LMMS Progress Report: September 2025

Welcome back to our monthly series of LMMS Progress Reports!

If you missed last month's report, you can find it here.

Nightly News

September was unfortunately a slow month for development. In total just 4 PRs were merged.

  • Lower the macOS minimum deployment target (#8004)
    tresf lowered the minimum deployment target for our macOS builds, allowing LMMS to run on versions as low as 11.0 (Big Sur) on Apple Silicon and 10.13 (High Sierra) on Intel. Prior to this, LMMS was only usable on 14.0 (Sonoma) or higher on Apple Silicon and 13.0 (Ventura) or higher on Intel.

  • Glue all notes if none are selected (#8018)
    allejok96 fixed a minor inconsistency in how the Piano Roll's glue action worked compared to other actions by allowing usage of the glue action even if no notes are selected.

  • More VST fixes (#8051)
    This PR by messmerd fixes a regression from July which broke certain VSTs, most notably Linux Studio Plugins (LSP).

  • Logarithmic tempo sync knobs and bars (#8058)
    Unlike regular knobs, tempo sync knobs and bars lacked the ability to switch between linear and logarithmic scaling. This was unintentional, and now thanks to crystalreef22 this oversight is fixed.

In progress

In the past month, 7 new PRs were opened, of which 2 have already been merged. The following is a list of both new and old PRs which were worked on in the past month.

Nearing completion

  • Refactor PortAudio backend (#7444)
    sakertooth returned to working on this PR and has rewritten or cleaned up various parts of the code. It's again ready for testing.

  • Remove the FIFO thread (#7568)
    This PR by sakertooth is in need of review and testing but is otherwise finished.

  • Improve search behavior in the file browser (#7679)
    Another PR by sakertooth, this time bringing several behavioral improvements to the search feature in the file browser. It's also awaiting a code review and final testing.

  • AppImage: Un-pollute /usr/lib (#8053)
    No functional changes should result from this PR by tresf, but it removes some AppImage sins committed earlier this year during the transition to linuxdeploy.

In the works

  • Multi-channel plugins (#7459)
    The auto-quit feature for effects has been fixed, but since it was a significant amount of work and is largely tangential to the focus of the rest of the PR, it has been moved to its own separate PR (#8070).

  • Fix audio resampling functionality (#7858)
    sakertooth isn't entirely satisfied with the resampler's design, but it is functionally complete.

  • Auto-quit rework (#8070)
    messmerd reworked the auto-quit feature of effects by keeping track of which track channels are currently silent as audio flows through the effects chain, then using that information to know when to put plugins to sleep or wake them up. This new implementation more closely follows how auto-quit is supposed to function by only waking individual plugins which have non-silent input rather than waking all plugins at once whenever a note is played. This is desirable for the multi-channel plugins PR (#7459) and future audio routing.

Other PRs

These PRs were also created or worked on during September.

  • Use length-bounded string/memory functions (#7709)
  • Replace uses of std::rand() with lmms:fastRand() (#7741)
  • Fixed translations, to be uploaded to Transifex (#8010)
  • Optimize cloning steps in Pattern Clips (#8042)
  • Hitting Home in the Song-Editor or PianoRoll-Editor resets Time Display (#8052)
  • Revert to older reSID emulator version (#8062)
  • Remove export file devices in favor of sndfile wrapper (#8069)

Goals for October

We're continuing to work towards the goal of releasing a new alpha version. It's taking longer than we'd like, but once it's released, we hope to establish a more frequent release cadence. We will be concentrating on the remaining 1.3-alpha.2 milestone issues this month. Thank you for your patience.

New contributors

  • crystalreef22 added logarithmic scaling support to tempo sync knobs and bars in #8058.

Closing thoughts

Thanks for reading! We have a lot of work ahead of us, but if you'd like to contribute to LMMS's development, it could go faster. Whether you're a developer or a tester, it all helps!

If you have any questions or suggestions, please let us know below or on our Discord.

Have a great October!