KXStudio : News

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 I test more compatibility)
• Only available for parameter inputs, not outputs

In order to make CV more useful by default, a new internal "MIDI to CV" plugin was added, originally created by Bram Giesen.
More plugins will be added as needed, for now I 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.

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

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/

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.

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

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.

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.

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. :)