LMMS Progress Report: October 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

October was a productive month for LMMS development. In total 13 PRs were merged.

• SlewDistortion effect (#7641)
  Slew Distortion is a new 2-band slew rate limiter and distortion plugin by LostRobotMusic featuring a GUI designed by thismoon. It fills a gap left by LMMS's current offering of built-in distortion plugins by providing a high quality, fully-featured, and highly optimized distortion effect which is broadly useful. Be sure to check it out, and click the "?" icon in the bottom right corner of the UI for built-in documentation if you're unsure of how to use it.

• Improve search behavior in the file browser (#7679)
  sakertooth made several improvements to the search feature in the file browser aimed at improving the user experience.

• Fix audio resampling functionality (#7858)
  This contribution from sakertooth fixes some improper usages of the libsamplerate library and removes some unnecessary and expensive memory allocations in the process methods of several plugins. It also removes the interpolation mode export option which was problematic due to its potential to conflict with the interpolation mode set by instruments.

Other changes:

• Use length-bounded string/memory functions (#7709)
• Make portsmf a git submodule (#7755)
• Use system cursors instead of embedded raster images where possible (#7838)
• AppImage: Un-pollute /usr/lib (#8053)
• Remove custom winebuild task (#8077)
• Fix several typos (#8090)
• Update macOS runner image and XCode version (#8092)
• Added opening samples in SlicerT from the file browser (#8100)
• PathUtil: Serialization and Formatting (#8103)
• Remove fastMemCpy() from RemotePluginBase (#8114)

In progress

In October, 26 new PRs were opened, of which 6 have already been merged into master. The following is a list of both new and old PRs which were worked on in the past month.

Nearing completion

• Add Qt6 Support (#7339)
  In October, this PR received some final changes and testing.

• Improve lmms::fastRand() and use it instead of std::rand() (#7741)

• Fix microtuning warning text widening instruments (#7805)
  rubiefawn fixed a couple visual bugs that were introduced after instruments like SlicerT were made resizable earlier this year.

• Fix knob linking / refactor linking (#7883)
  In this PR, szeli1 reworked the way knob linking works, simplifying the implementation and fixing a crash. It is now awaiting a final review before it is merged.

In the works

• Detachable windows (#3532, #8089, #8096)
  SpomJ returned to working on this PR, and over the past few weeks has spent a lot of time refactoring and simplifying the design. Some bugs were also fixed as a result, and it now appears that finally after the eight and a half years that the PR has been open, the finish line is now in sight.

• Pitch Bending Directly in the Piano Roll (#7759)
  This pitch bending quality-of-life update by regulus79 is functionally complete, but needs a code review and some more testing.

• Refactor and improve Tap Tempo (#8098)
  sakertooth is improving the accuracy and usability of the Tap Tempo tool.

• New AppImages (#8105)
  While there is no PR for this yet, tresf and Samueru-sama have been experimenting with AnyLinux AppImages - a new type of AppImage based on sharun and the uruntime AppImage runtime. There are numerous benefits to AnyLinux AppImages, including smaller file size and faster startup times, but most importantly, the AppImages produced this way are much more portable. There is no dependency on the system's glibc nor is FUSE required, meaning LMMS could run on non-glibc distros such as Alpine Linux and older Linux distros with an incompatible glibc version. A demo is available here. There are still some issues that need to be addressed, but we hope to resolve them soon.

Other PRs

These PRs were also created or worked on during October.

• Only show Piano Roll when editable (#6295)
• Add missing keyboard shortcuts (#6768)
• Add a cache for samples (#7497)
• Remove export file devices in favor of sndfile wrapper (#8069)
• Refactored SF2 to SoundFont (#8072)
• Add experimental AudioRecorder plugin (#8074)
• Drag and drop from external applications v3 (#8075)
• Fix for LFO Controller desync on changing play position with the mouse (#8081)
• Add simple versioned autosave (#8084)
• Implementing actions 3 (#8085)
• UI: Good space for two LFO controllers (#8088)
• Fix MixerChannel effect chain initialization with null parent (#8095)
• Refactor and improve Tap Tempo (#8098)
• Make automation nodes return outValue to handle discrete jumps without delay (#8104)
• Tool to sync translations with Transifex (#8111)

Goals for November

We're continuing to work towards the goal of releasing a new alpha version. It's taking longer than we want it to, 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

• Jan125 mitigated a file path serialization issue in #8103.

Administrative changes

• StakeoutPunch stepped down from the Discord Admin role. Thanks for all the work you did, Kev!
• bratpeki was promoted to Admin on Discord.
• headquarter8302 became the maintainer of the newly open-sourced "LoMMuS" Discord bot, taking over the responsibility from StakeoutPunch.
• Jan125 (Thedinosaur on Discord) was promoted to the Developer role on Discord.
• Monospace-V (monospace2980 on Discord) is now a Discord Moderator.
• thedogbup on Discord was also promoted to the Moderator role.

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 November!