KXStudio : News

> Carla 2.2 RC1 is here!
On 2020-07-18 by falkTX

Hello again everyone, it is release day! (casually late again, but only 3 days late this time, yay progress!)

This is the announcement of the first release candidate of Carla 2.2.
Carla is a fully-featured cross-platform audio plugin host, which itself can also run as a plugin.
As done with 2.1, there is no beta release for v2.2 and we are going straight into a release candidate.

Contrary to previous releases, there were not many graphical changes this time, but lots of stuff under the hood.
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.
This is because all host functions now have a "handle" prefix, so they can be reused for standalone, plugin and other variants.

Now with that said, let's go through what's new, first the bigger changes and smaller stuff for last.

Multi-Client + multi-instance improvements In order to allow multiple instances of Carla to work without conflicts, proper JACK multi-client multi-instance support was implemented. 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. Starting with v2.2, extra Carla instances will get a dedicated JACK client name suffix. 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. As a way to make this easier to manage and control, a new command-line argument was added, "--cnprefix=...". So now you can have a dedicated Carla instance that has its created JACK clients more globally recognisable. Also, when Carla runs under NSM, the JACK client name prefix is set automatically (coming from NSM). This is not enabled when loading pre-2.2 projects though, in order to keep backwards compatibility.

Linux VST3 plugin support 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. So now you can now scan and load Linux VST3 plugins under Carla. It is no longer limited to macOS and Windows. Worth noting is that this is not a custom implementation, but leveraging JUCE VST3 host support on Linux. It recently got supported as part of their JUCE6 update. There are no plans for a custom implementation at this point.

Small UI/UX improvements all around

The built-in keyboard right-click menu got a bit better. Everything is presented in a single menu, no more sub-menus are used.

The plugin built-in editor dialog now shows the currently mapped parameter type+value directly. No more clicking around needed to find out what the parameter is mapped to.

MIDI learn implemented, triggered via parameter mapping menu. Note that this is per plugin, not global, due to how Carla handles each plugin individually.

Other "quality of life" improvements:

• Added a 12400x9600 canvas size
• Added a 2x and 4x canvas image export mode
• Added a menu action to save current Carla canvas as image in the clipboard
• Added "Send MIDI notes" option to plugin built-in editor dialog
• Canvas positions are now always saved and restored, including in the plugin version
• Canvas positions are kept in sync across multiple Carla JACK instances and even Carla-Control
• Built-in plugin edit dialog tab state is kept when parameters are reloaded
• Implemented NSM "optional-gui"
• Plugin custom GUI Window title changes dynamically when renamed

Other notable changes

• Added a "carla-osc-gui" script that starts a Carla instance in the background and connects to it using OSC.
  Closing the GUI does not close the engine, and it can be run again to reconnect later on.
• Always use maximum amount of channels for VST2 plugins
• Better handle the case of JACK server stop (or killed)
• Better implementation of LV2 state path, now saving files in the same directory as the Carla project
• Changed the way plugins are deleted, so they are now safely deleted only when no longer in use
• Implement MIDI CC and CV source parameter changes for bridges
• 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
• Increase max value of the internal LFO plugin, so we can get reeeeeeeal slow
• Raise limit of plugins that can be loaded (512 default, 64 in rack)
• Tweaks for automatically converting internal Patchbay mode projects in JACK multi-client mode and vice-versa
• Working HaikuOS build, but no audio support yet

Many other bug-fixes and small under-the-hood improvements (too many to list here).
See the git log for the full list of changes.

Notes for users

When using JACK, the newly added features around the canvas require at least JACK v1.9.13.
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.
Alternatively, you can use JACK1 instead of JACK2, which has meta-data support since a long time.

The code for scanning plugins had a little rework yet again, making some internal data structures change.
Because of this, a full rescan of your plugins is needed after the update.
This should fix previously missing plugins that happened in v2.1.

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.

Final note

Just a reminder that this is a release candidate, and not the final release yet.
I did my best to fix all issues that I was able to reproduce, but some can still happen.
Please let me know if find any, thanks!

> A DISTRHO-Ports update
On 2020-07-16 by falkTX

Hello again, another release for the Quarterly Release Pact is here.
This one is a "small" update of the DISTRHO-Ports project.
It is a more packager-focused release rather than user-focused, because the (super old) build system was finally updated.
This alone warrants a new release by itself, as it finally becomes possible for the project to be packaged in regular linux distributions.

There are a few new plugins and fixes with this release, bigger changes are coming at a later date.
I want to update the DISTRHO-Ports website and have "nightly builds" of the plugin binaries, but this will take time.
For now, at least we have the plugins building and working on modern distributions.

Here is a resume of the full changes since last release in 2018:

• Add HiReSam plugin port
• Add ReFine plugin port
• Add Temper plugin port
• Fix build for ARM NEON target
• Fix LV2 UI notifications happening in non-GUI thread
• Fix LV2 meta-data to pass lv2lint errors
• Update JUCE (current plugins frozen in a known good but slightly old version, with cherry-picked fixes)
• Switch build system from premake3 to meson

There are no pre-compiled binaries for this release, though the plugins are fully up-to-date in the KXStudio repositories.
You can find this 2020-07-14 release at github.com/DISTRHO/DISTRHO-Ports/releases.

> WineASIO v1.0.0 released
On 2020-07-15 by falkTX

Hello everyone, a perhaps unexpected release is here.
This is a release of WineASIO, as a way to announce maintainer change as well as making it up to date with current Wine.

The previous maintainer, Joakim Hernberg, publicly said that he was looking for someone to take lead on the project.
When I was doing packaging of WineASIO to the KXStudio repositories, there were a couple of fixes needed... and eventually just decided to maintain it since I was in a way already doing that.
With the green-light for taking over the project, I did a couple of changes that seemed (to me) relevant and useful.
The Cadence-specific WineASIO settings were also split off to become a standalone tool, and it is now the ASIO "control panel" for the WineASIO driver.

I do not plan to make new development for WineASIO, only maintain it to keep it alive and working.
The new "control panel" was an exception due to it being, in my opinion, a user experience fix.
(understanding the Windows registry can be hard, so the "panel" allows us to skip on having to deal with that)

This is what changed compared to the previous official release:

• Add custom GUI for WineASIO settings, made in PyQt5 (taken from Cadence project code)
• Add packaging script
• Fix code to work with latest Wine
• Fix control panel startup
• Rework Makefile, common rules for 32 and 64bit builds

There are no pre-compiled binaries for WineASIO, though it is available as a package in the KXStudio repositories.
You can find this v1.0.0 release at github.com/wineasio/wineasio.

> Carla 2.1.1 has been released
On 2020-06-11 by falkTX

This is a bugfix for Carla version v2.1 series, fixing many bug reports and stuff I found along the way.

Carla is an audio plugin host, with support for many audio drivers and plugin formats.
It has some nice features like automation of parameters via MIDI CC (and send output back as MIDI too) and full OSC control.

Changelog

• Fix carla-control not handling CLI argument for custom address
• Fix carla-plugin not handling all callbacks
• Fix carla-plugin LV2 UI not showing up if host supports touch feature
• Fix for some plugin formats having 0 audio ports
• Fix occasional crashes due to canvas shadow (Qt bug, shadow is disabled by now)
• Fix canvas ports text width calculation with new Qt
• Fix wrong assertion with size 1 MIDI messages
• Fix errors in the icons
• Fix incorrect base conversion for MIDI CC assignments
• Fix rpath specification in pkg-config files
• Fix build with Qt 5.15
• Discovery: Force language to be "C" (English) so we can parse errors
• Discovery: assume midi inputs = 1 if VST plugin is synth
• Make canvas ports and groups ignore middle mouse clicks
• Improve performance of canvas "inline display" rendering
• Other miscellaneous bug fixes

Downloads

To download Carla binaries or source code, jump on over to the KXStudio downloads section.
Carla v2.1 is available pre-packaged in the KXStudio repositories, ArchLinux and Ubuntu since 20.04. On those you can simply install the carla package.
Bug reports and feature requests are welcome! Jump on over to the Carla's Github project page for those.

> KXStudio Monthly Report (May 2020)
On 2020-05-31 by falkTX

Hello all, another monthly report about the KXStudio project is here.
It has been a few months since one of these, which I apologise for.
It was wrong of me to assume I will have news every single month, some are just a bit slow on news due to external circumstances.

Anyway, a lot of work is going into Carla, lots of bug-fixes.
A good collection of them are piling up, which makes a v2.1.1 release worthy, so expect that in the next few days.

One of the new features in Carla is Linux VST3 support, already available if you use carla-git.
There is also a category filter in the add-plugin dialog now, and better handling of high-dpi mode.
That is basically it in regards to frontend/GUI changes, everything else is on the backend/audio-host side.
All of this will be in Carla v2.2, with a tentative release date of July 15.

Other developments happening behind the scenes are a DISTRHO-Ports update (setting old JUCE aside and using new juce6 branch for Linux VST3 plugins), plus updating its build system to meson.
The WineASIO project was finally given to me officially, so expect a release soon for that too.
There is also a big DPF rework going on, and a new project for cross-platform LV2 plugin binaries.
Those will be announced at a later point in time, once ready.

Regarding package updates in the repositories, there have been a few since the last monthly report. Those are:

• element added
• impro-visor added
• ladish fixed to work on systems without python2
• amsynth updated to 1.10.0
• avldrums.lv2 updated to 0.4.1
• bsequencer updated to 1.4.2
• bshapr updated to 0.9
• bslizr updated to 1.2.6
• carla-git updated
• fluajho updated to 1.5
• geonkick updated to 2.1.1
• lsp-plugins updated to 1.1.22
• mod-host updated to latest git
• patroneo updated to 1.5
• vico updated to 1.1
• x42-plugins updated to 20200411

Not so much work got done in regards to the website and documentation.
Perhaps for next time.

That is all for now, stay safe out there.