Carla 2.2 official announcement

Signed-off-by: falkTX <falktx@falktx.com>
4 years ago · 3c0e4e85f2
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 <p><b>THIS IS A FAKE PAGE, KXSTUDIO NEWS USES A DYNAMIC MODULE NOW</b></p>

 <p>
    <span style="font-size: 20px">&gt; Carla Plugin Host v2.2 is finally here</span><br/>
    On <i>2020-07-16</i> by<i> falkTX</i>
 </p>
 <p>
    Hello everyone, this is the announcement of the 2.2 version of the Carla Plugin Host.<br/>
    If you do not know, Carla is a fully-featured cross-platform audio plugin host, which can also run as a plugin.
 </p>
 <p>
    This release announcement comes quite a few days after it was initially tagged and builds uploaded.<br/>
    I moved to a different place, everything got a bit delayed with that, and also me getting a small but well-needed break.<br/>
    Anyway, back to the topic at hand...
 </p>
 <p>
    Contrary to previous releases, there were not many graphical changes this time, but lots of stuff under the hood.<br/>
    One very important note for developers is that the "native" API to access carla as plugin (as used by LMMS)
    is still ABI and API-wise backwards compatible with 2.0, but the ABI and API of Carla as a library is not.<br/>
    This is because all host functions now have a "handle" prefix, so they can be reused for standalone, plugin and other variants.
 </p>
 <p>
    <b>Special thanks to everyone that did testing during the release candidate phase</b>, some with very complex setups! (as seen below)<br/>
    <a href="/screenshots/news/carla-2.2_usage.png">
        <img src="/screenshots/news/carla-2.2_usage.png" style="max-width:100%;height:auto;" alt="settings"/>
    </a>
 </p>
 <p>
    Now with that said, let's go through what's new, first the bigger changes and smaller stuff for last.
 </p>

 <table><tr><td width="40%">
 <a href="/screenshots/news/carla-2.2_multi-client.png">
    <img src="/screenshots/news/carla-2.2_multi-client.png" style="max-width:100%;height:auto;" alt="settings"/>
 </a>
 </td><td width="60%">
 <h3>Multi-Client + multi-instance improvements</h3>
 <p>
    In order to allow multiple instances of Carla to work without conflicts,
    proper JACK multi-client multi-instance support was implemented.<br/>
    What this means is that you can have a name prefix for all plugins when in JACK multi-client mode,
    so that it is easier to understand where a plugin belongs to.<br/>
 </p>
 <p>
    Starting with v2.2, extra Carla instances will get a dedicated JACK client name suffix.<br/>
    On projects created with v2.2 and above, Carla will know which saved connections belong to which plugins,
    making it possible to load a session correctly where multiple Carla instances are involved.
 </p>
 <p>
    As a way to make this easier to manage and control, a new command-line argument was added, "--cnprefix=...".<br/>
    So now you can have a dedicated Carla instance that has its created JACK clients more globally recognisable.
 </p>
 <p>
    Also, when Carla runs under NSM, the JACK client name prefix is set automatically (coming from NSM).<br/>
    This is not enabled when loading pre-2.2 projects though, in order to keep backwards compatibility.
 </p>
 </td></tr></table>

 <br/>

 <table><tr><td width="40%">
 <a href="/screenshots/news/carla-2.2_linux-vst3.png">
    <img src="/screenshots/news/carla-2.2_linux-vst3.png" style="max-width:100%;height:auto;" alt="settings"/>
 </a>
 </td><td width="60%">
 <h3>Linux VST3 plugin support</h3>
 <p>
    As new VST2 plugins can no longer be officially licensed and VST2 is very, very, very slowing being phased out, it is important to have VST3 support.</br>
 </p>
 <p>
    So now you can now scan and load Linux VST3 plugins under Carla.</br>
    It is no longer limited to macOS and Windows.</br>
 </p>
 <p>
    Worth noting is that this is not a custom implementation, but leveraging JUCE VST3 host support on Linux.</br>
    It recently got supported as part of their JUCE6 update.</br>
    There are no plans for a custom implementation at this point.
 </p>
 </td></tr></table>

 <br/>

 <h3>Small UI/UX improvements all around</h3>

 <div style="display:flex;align-content:baseline;text-align:center;flex-wrap:wrap;">
    <table style="width:420px;">
    <tr><td>
    <a href="/screenshots/news/carla-2.2_uiux-keyboard.png">
        <img src="/screenshots/news/carla-2.2_uiux-keyboard.png" style="max-width:100%;height:auto;" alt="settings"/>
    </a>
    </td></tr>
    <tr><td>
    <p>
        The built-in keyboard right-click menu got a bit better.<br/>
        Everything is presented in a single menu, no more sub-menus are used.
    </p>
    </td></tr>
    </table>

    <table style="width:420px;">
    <tr><td>
    <a href="/screenshots/news/carla-2.2_uiux-mappedparam.png">
        <img src="/screenshots/news/carla-2.2_uiux-mappedparam.png" style="max-width:100%;height:auto;" alt="settings"/>
    </a>
    </td></tr>
    <tr><td>
    <p>
        The plugin built-in editor dialog now shows the currently mapped parameter type+value directly.<br/>
        No more clicking around needed to find out what the parameter is mapped to.
    </p>
    </td></tr>
    </table>

    <table style="width:420px;">
    <tr><td>
    <a href="/screenshots/news/carla-2.2_uiux-midilearn.png">
        <img src="/screenshots/news/carla-2.2_uiux-midilearn.png" style="max-width:100%;height:auto;" alt="settings"/>
    </a>
    </td></tr>
    <tr><td>
    <p>
        MIDI learn implemented, triggered via parameter mapping menu.<br/>
        Note that this is per plugin, not global, due to how Carla handles each plugin individually.
    </p>
    </td></tr>
    </table>

    <div style="width:390px;">
        <h5>Other "quality of life" improvements:</h5>
        <ul style="text-align:left;">
        <li>Added a 12400x9600 canvas size</li>
        <li>Added a 2x and 4x canvas image export mode</li>
        <li>Added a menu action to save current Carla canvas as image in the clipboard</li>
        <li>Added "Send MIDI notes" option to plugin built-in editor dialog</li>
        <li>Canvas positions are now always saved and restored, including in the plugin version</li>
        <li>Canvas positions are kept in sync across multiple Carla JACK instances and even Carla-Control</li>
        <li>Built-in plugin edit dialog tab state is kept when parameters are reloaded</li>
        <li>Implemented NSM "optional-gui"</li>
        <li>Plugin custom GUI Window title changes dynamically when renamed</li>
        <li>Package macOS plugin version, making Carla-Plugin usable with macOS 10.15</li>
        </ul>
    </div>
 </div>

 <br/>

 <h3>Other notable changes</h3>
 <ul>
    <li>Added new xycontroller plugin</li>
    <li>Added a "carla-osc-gui" script that starts a Carla instance in the background and connects to it using OSC.<br/>
        Closing the GUI does not close the engine, and it can be run again to reconnect later on.
    </li>
    <li>Always use maximum amount of channels for VST2 plugins</li>
    <li>Better handle the case of JACK server stop (or killed)</li>
    <li>Better implementation of LV2 state path, now saving files in the same directory as the Carla project</li>
    <li>Changed the way plugins are deleted, so they are now safely deleted only when no longer in use</li>
    <li>Implement MIDI CC and CV source parameter changes for bridges</li>
    <li>Improve the (still experimental) JACK-apps-as-plugins implementation,
        now mapping show/hide gui to NSM commands, sending arbitrary MIDI events and making it work on more systems</li>
    <li>Increase max value of the internal LFO plugin, so we can get reeeeeeeal slow</li>
    <li>Raise limit of plugins that can be loaded (512 default, 64 in rack)</li>
    <li>Tweaks for automatically converting internal Patchbay mode projects in JACK multi-client mode and vice-versa</li>
    <li>Working HaikuOS build, but no audio support yet</li>
 </ul>
 <p>
    Many other bug-fixes and small under-the-hood improvements (too many to list here).<br/>
    See the
    <a href="https://github.com/falkTX/Carla/commits/master?after=783352477fec5f135f2040afd09257d68211ca73+8" target="_blank">
      git log</a>
    for the full list of changes.
 </p>

 <h3>Notes for users</h3>
 <p>
    When using JACK, the newly added features around the canvas require at least JACK v1.9.13.<br/>
    This is because Carla relies on JACK meta-data in order to store information about each plugin/client,
    and meta-data was only added to JACK2 in version 1.9.13.<br/>
    Alternatively, you can use JACK1 instead of JACK2, which has meta-data support since a long time.<br/>
    Note that the <a href="/Repositories:Extras">"extras" KXStudio repository</a> (which provides an updated JACK2) now supports Ubuntu 20.04 along-side 18.04.
 </p>
 <p>
    The code for scanning plugins had a little rework yet again, making some internal data structures change.<br/>
    Because of this, a full rescan of your plugins is needed after the update.<br/>
    This should fix previously missing plugins that happened in v2.1.<br/>
 </p>
 <p>
    The official Linux binary build does not provide native Linux-VST3 support.<br/>
    Packages from regular Linux distributions do not have this issue.
 </p>

 <h3>Downloads</h3>
 <p>
    To download Carla binaries or source code, jump on over to the <a href="https://kx.studio/Downloads" class="external free" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">KXStudio downloads section</a>.<br/>
    If you're using the KXStudio repositories, you can simply install "carla-git" (plus "carla-lv2" and "carla-vst" if you're so inclined).<br/>
    Bug reports and feature requests are welcome! Jump on over to the <a href="https://github.com/falkTX/Carla" class="external free" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carla's Github project</a> page for those.
 </p>

 <hr/>

 <p>
    <span style="font-size: 20px">&gt; Carla 2.2 RC2 is here!</span><br/>
    On <i>2020-09-07</i> by<i> falkTX</i>
--- a/Repositories:Extras.php
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 <ul>
    <li>Up-to-date FFADO and JACK2</li>
    <li>Patched alsa-driver source to prevent snd-aloop from being loaded as first soundcard</li>
    <li>Patched audacious-plugins source to add "ignore-length" option to PSF plugin</li>
    <li>Patched pulseaudio source to always install pulseaudio-module-jack (needed for JACK+PulseAudio bridge)</li>
 </ul>
 <p>
    The repository also contains: (specifically for 18.04)
@@ -49,7 +51,6 @@ include_once("includes/header.php");
    <li>Up-to-date GCC (version 9 at the moment)</li>
    <li>FAudio package, needed for Wine-Staging (also updated libstb and libsdl2 as required)</li>
    <li>Wine-RT package (an old version, for now)</li>
    <li>Patched pulseaudio source to always install pulseaudio-module-jack (needed for JACK+PulseAudio bridge)</li>
 </ul>
 <p>
    Enabling this repository can be done with the following:
--- a/screenshots/news/carla-2.2_usage.png
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