Articles

Yes, its time for the usual bug-fix-after-the-real-release. 2.4.1 primarily fixes two significant bugs in 2.4 (no undo after region dragging being the most important). But it also has a couple of new features and several other nice fixes and improvements, particularly for users of AudioUnit plugins on OS X. Read below for more ...

Well, its over a month later than expected, but Ardour 2.4 is finally here. A respectable list of new features, many small improvements and an important set of bug fixes make up the news for this one. Read more below ...

Dave “MIDI” Robillard writes: Hi all. Thought I’d make a little post on MIDI stuff so things appear alive to you weirdos who aren’t on IRC 24 hours a day. Just some random not-very-prepared screenshots.

An older shot showing multi-line controllers, and the editor controllers: Editor controls. On MIDI controller tracks (CC) the bar controllers can be used to record/touch, or twiddled in realtime to control MIDI apps/gear.

MIDI import was introduced yesterday (Importing MIDI is done with the same dialog as audio, though it doesn’t look appropriate yet..). Here’s some Mozart imported into Ardour from a (single, multi-track) Standard MIDI File: Mozart Import.

Read more below ….

To address some of the issues that surround using Ardour on OS X, there is now a new IRC channel, #ardour-osx at irc.freenode.net. Its where we will announce new test releases of the native verion, and where people can visit to seek help for problems that are specific to starting up/installing on OS X. More general ardour questions and issues still belong on the general #ardour channel. For those without IRC software (we recommend xchat, though colloquy on OS X is good too), visit the OS X channel or the regular channel via the mibbit web interface.

Another month has crept up on us, and the next release of Ardour is here. 2.3 includes major new features in the area of tempo management and feature analysis, dozen or so important-to-useful bug fixes, another dozen or so improvements, and also provisional LV2 support (provisional). Binary releases for OS X Intel and PPC will be announced on our OS X-focused IRC channel. We will make a more public release for OS X once we have AudioUnit GUIs working acceptably. Read more below ...

I hate to tease people when we haven't released the OS X native version yet, but I sometimes get so tired of people complaining about Ardour not supporting real plugins that I thought this screenshot might be interesting. OS X users - we promise to get this functionality into your hands just as soon as its ready to be used by almost all of you without too many annoying minor issues.

Jonathan Stowe wrote a Perl module to allow remote control of Ardour with Perl via OSC. At present, OSC control is limited to transport and per-track solo/mute/rec-enable operations. Hopefully with this module there to make testing and development of a remote control application easier, OSC control can be expanded in interesting ways.

We are getting closer and closer to being able to release a “native” OS X version of Ardour that will not require X11. There are still several substantive issues to be resolved, but a few bleeding edge users are currently evaluating the initial “All In One” package that includes JACK as well as Ardour (and will very soon include a set of recommended LADSPA plugins too). This has been made possible by the amazing work of the GTK-Quartz porting team, who managed to get GTK to run on a system that is really fundamentally different in several key ways from X11. Stay tuned for more news.