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> KXStudio Monthly Report (January 2019)
On 2019-01-18 by falkTX

Hello all, another monthly report about the KXStudio project is here.
Carla 2.1 released
Carla move to C++ started, explain why, and means frontend won't change much now, mainly the backend.
Office space setup, which took most of the time on the holidays

With Carla v2.1 "done", next up is some much needed DPF and then JACK2 handling.
But these will not be rushed, so next month progress report is expected to be smaller than usual.

> Carla 2.1 RC1 is here!
On 2020-01-15 by falkTX

Hello again everyone, it is release day! (kinda, just a casual 4 days late...)

This is the announcement of the first release candidate of Carla 2.1.
I am skipping the beta phase as done for the 2.0 release and going straight into a Release Candidate.
This means there will be no more changes in the graphical user interface or engine/backend features, except when required for fixing bugs.

Carla projects/sessions are meant to be fully compatible between between 2.0 and 2.1 versions, except for features marked experimental.
The "native" API to access carla as plugin (as used by LMMS) is ABI and API-wise backwards compatible compatible with 2.0.
If this is not the case, consider it a bug that needs to be fixed.

As with the v2.0 release, the list of changes is a little big, so let's split it by parts.
First, the highlights and major changes, in no particular order of relevance.


settings

Better CV Support

CV ports are now supported in the internal patchbay mode, meaning you do not need to use JACK with Carla in order to use CV plugins.

Automable parameters can now be exposed as a CV port, so they can be controlled by regular CV sources or other plugins.
This is a kinda feature preview, as there are some limitations at the moment:

  • Parameter changes are not sample accurate
    (in a later version, Carla will split buffer up to 32 frames for more fine-grained control changes)
  • Not all plugin formats and parameter types are allowed to be controlled this way
    (to be extended as we test compatibility)
  • Only available for parameter inputs, not outputs

In order to make CV more useful by default, we added a new internal "MIDI to CV" plugin, originally created by Bram Giesen.
More plugins will be added as needed, for now we recommend to use ams-lv2 and mod-cv-plugins as they already do a lot.

Also, a new variant of Carla as plugin was created that provides audio, MIDI and 5 CV ports (for each side).
This allows CV signals to flow in and out of Carla as a plugin.


settings

High-DPI support (work in progress)

Initial work was done to support high-DPI screens.
Note that this was not tested very extensively, due to lack of proper hardware, but the requirements in terms of code are all there.
There are still a few "normal" resolution bitmaps in use, to be replaced in future releases.
You can click on the screenshot on the left to see Carla rendered at 3x the resolution.

So for now, the situation is:

  • Most of the icons changed to scalable format
  • UI will scale with the desktop automatically, as Qt takes care of that for us
  • Some bitmaps still remain, to be replaced by vector images in a future release
  • Not extensively tested, feedback is welcome

settings

Proper theme and Carla-Control for Windows

The Windows build stack changed from using official Python and PyQt5 packages to msys ones, allowing us to link against them using mingw (Carla does not support MSVC)
This makes it possible to use the proper "pro" theme like Linux and macOS already did, and also get Carla-Control finally working on Windows.

Previously, the Carla Windows builds were using Qt's "fusion" theme (which the Carla "pro" theme is based on), which looks very similar but misses all of custom tweaks made for Carla.
This includes, for example, preventing pop-up menus from taking the entire screen or ugly thick lines being drawn where a small one was expected.

A small but important step towards cross-platform feature parity. \o/

Note: Carla plugins are not "notarized" yet, so they will not run under latest macOS 10.15/Catalina where this is a requirement.


settings

VST2 plugin for macOS and Windows, plus exposed parameters

This is the final item that was missing for cross-platform feature parity.
We now have Carla as VST2 plugin running on both macOS and Windows!

Embedding of the full GUI on these systems is not possible, so a small "middleware" window is shown as the plugin custom UI.
Not the best experience, but allows Carla to finally work as VST2.

Additionally, 100 parameters are exposed to the host, dynamically used in the order of the plugins loaded.
So for example, if the first plugin in the rack has 20 parameters, the first 20 parameters of carla-vst will be mapped to that plugin.
This continues in order for the remaining plugin parameters until we reach 100 of them.

When Carla is loaded as an internal plugin, parameters will be dynamically available too.
This feature is not available in the LV2 version of Carla though, at least not yet.


settings

Wine-native bridge, sorta experimental

This is a way to load Linux binaries under Windows applications running with Wine, in case you need that for some reason
Personally I made it so that I could run the native Carla inside FL Studio, which allows me to use its sequencer but not have to deal with Windows plugins.

This is available in the KXStudio repositories as "carla-vst-wine" package, you need to copy /usr/lib/winvst/Carla* into your Wine VST dll folder to make it work.
It requires Carla to be installed system-wide, so it cannot work if Carla is downloaded manually.

Building it is kinda tricky, as it requires building a native-windows dll first, and then a few things with winegcc...
Packager documentation will be added soon to Carla's source code repository, so other Linux distributions can pick it up.

I demoed this feature at Sonoj last year (2019), you can watch it as the 3rd part of this video.

settings

Refreshed add-plugin dialog and favorite plugins

The add-plugin dialog had a major overhaul, now looking much better and with more content visible at once.
Target was to improve the user experience, making clear that there are filters available. (it was not so obvious in previous versions)

The star on the most-left section of the table is to mark a plugin as a favorite, which will add it as a shortcut to the right-click menus on empty rack and patchbay areas.

settings

Single-page and grouped plugin parameters

The dialog for the generic plugin parameter view also had an update.
All parameters are now placed in the same tab (separated only by input and output types), and grouped when supported by the plugin.
The options for mapping a parameter to a MIDI CC were taken out and replaced by a button that triggers a menu with the relevant options.

Note that, at the moment, only a few LV2 plugins support parameter groups.
This is because most hosts do not support this feature, so plugins do not have many incentives to support such a thing.
And with not a lot of plugins supporting it, hosts also do not care that much. The usual circular dependency deal...
But since the feature applies quite nicely to Carla, made sense to add it.

The group can be collapsed by clicking on it.

A similar feature will be added to the patchbay in a later release, so we can group audio ports too. :)

More UI changes

The rack items will dynamically show as many knobs as possible
You can now change the "skin" and color of any rack item, making it easy to identify certain plugins
Added buffer-size, sample-rate and xrun information to the status; clicking on the xrun counter will reset it to zero

Canvas changes

Right-clicking on a canvas group will show options for quickly connecting all ports to another group
Many small tweaks and fixes, plus a few extra actions, as contributed by Nikita Zlobin (to be documented on the user manual)
Support for Ardour-style inline-displays, marked experimental in this release (sadly cannot be made stable until Carla v3.0)

Carla-control and OSC rework

Carla's OSC support has been reworked, now has its own dedicated page in the settings.
Carla-Control has been extended to support all non-local-dependent features of the main Carla (like patchbay management and transport controls).
This will be extended even further in future releases.

AU and VST3 support is back, by leveraging JUCE

Disabled during a previous 2.0 beta release, support for the JUCE library was removed and replaced by a heavily stripped-down version of it. (while it was still GPlv2 licensed)
The reasons for that decision still remain relevant, but in order to keep in mind with Carla's goals, I decided to add back JUCE support - but now completely optional.
It will always be possible to build Carla without JUCE, it is only used for extra hardware and plugin format support.
In fact, Linux builds by default do not use it, as there is no need for it.

Anyway, the published macOS and Windows Carla builds do use JUCE, which means Carla supports VST3 under macOS and Windows, and AU under macOS.
As a bonus, it is now possible to show the custom control panel of ASIO devices. :)

Worth noting is that JUCE does not support VST3 under Linux at this point, so neither does Carla even if you build it yourself with JUCE enabled.

Other changes

Within a bunch of small fixes and new implementations, here are some changes that deserve to be mentioned:

Notes for developers and packagers

Notes for users

The code for scanning plugins had a little rework, again, making some internal data structures change.
Because of this, a full rescan of your plugins is needed after the update.

Downloads

To download Carla binaries or source code, jump on over to the KXStudio downloads section.
If you're using the KXStudio repositories, you can simply install "carla-git" (plus "carla-lv2" and "carla-vst" if you're so inclined).
Bug reports and feature requests are welcome! Jump on over to the Carla's Github project page for those.

Future and final notes

I have started a change of the Carla's frontend coding language, from Python to C++ (for performance, reliability and debugging reasons).
There are a few canvas related things, currently experimental, that can never be made stable or fast due to how Python/PyQt works.
Also Carla is not scaling very well at the moment, and the addition of CV controlled parameters and inline-displays does not help its case.
So a move of the entire frontend to C++ makes quite a lot of sense.
Whenever this is finished a new release will be made.
But it is going to be something that, even though means a lot behind the scenes, visibly nothing will change. (except performance)
Because of this, do not expect many UI related changes in Carla for the time being.

A user manual for Carla has been started.
It proved to be quite helpful for development too, as I had to justify why things are the way they are, and explain how they work too.
Now that Carla UI should not change too much for a while, it is the right time for such thing.
I personally dislike writing such things, but understand it can be quite useful.
The work-in-progress manual is at https://kx.studio/Documentation:Manual:Carla.
(Not much to see there at the moment though, give me time)

That's it.
Please remember that this is a release candidate, and not the final release.
Some issues are expected, I will do my best to fix all reports that get to me.
If I don't know about the issues though, I can't fix them. So please report any issues you find, thanks!

> KXStudio Monthly Report (December 2019)
On 2019-12-16 by falkTX

Hello all, another monthly report about the KXStudio project is here.

There is not a whole lot of new exciting stuff this time around, as most of the time was spent on Carla new features and bug-fixing.
I am doing a push towards CV support in Carla (a "MIDI to CV" internal plugin was added, for example),
with only 1 new feature to be implemented - allowing to automate any regular parameter with CV.
The idea is to make it easier to automate things in Carla, by exposing individual parameters in the patchbay as CV ports.
There is only 1 month left for the planned release, so going to be tight on time, but still seems doable, specially with holidays coming.
(so more free time to work on this)

There were a few minor package updates in the repositories. Those are:

A new small extra repository has been created, one I have been using for some time now.
This came out of the necessity to update JACK2, but JACK not being something we can distribute in generic packages like KXStudio does for applications and plugins.
A few pieces of software, like JACK2 and other libraries, cannot be made into generic deb packages.
So, I want to create a few small but nice repositories for basic utilities and nice-to-have things.
For now, I have created a first, small one for Ubuntu 18.04 users (which includes me, obviously :P) which contains an updated JACK2, Wine-RT, among other small things.
You can find more details about this repository and all future ones coming soon at https://kx.studio/Repositories:Extras.

In some news regarding the JACK2 project, it has its own news page now, so I won't be posting JACK2 related stuff here anymore.
The latest about it, which is worth mentioning, is that its mailing list is back online once again! \o/

Cadence v0.9.1 was released, just tagging it in its git repo so distributions can pick it up.
It was mostly needed due to an incompatibility with Python 3.8.

And finally, donations for the KXStudio project (basically myself) are open once again, now even with a Patreon page.
In the past I mentioned that, due to legal costs, it was not worth having them while in Germany and I would open them again once I moved.
That happened a few months ago, but I dislike dealing with these things, so it took some time...
They are open once again now, though I removed the PayPal subscription option and counter for now.
(I am intentionally not posting the link here, I trust that if you care enough, you know where to find it)

Next month hopefully a new Carla release will be here.
Catia will be made into a standalone project, leaving Cadence behind. But that is news for another time... :)

> KXStudio Monthly Report (November 2019)
On 2019-11-16 by falkTX

Hello everyone, it is time for another monthly report in regards to the KXStudio project.

First, the most important I think, some small repository changes have been made.
I added a "KXStudio" suffix to the repository names, so you get stuff like "KXStudio Plugins" in your package manager now.
This was requested by a user, and makes a lot of sense.
The bad news is that your package manager is likely to complain about the changes, as it thinks it is a sign of trouble.
That is not the case though, as I am here just informing you of that. :)
A quick "solution" to this is to simply delete the cached apt list information, so the package manager will not have the previous repository title, like so:
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

There were a few new packages added to the repositories.
First, for the basic infrastructure, we got meson 0.51.2 and premake5. A few projects need this in order to build, so we got to have them first.
The more exciting ones are added and updated application and plugins, the changes on that are:

Lastly, preparations for the next Carla release are well under way.
I was able to update and build generic Windows and Linux binaries (with Qt 5.9), and macOS is mostly working but still needs some fixing.
In the past I used to do a bunch of beta releases until the final one was declared stable.
I am going against this now, and will directly do a "Release Candidate" where no more new stuff can be added, only bug-fixing.
The next "Linux Audio release day" is January 15, so that will be the target date.

PS: Many of the new packages were imported from the LibraZik project, for which I am extremely grateful for.
The surge armhf build fails at this point, to be fixed soon.

> KXStudio Monthly Report (October 2019)
On 2019-10-15 by falkTX

Hello all, today is October 15, a Linux/Libre-Audio release day.
I do not have anything to actually release (that is ready anyway), so I thought to instead start something new.

Every month, starting with this one, we will have a monthly report regarding the latest stuff in KXStudio.
This will involve new releases, package updates to its repositories, important bug-fixes and short-term plans.
So let's begin...

First of all, in case you somehow missed it, a new JACK2 release is here!
This finally brings meta-data support into JACK2. More information about meta-data in JACK can be found here.

On the repositories, "helm" package had an issue where the plugin could not find its own presets.
(This was caused due to KXStudio repositories going ahead on renaming "helm" to "Helm" as the former already exists)

ZynAddSubFX got (re-)added, using its nice and fancy Zyn-Fusion UI.
In the old repositories there was "zynaddsubfx" for old UI, and "zynaddsubfx-git" for the new one.
The "git" package is gone, only "zynaddsubfx" is there now and it has the new UI. +1 for progress!

x42-plugins got updated to 20191013 release.

Fluajho, Patroneo and Vico were added. (nice simple tools from Nils Hilbricht)
These last ones were tricky since they use python libraries.
In order to make it a generic package I resorted to cxfreeze which makes it run independent of the system python.

Coming soon is Carla 2.1-beta1.
The actual software is ready for the beta1 release, but setting up the infrastructure for an updated Qt5 build is taking longer than expected.
The current 2.0 builds use quite an old Qt version: Qt5.5 on macOS, Qt4(!) on Linux, which I do not accept for new releases going forward.
Windows builds are ready to go though, you can find test binaries on Carla's github.
Once I finish setting up the builds for Linux and macOS, I will make the announcement. Very likely in mid-November.

Finally, Sonoj is coming!
Sonoj is an annual event/convention in Cologne, Germany, about music production with free and open source software.
It features demonstrations, talks and hands-on workshops.
You can meet like-minded people, learn insider knowledge and tricks, participate in their one-hour production challenge!
It is only a few days from now, so please get ready! :)
I will be doing a talk in Sonoj about the past, present and future of JACK.
So please come and say hi, registration is free!

Note: Since the KXStudio website has been internally reworked (removed mediawiki, much simpler PHP code now), the old news have been removed.