KXStudio : News

> KXStudio Monthly Report (February 2021)
On 2021-02-28 by falkTX

Hello all, another "monthly" report about the KXStudio project is here.
There is not a whole lot of stuff this time around, this being a short month and also me moving to a different place.
But there are still some things worth reporting, so let's get to that.

First, in case you missed it, Carla v2.3-RC1 was tagged and released, marking the first PyQt-based project of mine to have automated release binaries.
This is crucial for having more frequent releases, as it reduces the workload that each release requires.
It is now basically just setting the commit hash in the Carla-Releases project, and wait for the builds to be done.
And speaking of Carla, a few small issues were found and already fixed, so you can expect RC2 to be out very soon.

On non-KXStudio related news, Vital is now open-source.
Obviously I have interest on packaging it in the KXStudio repositories but, even though the project is released under GPLv3, there are restrictions on the use of the name and its trademarks.
So the idea right now is to (im)port it over to DISTRHO-Ports project, with a change of name to Vitalium and an alternative icon made by unfa.
This is already on-going, with one change required which was to update the DISTRHO JUCE fork to the latest upstream v6.0.7 - this is done now (including rebasing all of DISTRHO JUCE patches).
I will write something when the porting process is over, likely doing another release of PawPaw since simply having Vitalium as cross-platform LV2 plugin is worth an update.

Package updates in the KXStudio repositories are very few this time.
Basically soundtracker was added (as a special request from a friend) and Helio was updated to v3.3 (which served as a way to test the updated JUCE).

On a final note, I am experimenting with a public kanban-style board.
Not just to organize myself a bit better, but also as a way to let everyone know what I am working on at the moment and things that I will start to do relatively soon.
You can see what has already been done this month so far (let's pretend we are already in March) and what might be coming soon.
I am still playing with colors and tags, but general idea on the colors at the moment is:

• yellow: packaging stuff or something related to kxstudio repositories
• orange: articles or things to write (usually releases or news)
• green: coding task which is similar to something I did before, so "easy" to do
• red: bug-fixes
• blue: porting over something that already exists/was done before. involves boring, copy, paste and adjust work
• pink: brand new projects or things to do, which usually involve learning, research, testing, etc. can take long

I have recently been trying to get some sort of crowd-funding going (to help in terms of financial support).
If you are a sponsor/subscriber, you might have felt that these monthly updates are too spread out and too few.
So a public work-tracking board seems like a nice middle-ground, a way to indicate what is happening on a specific moment without having to wait for monthly reports or big splashy news.
For now you can access the board at board.kx.studio; later on I will see if it can be embed into the main website.

If you see anything you like in there or just simply appreciate the kind of work I do, please consider a donation.
I am not taking feature requests at the moment, as there is quite a few things in the backlog already, but once most of the DPF-related work is complete, I will revisit this idea.
Thank you in advance for your support, stay safe out there!