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Geoffrey D. Bennett has just released a major update of ALSA Scarlett GUI, a control program for Focusrite’s Scarlett, Clarett, and Vocaster audio interfaces. DSP control For Vocaster One and Two, Geoffrey added controls for the built-in DSP that includes a pre-compressor filter, a compressor, and a parametric EQ. The controls on the pre-compressor filter and parametric EQ graphs are…
Google has just published the list of students accepted into the Google Summer of Code 2026 program. Some of the teams usually participating are off this year: Krita and Inkscape are temporarily out of mentors. Let’s take a look at the rest of them. GIMP Akascape will completely revamp the keyboard shortcuts configuration dialog and add support for importing and exporting presets, as well as…
Yesterday at LGM2026, GIMP’s maintainer Jehan Pagès gave a talk about GIMP as a community project and made several interesting announcements. This post is going to be quite a bit critical, so before I proceed, here is the obligatory disclaimer: I used to be a GIMP contributor, significantly decreased my participation in late 2021, and officially bowed out in late 2022. I’m omitting a…
Rolando Trevino recently started working on Open Apollo , Linux drivers for Universal Audio’s Thunderbolt and USB audio interfaces. Initial support is now done and available for testing. Apollo x4 and Apollo Solo USB are currently marked as verified to work, but Morten Mosgaard tested his Apollo Twin X and Apollo 8P, and both of them work as well. That makes the “Thunderbolt 2 Devices…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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)…
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…
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…
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,…
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: Your browser does not support the video tag. CmykStudent…
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