New AV software in Debian 8 (Jessie)

[danboid]

Thanks to Alessio Treglia for writing this summary of new and updated AV software in Debian 8 aka Jessie. It makes for interesting reading even if you don't run Debian.

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-a ... 00005.html


Ciao!

The Debian Multimedia Maintainers have been quite active since the
Wheezy release, and have some interesting news to share for the Jessie
release. Here we give you a brief update on what work has been done and
work that is still ongoing.

Let's see what's cooking for Jessie then.


Frameworks and libraries
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

* Support for many new media formats and codecs.

The codec library libavcodec, which is used by popular media playback
applications including vlc, mpv, totem (using gstreamer1.0-libav), xine,
and many more, has been updated to the latest upstream release version
11 provided by Libav [libav]. This provides Debian users with HEVC
playback, a native Opus decoder, Matroska 3D support, Apple ProRes, and
much more. Please see [libav-changelog] for a full list of functionality
additions and updates.

* libebur128

libebur128 is a free implementation of the European Broadcasting Union
Loudness Recommendation (EBU R128), which is essentially an alternative
to ReplayGain. The library can be used to analyze audio perceived
loudness and subsequentially normalize the volume during playback.

* libltc

libltc provides functionalities to encode and decode Linear (or
Longitudinal) Timecode (LTC) from/to SMPTE data timecode.

* libva

libva and the driver for Intel GPUs has been updated to the 1.4.0
release. Support for new GPUs has been added. libva now also supports
Wayland.

* Pure Data

A number of new additional libraries (externals) will appear in Jessie,
including (among others) Eric Lyon's fftease and lyonpotpourrie, Thomas
Musil's iemlib, the pdstring library for string manipulation and pd-lua
that allows to write Pd-objects in the popular lua scripting language.


JACK and LADI
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

LASH Audio Session Handler was abandoned upstream a long time ago in
favor of the new session management system, called ladish (LADI Session
Handler). ladish allows users to run many JACK applications at once and
save/restore their configuration with few mouse clicks.

The current status of the integration between the session handler and
JACK may be summarized as follows:
* ladish provides the backend;
* laditools contains a number of useful graphical tools to tune the
session management system's whole configuration (including JACK);
* gladish provides a easy-to-use graphical interface for the session
handler.

Note that ladish uses the D-Bus interface to the jack daemon, therefore
only Jessie's jackd2 provides support for and also cooperates fine
with it.


Plugins: LV2 and LADSPA
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Debian Jessie will bring the newest 1.10.0 version of the LV2 technology
[lv2]. Most changes affect the packaging of new plugins and extensions,
a brief list of packaging guidelines is now available [lv2-packaging].

A number of new plugins and development tools too have been made
available during the Jessie development cycle:

* LV2 Toolkit

LVTK provides libraries that wrap the LV2 C API and extensions into easy
to use C++ classes. The original work for this
was mostly done by Lars Luthman in lv2-c++-tools.

* Vee One Suite

The whole suite by Rui Nuno Capela is now available in Jessie, and
consists of three components:
drumkv1: old-school drum-kit sampler synthesizer
samplv1: polyphonic sampler
synthv1: analog-style 4-oscillator substractive synthesizer
All three are provided in both forms of LV2 plugins and stand-alone JACK
client. JACK session, JACK MIDI, and ALSA MIDI are supported too.

* x42-plugins and zam-plugins

LV2 bundles containing many audio plugins for high quality processing.

* Fomp

Fomp is an LV2 port of the MCP, VCO, FIL, and WAH plugins by Fons
Adriaensen.

Some other components have been upgraded to more recent upstream versions:

* ab2gate: 1.1.7
* calf: 0.0.19+git20140915+5de5da28
* eq10q: 2.0~beta5.1
* NASPRO: 0.5.1

We've packaged ste-plugins, Fons Adriaensen's new stereo LADSPA plugins
bundle.
A major upgrade of frei0r [frei0r], namely the standard collection for
the minimalistic plugin API for video effects, will be available in
Jessie.


New multimedia applications
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

* Advene

Advene (Annotate Digital Video, Exchange on the NEt) is a flexible video
annotation application.

* Ardour3

The new generation of the popular digital audio workstation will make
its very first appearance in Debian Jessie.

* Cantata

Qt4 front-end for the MPD daemon.

* Csound

Csound for jessie will feature the new major series 6, with the improved
IDE CsoundQT. This new csound supports improved array data type
handling, multi-core rendering and debugging features.

* din

DIN Is Noise is a musical instrument and audio synthesizer that supports
JACK audio output, MIDI, OSC, and IRC bot as input sources. It could be
extended and customized with Tcl scripts too.

* dvd-slideshow

dvd-slideshow consists of a suite of command line tools which come in
handy to make slideshows from collections of pictures. Documentation is
provided and available in `/usr/share/doc/dvd-slideshow/'.

* dvdwizard

DVDwizard can fully automate the creation of DVD-Video filesystem. It
supports graphical menus, chapters, multiple titlesets and
multi-language streams. It supports both PAL and NTSC video modes too.

* flowblade

Flowblade is a video editor - like the popular KDenlive based on the MLT
engine, but more lightweight and with some difference in editing concepts.

* forked-daapd

Forked-daapd switched [forked-daapd] to a new, active upstream again
dropping Grand Central Dispatch in favor of libevent. The switch fixed
several bugs and made forked-daapd available on all release
architectures instead of shipping only on amd64 and i386. Now nothing
prevents you from setting up a music streaming (DAAP/DACP) server on
your favorite home server no matter if it is based on mips, arm or x86!

* harvid

HTTP Ardour Video Daemon decodes still images from movie files and
serves them via HTTP. It provides frame-accurate decoding and is main
use-case is to act as backend and second level cache for rendering the
videotimeline in Ardour.

* Groove Basin

Groove Basin is a music player server with a web-based user interface
inspired by Amarok 1.4. It runs on a server optionally connected to
speakers. Guests can control the music player by connecting with a
laptop, tablet, or smart phone. Further, users can stream their music
libraries remotely.
It comes with a fast, responsive web interface that supports keyboard
shortcuts and drag drop. It also provides the ability to upload songs,
download songs, and import songs by URL, including YouTube URLs. Groove
Basin supports Dynamic Mode which automatically queues random songs,
favoring songs that have not been queued recently.
It automatically performs ReplayGain scanning on every song using the
EBU R128 loudness standard, and automatically switches between track and
album mode. Groove Basin supports the MPD protocol, which means it is
compatible with MPD clients. There is also a more powerful Groove Basin
protocol which you can use if the MPD protocol does not meet your needs.

* HandBrake

HandBrake, a versatile video transcoder, is now available for Jessie. It
could convert video from nearly any format to a wide range of commonly
supported codecs.

* jack-midi-clock

New jackd midiclock utility made by Robin Gareus.

* laborejo

Laborejo, Esperanto for "Workshop", is used to craft music through
notation. It is a LilyPond GUI frontend, a MIDI creator and a tool
collection to inspire and help music composers.

* mpv

mpv [mpv] is a movie player based on MPlayer and mplayer2. It supports a
wide variety of video file formats, audio and video codecs, and subtitle
types. The project focuses mainly on modern systems and encourages
developer activity. As such, large portions of outdated code originating
from MPlayer have been removed, and many new features and improvements
have been added [mpv-changelog]. Note that, although there are still
some similarities to its predecessors, mpv should be considered a
completely different program (e.g. lacking compatibility with both
mplayer and mplayer2 in terms of command-line arguments and
configuration).

* smtube

SMTube is a stand-alone graphical video browser and player, which makes
YouTube's videos browsing, playing, and download such a piece of cake.
It has so many features that, we are sure, will make YouTube lovers
very, very happy.

* sonic-visualiser

Sonic Visualiser Application for viewing and analysing the contents of
music audio files.

* SoundScapeRenderer

SoundScapeRenderer (aka SSR) is a (rather) easy to use render engine for
spatial audio, that provides a number of different rendering algorithms,
ranging from binaural (headphone) playback via wave field synthesis to
higher-order ambisonics.

* Videotrans

videotrans is a set of scripts that allow its user to reformat existing
movies into the VOB format that is used on DVDs.

* XBMC

XBMC has been partially rebranded as "XBMC from Debian" [xbmc-debian] to
make it clear that it is changed to conform to Debian's Policy. The
latest stable release, 13.2 Gotham will be part of Jessie making Debian
a good choice for HTPC-s.

* zita-bls1

Binaural stereo signals converter made by Fons Adriaensen

* zita-mu1

Stereo monitoring organiser for jackd made by Fons Adriaensen

* zita-njbridge

Jack clients to transmit multichannel audio over a local IP network made
by Fons Adriaensen

* radium-compressor

Radium Compressor is the system compressor of the Radium music editor. It is
provided in the form of stand-alone JACK application.


Multimedia Tasks
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

With Jessie we are shipping a set of multimedia related tasks [tasks].
They include package lists for doing several multimedia related tasks.
If you are interested in defining new tasks, or tweaking the current,
existing ones, we are very much interested in hearing from you.


Upgraded applications and libraries
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

* Aeolus: 0.9.0
* Aliki: 0.3.0
* Ams: 2.1.1
* amsynth: 1.4.2
* Audacious: 3.5.2
* Audacity: 2.0.5
* Audio File Library: 0.3.6
* Blender: 2.72b
* Bristol: 0.60.11f
* C* Audio Plugin Suite: 0.9.23
* Cecilia: 5.0.9
* cmus: 2.5.0
* DeVeDe: 3.23.0-13-gbfd73f3
* DRC: 3.2.1
* EasyTag: 2.2.2
* ebumeter: 0.2.0
* faustworks: 0.5
* ffDiaporama: 1.5
* ffms: 2.20
* gmusicbrowser: 1.1.13
* Hydrogen: 0.9.6.1
* IDJC: 0.8.14
* jack-tools: 20131226
* LiVES: 2.2.6
* mhWaveEdit: 1.4.23
* Mixxx: 1.11.0
* mp3fs: 0.91
* MusE: 2.1.2
* Petri-Foo: 0.1.87
* PHASEX: 0.14.97
* QjackCtl: 0.3.12
* Qtractor: 0.6.3
* rtaudio: 4.1.1
* Rosegarden: 14.02
* rtmidi: 2.1.0
* SoundTouch: 1.8.0
* stk: 4.4.4
* streamtuner2: 2.1.3
* SuperCollider: 3.6.6
* Synfig Studio: 0.64.1
* TerminatorX: 3.90
* tsdecrypt: 10.0
* Vamp Plugins SDK: 2.5
* VLC: Jessie will release with the 2.2.x series of VLC
* XCFA: 4.3.8
* xwax: 1.5
* xjadeo: 0.8.0
* x264: 0.142.2431+gita5831aa
* zynaddsubfx: 2.4.3


What's not going to be in Jessie
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

with the aim to improve the overall quality of the multimedia software
available in Debian, we have dropped a number of packages which were
abandoned upstream:

* beast
* flumotion
* jack-rack
* jokosher
* lv2fil (suggested replacement for users is eq10q or calf eq)
* phat
* plotmm
* specimen (suggested replacement for users is petri-foo - fork of
specimen)
* zynjacku (suggested replacement for users is jalv)

We've also dropped mplayer, presently nobody seems interested in
maintaining it.
The suggested replacements for users are mplayer2 or mpv. Whilst the
former is mostly compatible with mplayer in terms of command-line
arguments and configuration (and adds a few new features too), the
latter adds a lot of new features and improvements, and it is actively
maintained upstream.

Please note that although the mencoder package is no longer available
anymore, avconv and mpv do provide encoding functionality. For more
information see [avconv-man], [avconv-documentation] and [mpv-encoding].


Broken functionalities
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

rtkit under systemd is broken at the moment. [bug747568]


Activity statistics
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

More information about team's activity are available at [team-stats].


Where to reach us
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Debian Multimedia Maintainers can be reached at
pkg-multimedia-maintainers AT lists.alioth.debian.org for packaging
related topics, or at debian-multimedia AT lists.debian.org for user and
more general discussion.

We would like to invite everyone interested in multimedia to join us
there. Some of the team members are also in the #debian-multimedia
channel on OFTC.


Cheers!


Alessio Treglia
on behalf of the Debian Multimedia Maintainers



[bug747568] https://bugs.debian.org/747568
[forked-daapd] http://bit.ly/1rqwAW1
[frei0r] http://frei0r.dyne.org/
[libav] http://libav.org
[libav-changelog] http://bit.ly/1DB3MTo
[lv2] http://lv2plug.in/
[lv2-packaging] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/Policy/LV2
[mpv] http://mpv.io/
[mpv-changelog] http://bit.ly/1tLqV4i
[mpv-encoding] http://bit.ly/1tcgE0f
[avconv-man] http://bit.ly/1s8QKE5
[avconv-documentation] https://libav.org/avconv.html
[tasks] http://blends.debian.org/multimedia/tasks/index
[team-stats] http://blends.debian.org/multimedia/
[xbmc-debian] http://balintreczey.hu/blog/introducing ... om-debian/

[thetotalchaos]

Nice info. Thanks for sharing.

[briandc]

Good list! Hopefully other quality linux apps will continue to be maintained, too... There are a few that would benefit greatly...!

brian

[aprzekaz]

Looks like a nice list. Would it make sense to wait until Jessie becomes the new stable to install it? My system is getting a little tore up from updates and I like the idea of running just plain old Debian stable.

[tripomatic]

You can install it from testing also. There's an installer for it.

I use testing/unstable with kxstudio for extra's on desktop & laptop. For me it's stable enough and never have serious issues.

[kmatheussen]

I wonder if it would be possible to change this text:

"Radium Compressor is the system compressor of the Radium suite. It is
provided in the form of stand-alone JACK application."

There is nothing called the "Radium suite". It's the system compressor in the
Radium music editor. The standalone version of the compressor was partly made
to give attention to the radium music editor, so when it has this wrong
description, it doesn't quite fulfill the original purpose it was intented for.

[thetotalchaos]

Took me whole day to realize that Jessie's linux-rt kernel was dropped down (probably because the preempt-rt team are on a break again) and the Debian generic kernel is not preempt-able. So by far all those efforts are meaningless. The only (known to me) alternative is to "upgrade" to unstable and than using the good old liquorix kernel. Pretty much a stalemate situation. For all those years as a GNU/Linux user i never saw Linux-Audio being so neglected!

[asbak]

How about compiling your own? It's been a while since I last compiled kernels but it wasn't too difficult. (Not sure how hard it would be to patch it to rt though)

[DepreTux]

How about compiling your own? It's been a while since I last compiled kernels but it wasn't too difficult. (Not sure how hard it would be to patch it to rt though)

It's easy if you stick to some distro's default rt config. Once you start tweaking it becomes nightmare-ish. On the other hand, not many distros provide rt patched kernels, and they usually include everything and the kitchen sink, so it will take time to compile.

If I were you, I would either download and install the linux-rt from wheezy (which is stuck at 3.2.x.) and first see if it fits your needs. If it doesn't, then maybe you can use the config for that version (which resides in /boot ) to compile your own.

Latest kernels bring in some advantages, but they have a lot more options to consider, so once you are running a decent config, stick to that version for as long as possible.

Ubuntu 12.04 is at linux-3.2, and it is supported through 2017, which means the 3.2 kernel will live at least till that date. In my book that means linux-3.2 is the safest choice nowadays in terms of stability.

Myself, I'm running 3.4 on debian wheezy and I haven't had a problem. When upgrade time comes, it's probably gonna be painful given how quickly the kernel evolves.

[asbak]

Thanks for the insight DepreTux

I took your advice and stuck a Wheezy 3.2 rt kernel on Jessie 64Bit and managed to go for 25 mins without an xrun (before quitting the test session) whilst playing Doze VSTi's via WineASIO.
There still seems to be a case to be made for rt kernels as opposed to "low latency" kernels, at least for my particular circumstances. (I never quite managed to get things to work flawlessly with Mint 64Bit and the low-latency kernel).

In the past I also had less trouble with USB interfaces + lowlatency or stock kernels but struggled to get xrun free sessions with a RME 9652 PCI card. Perhaps rt kernel + a few tweaks (disabling gvfs and jackaudio in dbus-1, upowerd etc) is the answer, who knows.... more testing needed. Perhaps USB audio interfaces are less prone to xrun issues than PCI interfaces? Who knows.....

Thanks for the help

[danboid]

I wonder if it would be possible to change this text:

"Radium Compressor is the system compressor of the Radium suite. It is
provided in the form of stand-alone JACK application."

There is nothing called the "Radium suite". It's the system compressor in the
Radium music editor. The standalone version of the compressor was partly made
to give attention to the radium music editor, so when it has this wrong
description, it doesn't quite fulfill the original purpose it was intented for.

Done, but there's not much I can do about the original Deb ML posting of course.

[thetotalchaos]

If i decide to use any rt-kernel with Jessie i would prefer the latest linux-rt-3.14 from wheezy-backports.

My point is that (by far) besides all the efforts from Debian-Multimedia team, Debian Jessie still wouldn't be a self-sufficient audio distribution, which is really sad.

[asbak]

Is that really the case though?
My (admittedly patchy) experiences so far with Jessie has been quite positive.
An rt kernel isn't too difficult to install and at some point a dedicated one will presumably be made available anyway. The zillions of plugins and apps collected in KXStudio installs without much drama as do other apps.

Even the stock Jessie kernel does reasonably well with audio imo, at least as far as the interfaces I tested with are concerned.

At the end of the day it isn't an impossible task to compile a rt kernel anyway so what (apart from the current lack of an updated rt kernel) is the huge audio fail wrt Jessie?

[thetotalchaos]

Even the stock Jessie kernel does reasonably well with audio imo, at least as far as the interfaces I tested with are concerned.

You must have much faster hardware than me, or you didn't use a low count of frames/period in Jack.
Anyway a kernel without at least preemption enabled is unusable for me.
And normally a kernel compiling takes at least 6-7 hours at my system. So this will happen when i am "pushed to the corner".

There isn't any professionally tailored audio dedicated distribution, at this point in time, for the user to just install and use. What i mean:
falkTX is basically is carrying all Linux audio on his shoulders, Gmaq is living in the past, TangoStudio is currently not install-able, because it uses an old Mate repository, which is officially down. And UbuntuStudio is still UbuntuStudio. Don't get me wrong a power-user can have a well working system, but not the regular user, at least not in XI.2014
And that is what concerns me

[asbak]

Interesting comment, I am indeed running Jessie on a fast system but based on initial impressions I suspect it should also work well on lower end hardware. I'm evaluating it with both the stock kernel and the 3.2 rt-kernel from Wheezy. It's not 100% clear yet whether there is a significant gain (meaning less xruns, in my case) from using the rt-kernel vs the stock kernel. I imagine (could be mistaken?) that there's not likely to be an enormous performance gain to be made by using a later version rt-kernel although it will of course have more recent updates added to it.

KXStudio installs on Jessie without issue, I imagine that most other audio apps should compile & install too.

jackd settings are 48K, frames of 128 and Priority of 89 on all systems. Lower framerates also work but increase the likelihood of xruns so the small latency gain is not really worth it. 128 seems to be fast enough for live playing. PCI card performance is reasonable with regards to xruns, not perfect but it should be good enough for most purposes. Ditto with the USB interfaces. (Xrun performance may be slightly better with the USB interface in my case).

On another much slower system (HP N54L w. low power AMD Turion II 2.2Ghz) I have Mint 17 32Bit + lowlatency kernel + KXStudio + a USB audio interface and even on that performance was reasonable with apps like Guitarix and the Obxd synth. The CPU is pushed a lot harder but jackd doesn't xrun. I had the impression that at least with Mint, the 32Bit version xrunned a lot less than the 64Bit version.

Basically, I *think* the regular Joe can have an OK budget system which can do the basics right (based on my experiences with the N54L) but unfortunately it is a bit of a minefield trying to figure out how to get there. I guess what is needed is a better organised and more up to date system installation and hardware compatibility guide which covers general options such as selection of OS, 32Bit or 64Bit, tuning, compatible hardware etc. so people can install their own instead of being tied to a distribution which may or may not be maintained long term. I'd also be inclined to steer clear of Ubuntu & their increasing amounts of integrated spyware such as zeitgeist, geoclue and whoopsie.