"Planet apps"

Although we did a couple of hot-fix releases, it’s been quite a long time since the last planned release of Ardour. We’ve also not been responding particularly effectively to bug reports and user suggestions. This has all been because of a mountain of work going on to get 9.0 ready for release, and I wanted to just outline what we think will be in that version so that people can understand the relative “silence” from the project.

There’s still a lot of work to do before we release 9.0, but the following is a list of things we think will likely be there Some of them may not quite make it, and its possible there might be other things added.

GUI Rearrangement

We can’t say much about this yet, because the work here is not really finished. The main elements of this are that every page (editor/mixer/cue/record) in the GUI now has 5 areas: the transport bar (now always visible), the “main area” (e.g. the editor), 2 sidebars (left and right) and a lower pane that can show a variety of things. You’ll see more about this as we get closer to a 9.0 pre-release.

Multi-touch GUI

On Linux and Windows, Ardour now supports multi-touch interaction as provided by the operating system. This may come for macOS eventually, but the way multi-touch works there is significantly different and will need more work.

Pianoroll window(s)

Double click on a MIDI region to edit it in its own dedicated window, or in a pane at the bottom of the main window. Editing in that window will work almost identically to the way it does in the main timeline, but without the distractions of the timeline. You can also see MIDI automation (velocity, CC parameters etc.) overlaid (or not).

MIDI Cue Editing

The Cue page now allows direct editing of the contents of MIDI cues (“clips” for Live & Bitwig users).

Audio Cue Editing

This may or may not make it in time for 9.0. If it does, you’ll be able to edit audio cues directly on the cue page, setting loop points and more.

Cue Recording

You can now record directly into cue slots, making Ardour a “looper” in the same sense that Live, Bitwig and several other contemporary DAWs are. You can pre-specificy the recording duration (e.g. “Record 4 bars”) or you can record until you think you’re done. Whatever you recorded will start playing at the next quantization point (e.g. bar/beat).

Region FX

Is the answer to the question “how do I add some delay to just this part of my vocal?” Similar to region gain it allows to apply any plugin a given audio region only. The effect and its automation remains with the region, even when it is moved around on the timeline. While the same result can be achieved with channels-strip plugins in the mixer (using bypass automation) applying effects directly to regions on the timeline is convenient for many workflows. The given effect is applied offline, when reading the region from disk and does not add any additional DSP load.

Real Time Analyzer

A dedicated perceptual analyzer window is the works which allows one to visualize the live spectrum of multiple signals. A key feature is that one can overlay individual sources (tracks and busses) on top of each other. This allows one to see which track contributes a given of frequency range to the overall mix, find conflicting ranges or holes in the spectrum.

Faster GUI drawing on macOS

Without telling anyone, Apple have subtly changed the way their drawing APIs work for graphical applications over the last 5-10 years. The result has been that a naive graphical app would end up redrawing its entire window even if only a few pixels needed updating. We’re far from the only application to be affected by this. In Ardour 9.0 the GUI drawing speed will be significantly faster, at least on very dense pages like the mixer.

Bug Fixes

We’ve accumulated a long list of bug fixes during the significant reorganization that has taken place for 9.0. We’ll document them once we get to the release.

45 posts - 25 participants

Read full topic

Ardour 8.12 is now available.

This is a hot-fix release, intended to fix two issues.

1. the bug fix introduced in 8.11 turned out to be incorrect, and broke several other things in subtle ways. 8.12 is a completely new approach to fixing the problem with region lengths after certain operations could cause sessions to be unloadable.

2. for several previous versions, the packaging of translation files on macOS was broken. This has been corrected, and translations should work again on that platform.

Note that 8.12 will also correctly load sessions suffering from the problem referred to in #1 above.

All users of earlier 8.x versions should plan to upgrade as soon as possible. Apologies for the problems the bug in #1 has caused people - we hope this is a permanent, correct fix this time.

Download  

6 posts - 6 participants

Read full topic

(This post is geekery of, if not the highest order, then fairly high order. It doesn’t contain any useful information about Ardour itself, but might be interesting for … people interested in such arcana)

The packaging issue that broke translations in our initial release of 8.11 for Linux and macOS was almost a cool bug. I thought I’d quickly describe it here for the geeks among us.

The problem came from a combination of two things: an actual error in our packaging scripts, and the subtle and generally not-considered behavior of the Unix find command.

Our wonderful translators work on files that end in “.po” and connect the original english strings in the source code with their translated versions. During the build process, tools from the GNU translation system are used to convert the .po files into .mo files (aka “message catalogs”), which contain the same information but in a binary format that can be more efficiently used by the program when it is running.

During packaging Ardour for distributions, we copy all the .mo files into a new location in preparation for “bundling” (e.g. as a DMG file for macOS or a .run file for Linux). The copy also requires a renaming, because the organization of the message catalogs for use by the program needs to be fairly different than the way they are organized in our source code.

So the first bug was that we used find(1) to locate all the .mo files and copy/rename them. We start in several locations within the source code, including the directory that holds the GUI source code (gtk2_ardour). The files we’re looking for are in the po folder, and we use find because we don’t want to hard-code the languages that have translations. However, it turns out that there are another set of message catalogs associated with the RedHat/Fedora “appdata” system, and these files not only also are somewhere under gtk2_ardour but also, because of the way the translation software works, they have the same name.

So, if find finds the “real” message catalogs first and copies/renames them during packaging, and then later finds the “appdata” message catalogs, the latter will overwrite the former in the package being built. This is a bug - the appdata message catalogs are placed in the packaging at a separate step of the process, and we should not have been using a command that was so generic. This was easy to fix (and has been).

But wait a minute … didn’t this work just fine for Ardour 8.10 and other releases? It did. How could that be? Well, recall that at the beginning of the previous paragraph I wrote “if find …”. It turns out that that the order in which find will find files, unless told otherwise, depends on the filesystem the files are located on. Consequently, if you use two different types of filesystem (e.g. on Linux the ext4 or xfs filesystems), find may very well return files in a different order on each.

However, it does deeper than this. Certain directory operations can also cause the filesystem to change its state in a way that will change the order in which find finds files. It turns out that this had happened within the build systems we use for macOS and Linux. At the time we released 8.10, find would locate the (unintended) appdata message catalogs first, copy/rename them into the package and then later repeat this for the real message catalaogs. Result? The package has the correct translation files and everything works. When we released 8.11, the ordering had changed, and the real message catalogs were found first, and then overwritten by the “appdata” ones. Result – translations do not work.

I thought this was an example of a fairly cool and unusual category of bug. There was an error in our packaging scripts - we used an unnecessarily generic command to find message catalogs that needed installing, which found files it should not have. But this mistake by itself did not matter on systems where the unintended files were found first. It only caused problems when the unintended files were found second.

This is not a perfect example of what programmers called “Abstraction Leakage”, but it’s not a bad one. We generally like to think of filesystems as things where the details of their internal organization do not really matter, and for the most part that is possible. But combine the fact that their internal organization does affect the order that a program like find will list files in, and the bug in our packaging script, and all of a sudden the internal details of how filesystems work becomes a thing we have to think about.

3 posts - 3 participants

Read full topic

Ardour 8.11 is a hotfix release that contains a fix for a critical workflow-blocking bug. All users of 8.10 and all Linux distributions should upgrade to 8.11 as soon as possible.

The bug occurs whenever the user is working on a session using musical time as the default time domain (Session > Properties > Misc). If they carry out any operation that causes Ardour to write a modified copy of existing audio data to a new file (such as timestretching, pitch-shifting or reversing), there is a very high probability that they will be unable to reopen to the session in the future. Such sessions can be recovered manually with a text editor, but this is not an acceptable pattern for our users.

8.11 includes a fix for one other crashing bug. This bug only affected people using meters not denominated in quarter notes (crotchets) (e.g. 6/8 or 5/8). Adding BBT markers in such sessions would cause a crash soon after.

Download

28 posts - 11 participants

Read full topic

Earlier today I have updated the soundfont that is used by Ardour’s General MIDI Synth.

The upside is that some voices now sound better, the downside is that it existing sessions may sound different. If you have an ear to lend please test (it will be shipped with Ardour 9, once that’s ready):

–

Kudos to Chris Collins for creating and maintaining the soundfont that we use. He also published a video showcasing some highlights of the long list of changes (previously gmsynth.lv2 used v1.52):

https://www.youtube.com/embed/AtXvMz22y-M

3 posts - 3 participants

Read full topic

For those who build ardour from source, please read:

git/master is now considered an unstable pre-release branch. The “pianorule” branch has been merged, and will cause significant breakage for a while yet.

master has been tagged 9.0-pre0 which will (a) cause a major version switch (b) will generally display the pre-release warning dialog every time unless you grep the source code to find the name of the file to create to disable it.

If you need to build an earlier version of Ardour from a git repository, please use git checkout VERSION first to avoid building this unstable master branch.

We will be working over the next few months to get this into shape for a 9.0 release with several notable new features (region FX, clip recording and clip editing among them).

23 posts - 10 participants

Read full topic

Ardour 8.10 is now available for Linux, Windows and macOS. As with the last several releases, 8.9 turned out to have at least a couple of new major issues that required a hot-fix. We believe that we have corrected issues with performance caused by scheduling of disk input/output threads (these problems tended to be system dependent, but were very real on systems where they occured). Importing SMF (MIDI) via drag-n-drop now uses the file name once again. Content-slipping a region correctly causes an update of the playback buffers so you can hear the result as expected.

In addition to those hot-fixes, 8.10 sees small updates to all our non-default color themes, a new MIDI binding map for the M-Audio Axiom 49 MkII and a new Lua script to duplicate regions on the grid.

This is intended to be the last release of the 8.x series. Our git repository is now at 9.0-pre0, and should no longer be considered stable or usable for production work now that it contains what was the “pianorule” branch. Over the next few months, we will be working hard to get this into shape for a 9.0 release with several notable new features.

Download as usual with the full release notes (for 8.7 - 8.10) at the normal place.

27 posts - 12 participants

Read full topic

Ardour 8.8 turned out to have a couple of major issues. Many users experienced crashes at random times that were caused by a subtle change in how waveforms were drawn, introduced in 8.8. It also turned out that MIDI notes immediately at the start of playback were ignored.

Both of these have been fixed (and also the nightly website has been restored to proper functioning), and so 8.9 is now released and available. You can download it as usual.

We apologize for the lapse in quality control that led to these mistakes in the 8.8 release.

16 posts - 10 participants

Read full topic

Hey, Paul here. I’ve become a little concerned that the public impression of Ardour recently has been dominated by cases of entirely valid bug reports that go unnoticed and unresolved. Someone who is not quite connected to our development process might understandably get the sense that we’ve stopped working on the software.

This is absolutely not the case. Instead, what has been going on is that for the last several months, both myself and @x42 have been involved in work that has no immediate payoff for Ardour but we believe has long term significance. This has been going on in several development “branches”, and below I’ll go over these branches and what we’re up to:

1. “Pianorule” : this branch contains a massive refactoring and rearrangement of code so that we can implement MIDI editing anywhere we feel like it, without duplicating code. This is primarily focused on providing a MIDI editor for the cue (“clip”) page, but may later make it feasible to add a standalone “piano roll editor”. This branch is currently stuck because the changes have exposed that the (hidden) assumption that the left edge of the editor track canvas is zero on the timeline has turned into a much more pervasive part of our code than was ever intended.

2. “cliprec” : this branch is rather young but is a test bed for ideas about how to do clip recording in Ardour. This is surprisingly hard to do correctly, mostly because of assumptions and decisions that go back to the early 2000s. We have some good ideas though, and I’m optimistic that the experiments going on will land successfully.

3. a “new” DAW focused on front-of-house operations : this is where @paul has been focused for much of the last month, and is a resuscitation of the ideas behind Waves Tracks Live, a commercial GPL’ed product from about 2015 that was based on Ardour. There is a vague idea that this will become an additional DAW available from both ardour.org and also from other commercial partners. The main idea for WTL is that is a “front-of-house” recording tool for live sound engineers. It has no plugin support, no MIDI support, and is massively simpler to use than Ardour. It also has a clever trick to help with so-called virtual soundchecks, where you use a recording of a previous live gig to do most of the work for a soundcheck at the current one.

4. “mode-clamping” : this is where experiments with adding ideas orbiting the concept of “this thing has a scale” are happening. This is much more complex than most people imagine when they voice their desire to “tell Ardour what scale I’m using”. Lots and lots of music from all over the world doesn’t work with scales in a simplistic way (even a lot of western pop). Currently the most promising idea is a heirarchy of objects that can each have their own scale, starting at the session level and going all the way down to individual regions. If a scale is not assigned, an object inherits one from its parent (ultimately the session).

5. “region-fx” : @x42 has been busy with adding per-region plugins in this branch, and it is currently being tested/evaluated by some of our early beta-testers.

On top of all this, both myself and @x42 were quite involved in the work done on Ardour to provide support for Dolby Atmos now present in Harrison Mixbus 10. Sadly because Atmos is proprietary technology, Ardour itself cannot use this work at present. Nevertheless, we designed things so that should somebody create something broadly equivalent that is GPL compatible, it would be relatively easy to make it work with Ardour.

So, that’s what’s going on in the background. All this stuff does tend to mean that most new bug reports are not being attended to, and many already-known bugs too. Obviously if we had a larger development group, we could be doing both types of things, but we don’t, and so we aren’t. I’m not offering to change what we do, but let us know what you think of this prioritization/allocation of resources.

30 posts - 19 participants

Read full topic

Ardour 8.6 has been released. This is a hotfix release for 8.5, primarily to fix a drawing bug that was not noticed/fixed before 8.5 was released. It also comes with a fix for a crashing bug that can occur when JACK2 is being used.

In all other ways, 8.6 is equivalent to 8.5, but 8.5 should be considered “blacklisted” - we don’t want anyone to have to deal with the drawing issue.

Full release notes (for 8.5 and 8.6) over here as usual.

ADDENDUM: turns out we introduced a bug that ONLY affects macOS Catalina on Intel hardware. The downloads for macOS intel have been updated to include the fix for Catalina. No other changes were made.

32 posts - 14 participants

Read full topic

Ardour 8.5 is available now for Linux, Windows, and macOS. This is another “small” release without major new features, largely because our two lead developers continue to be busy with things linked to future releases.

However, 8.5 does see a fix for a problem in 8.4 that affected many Linux users (a crash whenever a file selection dialog was opened, triggered by the presence of certain icon files on their version of Linux).

Full release notes over here as usual.

10 posts - 6 participants

Read full topic

Ardour 8.4 is available now for Linux, Windows, and macOS. Nothing particularly significant in this release, because our two lead developers have been busy with things linked to future releases. (note: there was no 8.3 release due to a critical bug discovered after tagging 8.3).

From a project-level perspective, perhaps the most important change is that we have moved the source code of our GUI toolkit (GTK v2) into the Ardour source tree. This has no impact whatsoever on people using the builds provided at ardour.org.

However, this version of GTK is about to be deprecated by a number of Linux distributions, and without this change it will become more difficult for both individual users and Linux package maintainers to continue building Ardour. This also leaves us free to (slowly) strip down aspects of the toolkit that we do not use, and potentially modify it as needed in the future. It also means that even the distribution builds of Ardour for Linux will contain our patches to GTK, which has historically not been the case.

Meanwhile, we now have beta-level AAF import, some new MIDI device maps, a new color theme, a stack of UX/UI tweaks and several fixes for crashing and workflow bugs.

Full release notes over here as usual.

27 posts - 14 participants

Read full topic

Ardour 8.2 is now available. Nothing incredibly dramatic for this release, but it completes our support for all current Novation LaunchPad devices (as well as the new SSL UF8 surface) and includes the usual collection of bug fixes, small new features and quality of life improvements.

Full release notes and download as usual.

16 posts - 10 participants

Read full topic

Recently at the Ubuntu Summit. 50 mins 50 features. Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/PT8TkvwsgUE

PS. I should have taken a leaf out of Paul Simon’s book and ran with only 5

Slides are available from Ubuntu Summit 2023 (3-5 November 2023): 50 things you did not know you could do with Ardour · Canonical / Ubuntu Events (Indico)

40 posts - 23 participants

Read full topic

Hot on the heels of 8.0, we are happy to bring you a mostly-hotfixes 8.1 release. There’s a couple of tasty new features also. The full notes for 8.0 and 8.1 are in the usual place, with the new stuff & fixes for 8.1 also listed below.

Download as usual.

• MIDI port names for the Novation Launchpad Pro fixed, and believed to work on all platforms, and with all versions of ALSA on Linux. Earlier versions would fail to connect to the device in most cases.
• Varispeed dialog now allows control in percentage units in addition to semitones & cents. The shuttle control also now remains in sync with the actual transport speed.
• Fix an issue where multichannel tracks would play in mono (#9483).
• Prevent time domain (music/audio) confusion when trimming audio & MIDI regions.
• When drawing freehand velocity curves, if any MIDI notes are selected, only those notes will be modified. This is extremely useful for editing drum tracks.
• Fix selection logic when middle-clicking on notes in a MIDI track header keyboard. Middle click selects just that note-number. Ctrl/Cmd-middle-click now toggles the selection status of that note number. Shift-middle-click extends the selected note numbers.
• Fix duplicate close-session dialog on macOS.
• Fix a missing label in the insert time dialog.
• Fix a deadlock ("program freeze") when adjusting a region fade.
• Allow for bounces with specific source (file) and region names.
• Include track name when consolidating ranges.
• Fix potential for duplicated MIDI events with certain signal routing.
• Prevent crash with certain oddly-behaved VST3 plugins' response to being asked "do you have an editor?"
• Add MIDNAM file for Moog Subsequent 37.
• Remove some cruft from build system scripts.
• Build system tweak to accomodate newer versions of kissfft.

38 posts - 12 participants

Read full topic

We’ve finished an initial draft of a “roadmap” for future Ardour development. You can read it here and comment on it below, if you feel like it. Please read the introduction to understand what the document is and isn’t.

33 posts - 21 participants

Read full topic

Ardour 8.0 is available now for Linux, Windows, and macOS, including the latest release of macOS, Sonoma. Along with the usual set of important and not-so-important bug fixes, Ardour 8.0 brings users substantial quality of life benefits:

• “Quick groups” - most mix-related controls now operate on all the selected tracks & busses
• Manage sections of a song with arrangement markers. Define your verses, chorus, and bridge. Then rearrange or copy them as you wish.
• Create persistent region groups in the editor window, to make multi-region editing easier.
• Edit velocity easily on a dedicated automation lane whether it’s a single note or a chord.
• Draw automation freely for any controller or press Control (Command) key to enable line-drawing mode. You can also combine free and line segments as you draw just by pressing and releasing the Ctrl/Cmd key.
• Fit the tempo map to a human performance, with a new dedicated tool.
• If (e.g. drum) note names are available for a plugin instrument or external device (via a MIDNAM file), see those names in the all-new MIDI track header.
• Use Novation Launchpad Pro in DAW/Session mode (along with the standalone Sequencer, Note and Chord modes).
• Create new interesting progressions with arpeggiator plugins.

Some people will no doubt laugh at a few these “new features”, given that they’ve been in some other DAWs for 20 years or more. That’s OK — we laugh too when we see other DAWs finally adding things that Ardour could do in 2005.

As usual, full release notes are over here and you can download from here.

50 posts - 32 participants

Read full topic

We’re now about a week away from the release of Ardour 8.0. We are in a total string freeze (where we guarantee not to change any translatable text at all before release). It’s probably a good time for the translation team(s) to start working on the update for 8.0.

Currently Ardour translations for Czech, German, Greek, Spanish, UK English, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portugese (Brazilian and Portugese versions), Russian, Swedish and Chinese. If you’d like to add another language, you can find the instructions for creating (and maintaining) translations here:

If you’re an existing translator for one of the above languages, please try to find the time to go through the update process as soon as possible. Your work is much appreciated, and we’d like to have as many languages updated as possible before the 8.0 release.

10 posts - 7 participants

Read full topic