Week highlights: cool new features for GIMP, Inkscape, and Ardour in the works; new releases of Scribus and Bonsai BIM.
GIMP
The team is currently working on bugfixes for 3.0 and new features, and they are getting some useful contributions currently undergoing review:
- Overwrite mode for painting tools
- Vertical alignment for text layers
- Initial APNG loading support
- Extra options for the New Guide script
Inkscape
The team is preparing for the v1.4.2 release. Meanwhile, there are two notable patches under review:
- Animated GIF output
- On-canvas controls for offset and vertical orientation of the text on path.
This implementation is not complete yet and is not even in the development branch. Chances are, it will be part of v1.5/1.6.
Scribus 1.6.4
This is a bugfix update of Scribus, fixes are mainly for the importing and exporting of PDF files. See the announcement for details.
Blender Subtitle Editor
If you haven’t tried tin2tin’s subtitle editor addon for Blender, check it out. Most recently, it got faster automatic transcribing with Whisper. The addon is somewhat simplistic, but seems capable enough. Apart from automatic transcribing, it has importing/exporting (naturally), translations, line breaks, and more.
Bonsai 0.8.2
The new version of the BIM authoring addon for Blender comes with 654 new features and fixes. I don’t know how they manage it, but it’s impressive.
Here are some of the release highlights:
- Visualization of composite layered walls is now possible in both 3D and 2D (see the screenshot above)
- Blender 4.4 support has been added
- Drawing and snapping have been improved in a million ways
- Clicking on a face now displays its area estimation
- Zones, ports, and systems got UI polish
- The experimental cutting tool got a new bisect faces mode
- The addon got a workaround for loading TIN surfaces made with Revit 2025
See here for details. There’s also a video review by BIMvoice.
Ardour
Paul Davis published a post about the ongoing work and what’s likely coming in Ardour 9.0. Here’s what’s cooking:
- Various UI changes
- Multi-touch support on Windows and Linux
- Region effects
- Pianoroll windows
- Clip recording and editing in Cue (WIP for MIDI, audio editing could be a post-9.0 feature)
- Real-time analyzer, with code from Fons Adriaensens’s JAPA
All of the above items except UI changes are already in the main development branch. However, only the multi-touch support is more or less complete and even now Robin keeps adding some code. So expect a lot more polish. Also, for clip recording, Novation Launchpad surface code will need to be updated.
The UI changes are a bit of a tough cookie to crack. It’s likely that Ardour will inherit at least some of the changes you can see in Mixbus 11:
The two most important changes you are looking at here are 1) the restructuring of the toolbar and 2) the newly added bottom panel in the editor window that displays either plugin controls (track/bus header is selected) or the MIDI region editor (MIDI region is selected).
Overall, it’s a nice batch of changes. However, it comes with some changes that could be annoying for some users. For example, you can’t disable the navigation timeline in the toolbar anymore, and you can only see the varispeed control if you enable the secondary clock. Personally, I’d expect some level of cherry-picking to happen when the team start merging the changes .
Audacity
Martin Keary recently posted some screenshots of what native plugins are going to look like in Audacity 4.
I did some very quick testing of the latest Qt-based build from the main development branch. You can create a new project, import audio, play it back, and do things like trimming, cutting, and timestretching. However, it crashes a lot and still has bits of MuseScore all over the place.
ConvertWithMoss 12.2.x
Didn’t even know this project existed, but Jürgen Moßgraber has been working on this for several years already. It’s a converter between sample file formats, with support for NKI (Native Instruments Kontakt v1-v7), SFZ, DecentSampler, and more.
The latest few releases improved support for Kontakt, Yamaha YSFC, and Ableton ADV files.
Seems like a project I’d love to use to convert some sample libraries from NKI to SFZ or DS. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much luck building and running it on Linux, and the developer only ships a DEB file.
Maybe you’ll have more luck? Here is the code.
Artworks
Nautilus Chamber by Quentin Stipp, made with Blender and Photoshop:
Different Seasons (Autumn) by Reda Kan, made with Blender and Photoshop:
Fading Grace by Rene Gorecki, made with Blender, Photoshop, and Unreal Engine:
The Diesel Cat Pub - Part 1 by Nikita Gritsun, made with Blender and Photoshop:
The Node Tree by Einar Martinsen, made with Blender, Photoshop, and ZBrush:
Iceveil - Inside the Iceberg by Marvin Hillmann, made with Blender, Photoshop, 3DCoat, and Medium:
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://librearts.org/2025/04/week-recap-20-apr-2025/