sf.net/samplv1/samplv1-0.9.0-37.rncbc.suse.x86_84.rpm - AppImage packages (JACK stand-alone only): http://download.sf.net/samplv1/samplv1-0.9.0-4.x86_64.AppImage git repos: http://git.code.sf.net/p/samplv1/code https://github.com/rncbc/samplv1.git https://gitlab.com/rncbc/samplv1.git https://bitbucket.org/rncbc/samplv1.git **drumkv1 - an old-school drum-kit sampler [3]** drumkv1 0.9.0 (end-of-winter'18) released! drumkv1 is an old-school drum-kit sampler synthesizer with stereo fx. LV2 URI: http://drumkv1.sourceforge.net/lv2 website: https://drumkv1.sourceforge.io http://drumkv1.sourceforge.net downloads: http://sourceforge.net/projects/drumkv1/files - source tarball: http://download.sf.net/drumkv1/drumkv1-0.9.0.tar.gz - source package: http://download.sf.net/drumkv1/drumkv1-0.9.0-33.rncbc.suse.src.rpm - binary packages (openSUSE Tumbleweed): http://download.sf.net/drumkv1/drumkv1-0.9.0-33.rncbc.suse.x86_84.rpm - AppImage packages (JACK stand-alone only): http://download.sf.net/drumkv1/drumkv1-0.9.0-4.x86_64.AppImage git repos: http://git.code.sf.net/p/drumkv1/code https://github.com/rncbc/drumkv1.git https://gitlab.com/rncbc/drumkv1.git https://bitbucket.org/rncbc/drumkv1.git **padthv1 - an old-school polyphonic additive synthesizer [4]** padthv1 0.9.0 (end-of-winter'18) released! padthv1 is an old-school polyphonic additive synthesizer with stereo fx padthv1 is based on the PADsynth algorithm by Paul Nasca, as a special variant of additive synthesis. LV2 URI: http://padthv1.sourceforge.net/lv2 website: http://padthv1.sourceforge.net https://padthv1.sourceforge.io downloads: http://sourceforge.net/projects/padthv1/files - source tarball: http://download.sf.net/padthv1/padthv1-0.9.0.tar.gz - source package: http://download.sf.net/padthv1/padthv1-0.9.0-4.rncbc.suse.src.rpm - binary packages (openSUSE Tumbleweed): http://download.sf.net/padthv1/padthv1-0.9.0-4.rncbc.suse.x86_84.rpm - AppImage packages (JACK stand-alone only): http://download.sf.net/padthv1/padthv1-0.9.0-4.x86_64.AppImage git repos: http://git.code.sf.net/p/padthv1/code https://github.com/rncbc/padthv1.git https://gitlab.com/rncbc/padthv1.git https://bitbucket.org/rncbc/padthv1.git Licence: The 'Vee One Suite' are free, open-source Linux Audio [10] software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) [9] version 2 or later. References: [1] synthv1 - an old-school polyphonic synthesizer http://synthv1.sourceforge.net/ [2] samplv1 - an old-school polyphonic sampler http://samplv1.sourceforge.net/ [3] drumkv1 - an old-school drum-kit sampler http://drumkv1.sourceforge.net/ [4] padthv1 - an old-school polyphonic additive synthesizer http://padthv1.sourceforge.net/ [5] JACK Audio Connection Kit http://jackaudio.org/ [6] NSM, Non Session Management http://non.tuxfamily.org/nsm/ [7] ALSA, Advanced Linux Sound Architecture http://www.alsa-project.org/ [8] LV2, Audio Plugin Standard, the extensible successor of LADSPA http://lv2plug.in/ [9] GNU General Public License http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html [10] Linux Audio consortium of libre software for audio-related work http://linuxaudio.org See also: http://www.rncbc.org/drupal/node/1896 Enjoy && as always, have (lots of) fun ;) -- rncbc aka. Rui Nuno Capela

6 years, 8 months

Linux Audio Berlin meeting @ c-base 2018-03-07

by Daniel Swärd

Hi all. On Wednesday the 7th of March the monthly Berlin meeting is taking place at c- base. I'll as usual be in the mainhall from 20:00. See you there! :-) Cheers /Daniel

6 years, 8 months

FFADO 2.4.1 released

by Jonathan Woithe

FFADO version 2.4.1 is now available, a package of userspace drivers for firewire audio interfaces. This is a bugfix release with many of the changes associated with the use of python3 and distribution packaging. This is a source-only release which can be downloaded from the ffado.org website at http://ffado.org or via the direct link: http://ffado.org/files/libffado-2.4.1.tgz Issues addressed in this release include: * Fix some python syntax which was not compatible with python3. These were missed during the preparation of FFADO 2.4.0. * Modify the SCons build system to allow for scons running under python3. As of this release there seem to be a number of issues in scons itself when running under python3, so building FFADO in this environment is not yet guaranteed. * Merge distribution patches provided by package maintainers. * Address some difficulties experienced by package maintainers when compiling FFADO. * Improve the output of ffado-diag. Thanks to the developers and users who contributed to this release: Nicolas Bouleng, Benoit Delcour, David Kastrup, Hector Martin, Orcan Ogetbil, Dave Plater, David Runge, Jano Svitok and Jonathan Woithe. If an omission has been made please contact us through the ffado-devel mailing list so this can be corrected.

6 years, 8 months

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Linux-audio-dev March 2018