KXStudio : News

> KXStudio Monthly Report (August 2021)
On 2021-08-31 by falkTX

Hello all, another one of those monthly reports about the KXStudio project is here.
This month as you might have seen we had not one but two Carla releases.
Mostly bugfixes as expected, the new stuff was all very minor compared to past releases.
A few additonal things were added/fixed in Carla already since then, but all still very minor.
Whatever is ready by next release day (October 15) will be what gets in next, just to get a nice pace of releases going.

More (final?) DPF updates

DPF got a lot of attention once again.
It is now on a state where I can focus on bugfixes rather than new things, even though I still want to try official SVG support.
Everything that was in the previous DPF (that is, the git master branch) should now be in the develop branch.
I am confident enough in this that made a new "main" branch to be the default clone target (I will keep the old master branch untouched, as there are a few minor things that can't be made backwards compatible).

Fixing high-dpi support

Something that got a fair bit of attention was high-dpi support.
Previously DPF read the scale factor from the host (if provided, most do not) but now it can also figure it out on its own as fallback.
There was a lot of back and forth until it was verified to work on all major OSes and formats.
I also updated the DPF-Plugins project so that all plugins contained within it support this.
Even though some being bitmap-based causes their UI to look blurry, at least they will appear in the correct size.
You can see them in the screenshot below.

sofd improvements

Some care was given to the sofd module used by DPF as fallback X11 file browser dialog.
It serves us well enough because it generally works fine, but never looked that great in my opinion..
I spent some time to change its colors a bit to follow a more traditional/usual approach, plus a dark theme because yes.
And then on top make it work nicely for high-dpi setups too.
Not everyone uses dark themes, so there needs to be a light theme option too, not sure yet if it can be chosen automatically.
Personally I think it looks much better, but tastes are subjective. Anyway, the differences can be seen below:
(will submit the changes upstream after all the DPF file dialog stuff is finalized and stable)

External UI

As a final thing to mention for DPF, the last item that needed attention before the rework being in feature-parity with old branch, is external UI support.
The idea being that we can reuse DPF APIs and plugin export support but do the UI stuff completely separately - be it separate process or a custom implementation.
As long as it is in a way the plugin host expects things (ie, X11 window on Linux) things should just work..

The old DPF master branch didn't support this fully, but there was some experimental stuff in place.
Now it is back again, with a little more documentation and better support - it should eventually be an official DPF feature.
You can follow its discussion and progress here and because everyone likes screenshots, here is one as a quick test of mpv running as the external UI:

ProM revived

One little plugin I made quite some years ago but left it aside due to difficulties in packaging was ProM.
ProM is basically projectM in plugin form, on top of DPF.
It allows you to have old-school milkdrop-like visualizations on your DAW/host, it is an audio plugin after all.
After a little fighting over building projectM correctly (directly in ProM source, aka "vendored"), I can now say it builds and runs on at least GNU/Linux, macOS and Windows.
Taking from last month's automatic build setup, binaries are automatically generated for these 3 OSes directly from GitHub.
To make Linux distribution packagers happy, the option to build against system-provided libprojectM is still present, and should work even better now as it finds the shared data prefix to use via pkg-config.

Website updates

Worth of a little note, I updated the kx.studio website to better work in smaller screens, or vertical ones, or both like in mobile phones.
The content itself is mostly unchanged, still need to tackle that (specially documentation, there is a lot of old stuff there).
They typically call this "responsive design" I guess.
The news part I didn't update, as otherwise it would break RSS readers, and the top menu needs to become of one those "hamburguer"-style things when width is low. A task for later.

A final website update worth mentioning is the addition of the board and development pages.
As people sometimes wonder what I have been doing lately (specially important for those that give out donations, thanks for that by the way!) the board view is now integrated into the site. I added color descriptions there too.
Hopefully that makes everything more clear, and more visible too of course.

 

That is all for now.
If you appreciate the kind of work I do, please consider a donation.
Thank you in advance for your support, and stay safe out there!