Tools

There are 241 posts filed in Tools (this is page 16 of 25).

Libre Arts: Halloween art 2021

Over the past week, I’ve seen quite a few nice Halloween-themed artworks made with free/libre software. Here are my personal picks of the ones made with Blender and Krita.

Oh, and let’s have none of this “sexy witch” nonsense. Macabre is fine though somehow 🙂

Happy Halloween from Dennys J M Pinheda, Krita:

Crows, by mikak, Krita:

Happy Halloween by huleeb, Blender:

Pumpkin’s Trick or Treat by Thornydre, Blender:

’”Sick hat, Bro,” said the man in a tree.’ by yagrum, Blender:

Bonus part, a speedpainting video of that:

I like a lot what Metin Seven does, but his things with teeth are absolute best, this zombie head in particular!

Possessed Pumpkins by Steffen Hartmann, Blender:

Haunted house by GurjasStudios, Blender:

I nearly posted a still version of this, but the animation is so much more fun!

And this one is good too, can’t help myself feeling bad for the poor sod there limping away from the creature.

Somehow, this witch’s cottage by Liam Reagan is spooky realistic. Blender.

And because everything ends well when deevad is involved, here is Trick or treat! by David Revoy, Krita:

Featured image of the post is Pumpkin warlock by Asya Reshetnikova, Blender.

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Libre Arts: Weekly-ish recap — 31 October 2021

Highlights: Apple joins Blender Dev Fund, Ardour gets clip launching as part of future live looping feature set.

GIMP 2.99.8

Much of the release notes for the newly arrived GIMP 2.99.8 covers continuous integration changes. While it might be a boring topic for you, especially if you are in the “DO WANT FEATURES” camp, this is actually great. Here is why.

If someone fixed a bug that annoyed you or implemented a new feature that you really wanted, you can now test this on your operating system of choice and provide feedback to both the contributor and GIMP developers before they cut a release or sometimes even before they merge a fix or a feature into main development branch.

It’s a kind of a big deal when you think how much folklore is rooted in a belief that GIMP developers don’t listen to users.

Speaking of which, you can now use clone tools on multiple layers. The feature was requested and sponsored by Gleb Alexandrov of Creative Shrimp. His use case is working on multiple maps of the same material in a photoscanning workflow.

The only other new feature I personally care about is support for larger-than-4GiB PSD files and the loading of PSB files. Now that GIMP 2.99 is generally more responsive than 2.10 when dealing with large multilayer images (this change arrived in an earlier release), this makes a lot of sense sense.

Oh, and as for JPEG-XL support, I’m sort of on the fence about that. There’s probably one new JPEG/PNG killer too many these days. But it’s useful to support these file formats whichever one wins the battle to be the next big thing.

Krita 5.0 beta2

The second beta of much anticipated Krita v5 release arrived recently with a ton of fixes and reworked hardware-accelerated canvas (big props to Dmitry and Agata and everyone else). There’s a full list of changes in release notes.

I’ve yet to get a better picture of what’s coming in the final release, I’ve mostly seen bits and pieces so far. All I can say right now is I have a huge respect for the team. They are dealing with rapid acceleration of brand awareness which brings a ton of new users but also a ton of attention. These things tend to wear developers out. Yet they seem to be handling the load against all odds.

Penpot 1.9

The new verison of this UX/UI design application has several new prototyping features like advanced prototyping and multiple flows. My favorite improvement, though, is live booleans operations (although I’ve already managed to break it). What I mean by “live” is that after applying Union or Difference or what have you, you can still edit original shapes.

Blender and Apple, v3.x roadmap

The really big news with Blender is Apple joining developers fund and contributing Metal back-end for Cycles. There’s the usual mix of suspicions and praises in the community, with a very clear shift towards the latter, at long last. It looks like the majority of the user base (at least the ones you meet online) are beginning to realize that yet another corporate sponsor doesn’t have the power over the project to somehow make things worse for everyone.

The other news is newly published roadmap for Blender 3.x. Ton outlined what you should be expecting from v3.0.

Ian Hubert released a free (public domain) add-on called Shakify to make believable virtual camera shaking. Well… First, we got believable lens distortions and chromatic aberrations. No we have camera shaking. I’d say any time now someone will come up with a rigging add-on to make a virtual actor behave like an unprofessional drunk a-hole on scene 🙂

ArmorPaint 0.8

Lubos put an unbelievable amount of work into this release. I mean, this is one of those cases where it’s difficult to compress the list of new features and improvements into an itemized list that is not three pages long. Which is exactly what the changelog looks like originally.

Put another way, you get iOS and Android versions (and if you buy one of those, you get the desktop version for free), there’s an online textures library, infinite per-layer masks, groups for layers and nodes, more shortcuts, materials-to-textures baking, new importing and exporting options and so much more. The source code is available on GitHub as usual (zlib/png license), and building it takes ca. 5 minutes here.

Blender VSE

The video sequencer is getting more than the usual amount of attention lately. Here are the recent changes:

  • 2D cursor is now an overlay, it’s also hidden by default
  • Ca. 3 times faster thumbnail loading speed by splitting the thumbnail job on two passes, first for visible images, then for everything else. Also, don’t draw thumbnails while rendering, otherwise thumbnail job would constantly restart.
  • Smaller memory footprint when using thumbnails
  • Color tags can now be attached to strips

Peter Fog published his Blender add-in for multicam editing on GitHub.

” alt=“Multicam add-on for Blender VSE” >}}

Audacity 3.1.0

This is the first release where you can actually see where development of Audacity under Muse Group is heading to. Highlights:

  • Clips now have handle bars so that you could easily move clips around
  • You can now trim clips non-destructively, by dragging left/right sides
  • Looping has been reworked, Audacity now has editable looping region controls on the timeline ruler

Most major changes are very well covered in the official release video:

MuseScore 4 update

I totally missed the second update on MuseScore 4 progress from a month ago. In a nutshell:

  • They have implemented basic VSTi & VST support, the new UI is mostly done.
  • They have completely overhauled how the inspector works and how part scores can be generated and modified.
  • MusicXML import is vastly improved, dozens of engraving improvements are coming too.
  • The piano roll & automation is delayed. There’s a very active contributor working on that though.
  • The currently available SFZ sampler called Zerberus will be replaced with a new custom sampler.
  • There will be a couple of alpha releases, followed by a beta with a long testing cycle, then a few release candidates, and then the final release.

PipeWire news

You probably already saw a few videos on YT where people are positively freaking out because of how well PipeWire actually works this (relatively) early in development. Well, a new version of PipeWire is out. Here’s what’s changed:

  • There is now an LD_PRELOAD v4l2 emulation library to run some existing
    v4l2 applications on top of PipeWire.
  • Various libcamera plugin improvements.
  • Filter-chains should now flush out remaining samples when paused. There
    is now also the option to let a filter-chain drain so that long filters
    such as reverbs can fade out properly.
  • Stability and compatibility improvements in JACK apps.
  • Better Bluetooth compatibility with more devices.

In other news, WirePlumber is going to be the new session manager for PipeWire in Fedora Linux 35, and JDSP4Linux, an audio effect processor for PipeWire and PulseAudio clients, got another release recently with all sorts of improvements.

My first attempt at switching to PipeWire a few months back was a failure, but I’m really excited to try again soon.

Clip launching in Ardour 7

Paul Davis released an early preview of a clip launching feature. It’s an 8×8 grid by default, which is what most grid control surfaces have, but it’s will be expandable for all you monome users.

So that’s the ultimate answer to the question, whether Ardour 7 will be out with just internal changes to handling MIDI timing: nope, there will be more.

Stargate DAW

Personally, I find it difficult to wrap my head around Stargate DAW that was recently highlighted by Phoronix. I’m sure there’s a lot of use for applications with UX/UI approach from (generally speaking) FL Studio, I’m just not one of those people. Do check it out though, maybe it’s right up your alley.

Rubberband 2.0.0

Chris Cannam cut a new major release of this audio time-stretching and pitch-shifting library. What’s changed:

  • There is now a new custom resampler. It isn’t yet used by default, so there is still a dependency on libsamplerate. This might change as users give this new method more testing.
  • Stretch calculation logic for real-time mode has been improved. It was designed to better avoid timing drift when the pitch ratio changes frequently.
  • The example LADSPA pitch shift plugin has been updated accordingly: it now exposes a wet/dry mix control to test better timing management in real-time scenarios.
  • You can now pre-program time-varying pitch shifts using a pitch/frequency map from within the command-line utility.

Paul Davis already claimed he’s planning to make use of the changes in the clip launcher in upcoming Ardour 7.

Tutorials

Time-lapse painting “One With Nature” with Krita, by Raghavendra Kamath:

There’s a new Blender modeling and texturing course over at CGCookie. Here is the full trailer:

Sports poster design with GIMP, by Zakey Design:

Autumn landscape speed illustration with Inkscape, by ukrartdesign:

New Blender Institute short film

Sprite Fright is finally out, all project files are available on Blender Studio (formerly Blender Cloud) for subscribers.

Artworks

You can always rely on Sylvia Ritter using the best colors (Krita):

Speedpainting

Black space for relaxation, by Omer Faruk Davarci, made with Blender and E-Cycles, two lights sources:

Black space for relaxation

One of recent paintings by Retro Game Art, made with Krita:

Retro Game Art

Here’s an illustration by Ariabba, made with Krita:

Italy, Ariabba

Very cool render by Muradrama, made with Blender:

Papik

Dying of light, by Protyanik Hazra, made with Blender:

Dying of light

Rabbit and forest troll, by Tell, made with Blender:

Rabbit and forest troll

Sven posted another illustration made with Inkscape:

Pig2

Each of my weekly recaps involves researching, building and testing software, reporting bugs, talking to developers, actually watching videos that I recommend, and only then writing. Time-wise, that’s usually between 10 and 15 hours. If you enjoy the work I do, you can support me on Patreon or make a one-time donation.

Support Libre Arts at Patreon

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Libre Arts: Weekly-ish recap — 6 October 2021

Highlights: new Inkscape and Octo4A releases, Inkscape and Blender development updates, VCV Rack 2 source code release.

Inkscape 1.1.1

The team finally released the first update to Inkscape v1.1. It comes mainly with bug fixes — a lot of them, in fact — so you’d do yourself a big favor by upgrading.

And yes, I know I’m preaching to the choir with this, but the excitement is still strong witrh Martin’s ongoing work on pages support.

In other news, Mike Kowalski made toolbars icons size and the toolbox vastly more customizable:

Krita gets updated Levels filter

The team is working hard at getting Krita 5.0 ready to be released. That doesn’t mean great new features can’t sneak into the main development branch for what will become version 5.1.0. So Deif Lou took the opportunity to improve the Levels filter.

There’s some code refactoring involved, but on the UI side, changes are quite visible too. You can now edit separate channels, like R or B in RGB, and M or Y in CMYK. For RGB images, you can also tweak H and S in HSL.

New Levels dialog

And then there’s a new Auto Levels feature with settings.

Auto Levels

Blender 3.0 news

Cycles X landed to the main development branch, which is great for everyone who wanted the rendering to complete faster. Here is a video by Gleb from a few months back:

You can learn more from preliminary release notes, as well as from this post in developers’ blog.

Pablo returned from a quick holiday to resume hacking on sculpting:

Throughout September, the team posted a series of updates on Google Summer of Code projects this year:

  1. Geometry nodes
  2. VSE and UV Editor improvements
  3. Curve and Knife tool improvements

In 3rd party news, Bend Face v4.0.0 add-on has been released:

Massive FreeCAD update from Yorik

Yorik van Havre returned to posting updates on his FreeCaD hacking. Highlights:

  • Initial Topologic integration
  • A proper Hatch tool for the Draft and BIM workbenches
  • BIM Leader tool to draw polylines with arrows
  • You can now easily move a copy-pasted TechDraw view elsewhere
  • There’s a mode selector to reorder the contents of groups in the BIM workbench now
  • The BIM library tool can now import items from Grabcad
  • There’s a new Style Settings panel allowing to save and load draft styles

I absolutely encourage you to read the whole thing and maybe grab a build from git to see for yourself. Any new build from ‘realthunder’ should do.

New Hatch tool in FreeCAD

And because I feel lazy to make a new header, here is some great news from the fellow IfcOpenShell project:

Octo4A 1.0

The OctoPrint Android app has finally reached v1.0 stage, which is a bit of a jump from v0.0.5 released just this March 🙂

Highlights:

  • A new alpine-based bootstrap, supports Android 4.3+
  • A lot of new camera settings
  • Web terminal via ttyd
  • A new extensions system
  • More support for plugins
  • Better USB configuration
  • Corrupted detection installation
  • Massive features polish

You can grab an APK build from GitHub (v1.0.1 now available). This is not the first Android remote control for OctoPrint, but as far as I can tell, e.g. OctoRemote is not free/libre software.

Blender VSE updates

I think this deserves its own section, at least, this time. There has been a bunch of great VSE changes lately.

Here is one:

Here is another one:

And then there’s this:

Bespoke Synth excitement is growing

People keep raving about Bespoke Synth while the community started contributing to the project with fixes (mostly for the build system) and minor improvements.

Here is a review from Polarity Music, it specifically covers how different some of BS’s concepts are:

More interesting uses of the synth demonstrate just how much expressive the environment is:

I mean, how about a road runner game?

it is all the more exciting because it looks like Ryan Challinor, the guy behind this project, developed a bad case of RSI last year which is preventing him from releasing videos that he planned for this project, and now users are pretty much doing it for him.

Also, just for the fun of it:

VCV Rack 2 source code release

While the binary release along with the VST version is coming in November, the source code for v2 and preliminary builds from git were made available a week ago. Andrew first announced the coming source code release in the very last message in Mycelium Symposium chat on YT and then pushed the branch shortly after that.

You can fetch builds (Linux included) from the announcement post, although only default modules are available right now. There rest of some ca. 2700 of them would need porting first. Which, I feel, is the reason for the pre-release: gotta give developers something to test updated code against. Officially, Rack 2 API and ABI are unstable for the next few weeks though. But hey, still very exciting!

Rack 2.0 Community Edition and Studio Edition are expected to be released on November 6.

Audacity is getting non-destructive clip trimming

Getting major new stuff into Audacity has been taking time, but we are beginning to see the shape of what’s coming.

And then the spectral brush, which is one of the two GSoC projects this year, is nearing completion and might become part of v3.1.0 (not guaranteed though).

Artworks

Joshua Jay Christie, Oat Distillery, Blender:

ikhimaz, Overgrown, Blender:

Philipp Urlich, a new speedpainting of a mountain valley, Krita:

attackmenicely, Altered Carbon poster, Krita

Sylvia Ritter, The Devil tarot card, Krita:

Each of my weekly recaps involves researching, building and testing software, reporting bugs, talking to developers, actually watching videos that I recommend, and only then writing. Time-wise, that’s usually between 10 and 20 hours. If you enjoy the work I do, you can support me on Patreon or make a one-time donation.

Support Libre Arts at Patreon

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Libre Arts: Weekly recap — 19 September 2021

Week highlights: new releases of GIMP, PenPot, Glaxnimate, Ultimaker Cura, Horizon EDA, Bespoke Synth, Giada, further work on pages support in Inkscape, working VST3 instruments support in MuseScore.

VGC Illustration: funded on Kickstarter

First off, Boris Dalstein’s project got successfully funded on Kickstarter by 137 backers (so far). This covers the remaining 10% of the money that Boris needs to develop the first official release.

GIMP 2.10.28

This is a brown paper bag release: 2.10.26 was inadvertently released with a tiny annoying bug, so the team skipped that version entirely. Either way, if you are a Windows user, I definitely recommend upgrading.

This version comes with a bunch of fixes for this platform, especially for cases when GIMP used to be slow with a network drive being temporarily unavailable (not GIMP’s fault, but rather a 3rd party component used by the program).

In other news, GIMP 2.99.x now has a Preferences switch between various Windows APIs for graphic tablets support, thanks to Luca Bacci. Basically, this means support for more tablets. Oh, and Jehan’s patch to support cloning on multiple layers at once has been merged and will be part of 2.99.8, hopefully in the coming October.

Inkscape got a Page tool

So Inkscape now has an experimental Page tool for creating and managing pages. To be completely frank, Inkscape pages look more like artboards. That is, you can draw them in arbitrary positions and arbitrary ratios, drag them around with their content etc. Please don’t treat any of that as final design yet.

Experimental Page tool in Inkscape

You can fetch a build for your operating system from the Pipelines section of the merge request.

PenPot 1.8.0

There’s over a dozen new features and improvements in this UX/UI prototyping tool. Not big fancy things, but iterations over previous releases. I’d say, it’s well worth updating. See https://penpot.app/dev-diaries.html for details or the video below! One breaking change is that old share links will be defunct after upgrading.

Glaxnimate 0.4.5

This is a minor update of the animation editor, bringing sprite exporting mode (each frame becomes a tile), as well as numerous usability improvements and bug fixes. See Mattia’s post on Patreon for a complete list of changes. You can grab your download here.

Red Hat is looking for an HDR developer

This is both exciting and a little frightening. There has been some controversy over implementation approaches so far, especially where HDR meets color management (and there’s a still unapplied merge request for Wayland from Collabora developers). Done right, it would propel the Linux ecosystem significantly forward as a platform for content producers and consumers. Done wrong, it would hinder the progress.

New FreeCAD build by realthunder

Kurt Kremitzki released an updated “Link” build of FreeCAD with usability improvements, such as easily accessible presets to try various looks of the program (Tools > Preset Configurations), e.g. dark theme with overlaid sidebars. So in one sweep, you can go from this:

FreeCAD with default UI preset

to this:

FreeCAD with dark overlay UI preset

Which works nicely, except there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to revert, so please think twice before choosing a preset with large text font and icons!

Most of the details on the update are here.

Ultimaker Cura 4.11

If you do 3D printing and, for some inexplicable reason, you haven’t heard of Ultimaker Cura, definitely take it for a spin. Highlights of this release:

  • Monotonic ordering to print parts with smoother top surfaces
  • Complete UI refresh: over 100 updated icons and adaptive UI that readjusts itself when window gets resized
  • Improved digital library integration with the search function
  • Save third-party materials profiles to USB
  • Opt-in notifications for beta and plugin releases
  • A bunch of new printer definitions

Here’s the full list of changes. Or you can watch this video:

Horizon EDA 2.1.0

This free/libre EDA program by Lukas Kramer is relatively unknown (as compared to e.g. KiCad) but it’s a very interesting project that recently got an update. Highlights:

  • More natural visualization of arc selection
  • 3D view now has keyboard shortcuts
  • Easy switching between multiple grids
  • Much less messy look of composite pads
  • Hints showing up to help learning key sequences — after a delay so that experienced users wouldn’t fret

You can learn more from release notes. There’s an installer for Windows available, and for Linux users, the app is on Flathub (not to mention the source code under GPLv3+).

The project is rather active. In fact, Lukas has just added an Align/Distribute tool, and earlier this month, he added support for nested schematic sheets.

Actually, all four major free/libre EDA projects that I recall — KiCad, LibrePCB, gEDA and Horizon — are actively maintained and developed, although gEDA has been falling behind lately.

First VSTi support demo in upcoming MuseScore 4

The MuseScore team is putting it all together for an alpha release. You can now load VST3 plugins for the playback of notation.

At least the nightly builds for Linux do not allow loading native GUIs for VST3 plugins yet (or I simply don’t know how to do that). So I can’t make use of sfizz to load orchestral samples, and I’m temporarily stuck on Pianoteq v5.x, so no VST3 for me. But hey, it’s a start! And judging by discussions on their Discord channel, the internal SFZ-based sampler they are creating for MuseScore specifically will be news-worthy soon enough.

Bespoke Synth 1.0.0

Ryan Challinor finally released v1.0 of Bespoke Synth which is more like a modular synthesis/composition environment really. This is a nice short overview of what you can expect form this version:

The Linux build isn’t particularly well done and might fail you (it did for me), but there’s ongoing work to improve it, and the developer is extremely humble and welcoming about that. So… Stay tuned? Because this is a seriously cool project.

Giada 0.18.2

The almighty free/libre looper got a new release featuring:

  • stereo in/out audio meters;
  • revamped action editor: better UI, improved usability;
  • displaying the play head in the action editor.

I’d love to be able to use it, however it needs FLTK 1.4 to be released to support HiDPI displays. So… one day!

Tutorials

Krita timelapse by Orfenn Schuller:

Another Krita speed painting by Ali Bahabadi:

Boris Hajdukovic continues his series of lengthy in-depth darktable tutorials with this one:

Lonely Speck explains how to use Siril and Photoshop for astrophotography. Don’t worry about the Photoshop part too much. While GIMP doesn’t have the Dust and Scratches filter used in the tutorial, you can try the Remove Scratches filter in G’MIC.

Artworks

Rohit Hela, landscape painted with Krita:

Rohit Hela, landscape painted with Krita

Philipp Urlich, new speedpainting, Krita:

Philipp Urlich, new speedpainting

Jamie Farrar Goldstein, Painting with Light, Blender

Jamie Farrar Goldstein, Painting with Light

Shivom Kapoor, Rogue Philantropist, Blender:

Shivom Kapoor, Rogue Philantropist

Petra Trebjesanin, modern French interior archviz, Blender:

Petra Trebjesanin, modern French interior archviz

Pratik Solanki experimented with illusions in Blender:

Menno Snoek, Express Shipping, Blender

Menno Snoek, Express Shipping

kynlo, Bad Memories, Krita:

kynlo, Bad Memories

Sylvia Ritter, Impish Indri (codename for upcoming Ubuntu 21.10), Krita:

Sylvia Ritter, Impish Indri

Each of my weekly recaps involves researching, building and testing software, reporting bugs, talking to developers, actually watching videos that I recommend, and only then writing. Time-wise, that’s usually between 10 and 20 hours. If you enjoy the work I do, you can support me on Patreon or make a one-time donation.

Support Libre Arts at Patreon

Continue Reading →

Libre Arts: Weekly recap — 12 September 2021

Week highlights: new version of BeeRef available, Inkscape updates, VCV Rack 2 teaser, new PipeWire release, and more.

BeeRef 0.2.0

Rebecca Breu released a new version of BeeRef, an amazing free/libre reference image viewer. The main new feature is support for next notes (see my earlier post on the project).

G’MIC is getting new awesome filter

Paint with Brush is the latest addition to G’MIC. Even if you don’t understand German, just scroll to 1:45 to see it in action:

Inkscape updates

Most recently, Mike Kowalski merged his patch that turns the snapping toobar into a drop-down list of options (called popover in GTK).

Personally, I just save the usual snapping options I need into the default template, so I don’t particularly care how exactly they are accessible. What do you think?

In fact, Mike changed various part of the UI over the summer, e.g. you can now configure which parts of the status bar are visible by default. If you never use the drop-down list to navigate layers, you can disable it. And if you never use canvas rotation, you can lock canvas rotation and disable the status bar control over canvas rotation entirely. That gives you more space for context hints.

FreeCAD Trails add-on got its first release

Alright, that actually happened in July but I only noticed that today. Hakan Seven and Maarten Vroegindeweij made the first official release of Trails, the transportation engineering workbench for FreeCAD. And there’s new features coming all the time.

Olive allows previewing waveforms when dragging

Version 0.2 is slowly coming together. I know, it might sound silly, but I’m really glad to have this little feature brought back:

VCV Rack 2 teaser

Andrew Belt released a preview of what’s coming in VCV Rack 2 now expected in November this year.

Highlights:

  • Dark room mode (for working at night)
  • Better module sections management
  • Redesigned module browser
  • VST2 plugin to be part of paid version, more options to be added

The bit you are probably most interested in, from a forum post:

VCV Rack Community Edition will be GPLv3 (free/open-source). VCV Rack Studio Edition will be $99 ($149 after release sale) and include VST2 plugin support (+more plugin formats later) and professional support.

And the important part for plugin developers:

90% of plugins will only require a version update and a recompile (a 1-line edit, 15 seconds of work). For the other 10% of plugins using advanced or unstable API features, updating to v2 is easy and involves following a few search-and-replace steps.

There’s a migration guide available: https://vcvrack.com/manual/Migrate2

PipeWire 0.3.35

There’s a new release of PipeWire every other week, here are some of the most (subjectively) interesting changes over the past few weeks:

  • Support multiple sample rates in the graph
  • S/PDIF pass-through over optical or HDMI is now implemented
  • Bluetooth can now automatically switch between headset and audio profile
  • Bluetooth codecs are now in separate plugins to make it easier to ship them
  • Better JACK compatibility, including improved Catia and Carla compatibility
  • Internal latency of ALSA devices can now be configured
  • A fast convolver was added to the filter-chain to implement virtual surround sinks or reverbs

Meanwhile, you might want watching Helvum, a GTK-based patchbay for PipeWire.

ROLI files for bankruptcy, LV2 support in JUCE

If you didn’t follow all the news in the past few years, you might be asking yourself, whether ROLI filing for bankruptcy would affect JUCE in any way. After all, there are some very fine free/libre projects using this framework, like the recent DelayArchitect plugin.

Well, the thing is, they already sold JUCE to PACE in April 2020 (and probably started the process a year prior to that, as it is usual in mergers and acquisitions). And the project is rather active, they recently released version 6.1 with broader MIDI 2.0 support, support for VST3 extensions, support for native accessibility frameworks on macOS, Windows, iOS and Android etc. So no, unless you own any hardware instruments they made, you are probably fine.

Speaking of which, LV2 support might land to JUCE-based hosts and plugins after all. Developer reuk writes on GitHub:

We’ve recently been investigating adding LV2 support for both hosts and clients to JUCE, and I feel confident that this feature will be included in an upcoming release. We don’t have a concrete timeline for this work, but hopefully the beta will be ready soon (i.e. months rather than years).

Tutorials

Once you disregard the hilarious “Photoshop editing in GIMP” part of this video’s title, you might find this to be a very nice music-only tutorial on photo manipulation with GIMP.

This is a new Inkscape tutorial by grafikart:

Here is a great caracal speedpainting by Ali Bahabadi, made with Krita. The team recently published an interview with the artist:

This is a looooong no-commentary tutorial on making interior design visualization with Blender 2.9x and Eevee.

Featured Blender artwork: “The Greenhouse” by Laura Ganis.

Each of my weekly recaps involves researching, building and testing software, reporting bugs, talking to developers, actually watching videos that I recommend, and only then writing. Time-wise, that’s between 10 and 20 hours. If you enjoy the work I do, you can support me on Patreon or make a one-time donation.

Support on Patreon

Continue Reading →