FOSSPicks
IEM Plug-in Suite
The IEM in the name of this audio effects collection is an acronym for the Institute for Electronic Music and Acoustics. The IEM is a renowned research institute based in Austria, with a focus on acoustics, surround sound, and signal processing, and it's perhaps best known for being closely associated with Pure Data, the functional programming environment for audio synthesis and composition. There's even an IEM-flavored version of Pure Data built specially for its students and faculty, and the institute produces and sponsors a lot of experimental content, some of which is software released as open source – which is exactly what happened with this suite of amazing audio effects that come directly from the institute's current research and student projects.
The suite consists of 21 different effects. They all have a focus on acoustics, and in particular, something called "ambisonics," which is a specific surround-sound format. This is most evident in the greatest effect in the bundle, the GranularEncoder. It's a form of granular re-synthesizer, with the granular element being tiny fragments of audio pulled from its stereo inputs. The location of the grain defaults to the beginning of a recording with a duration of 1/4 of a second, but these values are easily modifiable either through the GUI, or through OSC remote automation, which is also true of any of the other plugins in the suite. Grains can be faded in and out, and mixed with the original signal, but the main processing comes from a large circle to represent a top-down view of a three-dimensional sphere. This is the 360-degree ambisonic sound stage, which you use to change where the grains emanate from within a three-dimensional environment: left, right, front, back, up, down, and any position in between. All of this is encoded as surround-sound ambisonics data, which works perfectly well with your plugin host, but will need to be decoded for the positional encoding to make sense in headphones. The included BinauralDecoder plugin is very good for this, even simulating the audio effects caused by that dense clump of mass between your ears.
The other effects deal with room simulation and reverberation. The RoomEncoder, for example, is the most computationally intensive plugin here because it generates over 200 virtual wall reflections for the audio you position within its virtual room. It sounds incredible, and unnaturally realistic when you map your current room coordinates and listening position to the plugin. The positional energy for all this audio processing can be viewed with the EnergyVisualizer plugin, which is a great way to see how your creations might sound in an environment capable of true ambisonics recreation, and there are equalizers, compressors, and even delays that can process your 3D audio even further. It all sounds incredible, and it's equally amazing that such high-quality processing is available as open source for your favorite Linux audio software for free. The output doesn't just have to be positional 3D audio either, because these effects are also a great way to add subtle ambiance to a podcast, or to reposition one or more acoustic recordings within a simulated live environment, regardless of whether you consider yourself an audio wizard or not. Which is surely something the Institute for Electronic Music and Acoustics would be proud of.
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Wii U Emulator
Cemu 2
There are dozens or even hundreds of open source console emulators for Linux, from GNU Pong to the thousands of arcade games emulated by MAME. But it's been the relatively recent development of various Nintendo emulators that have really impressed. Dolphin is doing an incredible job with both GameCube and Wii emulation, and it's remarkable how well Yuzu can already run Switch games. It helps that Nintendo's hardware is never cutting edge, and often a revision of its previous generation's technology, but it's still surprising how well games run on even modest hardware like the Steam Deck. Until recently, one piece of the Nintendo emulation stack was missing from Linux, and that was emulation of the massively underrated Wii U. The Wii U was the successor to the Wii, but it wasn't the success Nintendo hoped for. This was probably due to its large controller with an embedded screen, which made the whole system feel unnecessarily clunky when you still needed the console itself connected to a screen. But that didn't stop Nintendo making some amazing games for the unit, including definitive Zelda, Mario, Mario Kart, and Super Smash Bros. milestones.
If you own the originals, and are prepared to go through a somewhat convoluted extraction process, they can now all be played on Cemu, an emulator that until recently had been both Windows-only and closed source. The emulator has been around since 2015 and can already run many of the most popular games with excellent performance, but the popularity of the Steam Deck has prompted its developers to create a native port, despite the Windows version working well with Proton. The native Linux release still has some catching up to do, but it already runs well and is compatible with all the mods and graphics files of the original. If you're fortunate to have access to the original hardware and a decent games collection, it's become the best way to play them either on the go, or in higher resolutions and frame rates when your native Linux hardware is up for the job.
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