Ardour

Ardour 9.10 released

November 10th, 2026

For this release, we focused on a variety of quality of life improvements, particularly for details of the editing process. There were also a couple of new features, including audio waveform display (optionally) reflecting automation, and as usual a selection of random but important bug fixes.

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Audio Region update on gain envelope editing

Ardour can now update the waveform of audio regions as you drag the gain envelope nodes around:

Please note that this setting is disabled by default. You can toggle it in the Preferences window: Preferences > Appearance / Waveform > Apply region gain

There is also a new option that allows moving region's gain envelope along with contents of audio regions when slipping. This feature is disabled by default, too. You can find it on the Editor page in the Preferences window.

Region editing improvements

Several changes affect both audio and MIDI regions, while others are MIDI-specific.

First off, you can now drag automation nodes in multiple lanes simultaneously. That may come in handy when you have some automation dialed in already, and you need to slip contents in the region. So instead of dragging nodes in each lane one by one, you can just select all nodes in all lanes and drag them accordingly.

The next significant change is the introduction of middle-dragging for different types of objects: automation control points, lollipops, and notes. Middle-dragging locks the X position of the selected objects to prevent them from being shifted left/right on the timeline.

The Trim Front and Trim Back actions now work on hovered regions when the selection is empty.

The editor now allows to set the fade length to its minimum when edit point is outside selected region. This avoids having to be pixel-precise when removing a fade with a keyboard action.

MIDI editing improvements

There have been some MIDI-specific improvements as well.

You can now rubberband-select lollipops in the Grab and Edit mode and drag up and down, with both left-click and middle-click.

Middle-click to delete notes has been replaced with Shift+right-click. The same combination now applies to deleting automation control points.

There have been other smaller improvements:

  • Simplify note names rendering and honor ui scaling in font size.
  • Apply ui scaling to the width of the keyboard in a track/pianoroll header.
  • When quantizing in the main editor, use a quantize dialog if the MidiInspector is not visible.
  • Honor select-last-drawn-note-only setting when drawing percussive notes.
  • Add missing context menus: Quantize, Legatize, Transform, Remove Overlap.
  • Show lollipops regardless of their corresponding note being in the region view's visible range.
  • Support adding lollipops to existing note selection with Ctrl+drag.
  • Quantize region operation works on entire region, not current note selection.
  • You can now add a point on a click in a MIDI region automation line while in Edit mode.
  • Newly added points in MIDI region automation are now selected automatically.

Other Changes

macOS rendering revamp

Following some investigations by Lina (of Asahi Linux fame), we have altered all GUI rendering on macOS to use an intermediate off-screen image surface. This appears to improve performance quite noticeably. In tandem with this, we removed the option of directly rendering using OpenGL.

There are still a couple of bugs with redrawing the GUI on some versions of macOS with some hardware configurations, and we continue to work on tracking these down and fixing them.

WallClock transport master

There is now a timecode master that syncs to the system clock (aka wall-clock). This allows Ardour's own generated LTC or MTC to be synced to the wall clock, and also run or record a show timestamped with the current time of day.

Control surface improvements

  • Expand OSC surface with convenient one-stop record methods.
  • Fix crash when closing Mackie surface from GUI.
  • Various improvements in Steinberg CC121 surface support.
  • Banking with Mackie Control surfaces now works as intended.

Sequential track naming and re-naming

You can now easily rename tracks and buses using a pattern. Select the first track that needs to be renamed, click on its name in the track header, and type "stem 1..8", then press Enter. That track and 7 subsequent ones will be renamed to "Stem 1", "Stem 2", "Stem 3", etc.

Including ".." is the trigger for this behavior, and we support sequences like "A..Z", "l..r", and "1..999". The idea comes from IKIS, the console OS by Harrison.

This new featrure also works when creating new tracks or busses, in which case the upper number is auto-adjusted to match the number of created tracks or busses.

Exporting improvements

  • Use logscale/rectified preferences for the export report.
  • Allow changing the default export format (no UI).

Plugin/improvements

  • VST3 GUI resizing on Linux/X11 improved/fixed.
  • VST3: send the correct value and timestamp for parameter changes at the end of a processing block (fixes some problems in some VST3 plugins such as FabFilter).

MIDI Clock improvements

  • Notable imporovements in transport locking to incoming MIDI clock.
  • Ardour now correctly sends MIDI Clock position information when looping.

Lua Scripting

  • Expose Lua method to look up route-groups.
  • Add Lua bindings for transient Strips/Sources/Regions.
  • Allow to modify GUI selection via Lua.
  • Include RouteProcessorChange signal as trigger to run scripts.

Right-clicking and context menus

  • canvas: popup context menu on button press instead of release.
  • canvas: allow activate-on-release interaction with context menus.
  • tracks/busses: popup rec-enable context menu on button press instead of release.
  • select note when right-clicking a lollipop.
  • region automation: add a point on click in MouseContent mode (as in automation tracks).
  • select note when right-clicking on a lollipop.
  • add note context menu to lollipop items.

Fixes

  • MIDI chase fixed to avoid "ghost notes" when locating along the timeline (under very specific conditions).
  • Cue recording with more than one channel now works correctly.
  • FIX MMA/GM midnam. Drums are on bank 128.
  • Use bank specified in MIDNAM when using a MIDI channel for the first time.
  • Fix automation playback when looping.
  • Nudging automation control points now works better.
  • Save and restore key enforcement policy settings for MIDI tracks.

Updated Translations

Czech, Polish, Russian, Swedish.

Contributors

Aleksandr Prokudin, Arendil Plummer, DevJac, Dmitry Rantovov, Florea Andrei, Giang Nguyen, Hoger Dehnhardt, Hoshino Lina, jean-emmanuel Doucet, Jeremy Zemgulys, Jonatan Nyberg, Krzysztof Gajdemski, Martin Vlk, Paul Davis, Robin Gareus, Todd Naugle, Vineet Tiwari, xris1658.

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