Ardour

Ardour 6.9 released

Ardour 6.9 is now available. Despite previous announcements that there would be no further releases for older platforms, it once again seemed right to do a release before we take some big steps into the future. This version features some substantial changes to both plugin and playlist ("take") management, along with numerous bug fixes and improvements.

Download  

This release continues to include official builds for Apple M1 systems. They are not a part of the regular download system, but can be found on the nightly builds site.

Release notes for other older versions are linked in the list below.

Plugin Manager
  • Find it under the Window top-level menu
  • The Plugin Manager provides a complete list of plugins that were found on your system, and data about each plugin's scan results.
  • New standalone scanner applications for VST and AU plugins will scan your whole plugin collection without danger of crashing Ardour.
  • The new scanner dialog allows you to skip individual plugins without canceling the whole scan process. Or set the scanner to auto-timeout while you take a break, and come back later to re-scan those individual plugins that wanted some user input.
  • Sort and filter your plugins by name, brand, tags, or format.
  • Tell Ardour to Ignore troublesome plugins so we won't try to load them at all.
  • Ardour loads AU, VST2, VST3, and LV2 format plugins. Choose the format that works best for each plugin, and hide the ones you don't use (but might be used in some existing sessions).

Improvements
  • Playlist Management Substantial changes to playlist management include:
    • Global playlist actions like "New Playlist for rec-armed tracks" allow you to record a new take on all tracks that are record-armed, whether they are in a Group or not. You'll find these actions in the Track menu.
    • "Copy Playlist for All Tracks" will store the timeline state of your arrangement, edits and automation. You can later switch between them while leaving your static mixer and plugin settings intact.
    • Select a track and click "?" keyboard shortcut to open the Playlist Selector dialog. Click any playlist to listen to the alternative takes of that track, OR...
    • ...change the scope to "ALL Tracks" and you can switch all tracks that have a matching playlist to your selection: if you recorded a take of the drums and bass together, you can switch the drum and bass playlists together even if they aren't in a Group.
    • Create the perfect vocal or guitar comp: Create a new empty playlist and call it 'comp'. Then use the selector to switch between different takes and move the best take to your comp playlist. You can even have more than one comp playlist to compare with each other. And like the other playlist functions, you can edit multitracks with ease: by group, rec-armed, or ALL tracks.
    You can watch a video about these features in Mixbus (the behavior is identical there to Ardour).
  • Varispeed Changes
    • The GUI for the "shuttle control" has been modified to present a simpler, easier to understand interface.
    • Click on the "VS" button to enable/disable varispeed as well adjusting the varispeed settings. .
    • The VS button will blink when varispeed is enabled.
    • Varispeed settings are persistent, so you can revert to regular playback, then later re-enable varispeed to get back.
  • New GUI control allows blocking MIDI patch changes during session loading.
  • Preference items to enable/disable VST2 and/or VST3 support.
  • Add explicit actions for changing between stacked and overlaid region views, making this bindable (to a computer keyboard or MIDI).
  • LV2 plugins: add support for plugins with multiple Atom ports (e.g. Sfizz, the SFZ player)
  • Slip-contents editing now more easily accessible using Ctrl-Shift-drag (Cmd-Shift-drag on macOS) anywhere in a region. It is no longer necessary to place the mouse cursor near the edges of the region.
  • Fix drawing the red recording rectangle to honor latency compensation (region no longer visibly jump at rec-stop).

Bug Fixes
  • Splash screen management has been changed. On Linux, this may conflict with your window manager's behavior - if so, go to Edit > Preferences > Appearance > Quirks and try the "Show/Hide" setting.
  • Support for a Wine/windows build to run Windows VST plugins "natively" on Linux has been removed. ardour.org has never distributed these builds. There are plugin wrappers/bridges such as Yabridge that do a better job of making this possible.
  • Muted MIDI regions are now actually muted.
  • MIDI capture duration is correctly computed when loop recording.
  • MIDI capture alignment is now correctly implemented.
  • Loop recording working again after an unnoticed breakage.
  • Various fixes for recently added region markers during editing.
  • The "Escape" key now behaves identically while in internal editing modes as when in other mouse modes.
  • Prevent accidental addition of multiple markers at the same position.
  • In the Recorder tab, do not show input meters for control-only ports Faderport, Mackie, etc.
  • During a slip-contents drag, regions are now transparent so that you can align transients.
  • Fix Apple Coreaudio Source (used for MP3 import on macOS) -- was broken since 6.0

Control Surfaces
  • US2400: Fix direction of pan knob LEDs.
  • Mackie Control
    • Change combined meter to use a peak meter with falloff.
    • Reset surfaces once connected.
    • Correctly handle the Monitor section being removed.
    • Update the meters even when the transport is stopped.
    • Move meter deflection calc to a function.
    • Improved support for iCON QCon Pro X.
    • When reconnecting ports, don't give up on first failure.
    • Don't call port write directly since it bypasses active chk.
    • Improve debug trace output by skipping meter write output.
    • Hold the surfaces lock while resetting the master_surface.
    • Don't crash when the master is on the right.
    • Use selected device's info when building the Keys dialog.
    • Fix one off error in timecode display that broke spaces.
    • Use space as replacement for invalid characters on timecode display.
    • Fix logic in timecode display update.

Translation Updates
  • German.
  • Korean (New!).

Contributors

Robin Gareus, Ben Loftis, Paul Davis, Todd Naugle, William Light, Adam Sampson

Translators

Edgar Aichinger (German), JungHee Lee (Korean)

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