Ardour 3.2 released - Video comes to Ardour

Über-developer Robin Gareus has worked for a couple of years to add video support to Ardour, and with this release, we are pleased to finally enable it. In addition there are a couple of new features (including the ability to chain MIDI processing plugins) and the usual assorted list of bug fixes.

As usual, you can fetch the update from the download page.

Video Support

The integration of a video timeline and video monitoring into Ardour allows for convenient audio mixing and editing to video (i.e. soundtracks, music videos, TV post production etc.)

The new functionality allows users to:

  • Import a single video and optionally extract the soundtrack from it.
  • Provide a Video-monitor window, or full-screen display, of the imported video in sync with any of the available ardour timecode sources.
  • Display a frame-by-frame (thumbnail) timeline of the video.
  • Time-offset the video.
  • Lock audio-regions to the video: Move audio-regions with the video at video-frame granularity.
  • Export the video, cut start/end, add blank frames and/or mux it with the soundtrack of the current-session.

Furthermore, the setup is modular and can be configured in different ways, including:

  • One machine: all video decoding, video monitoring and Ardour audio
  • Two machines: separate video-monitor and Ardour
  • Three machines: separate video-server (for timeline decoding and file-archive), dedicated video-monitor and Ardour

Video support in Ardour does not:

  • allow for more than one video to be loaded at a time.
  • provide video editing capabilities

Other New Features and UI Changes

  • chain together LV2 plugins that accept and output MIDI data
  • OSC access to send gain parameters (via /ardour/route/send/gainabs rid sid gain and /ardour/route/send/gaindb rid sid gaindB)
  • window management (layering and related issues) overhauled to work better on both platforms and with more window managers
  • horizontal scrolling of the timeline is now done with shift-wheel and track height adjustment is done using alt-wheel (matches OS X conventions)
  • German and French translations improved
  • Allow a pre-existing selection to override region grouping if the clicked-on region is part of that selection
  • Plugin editing tweaked:
    • Always show plugin's own UI (if available) on double-click
    • Alt+double-click -> show 'generic controls' (GUI built by Ardour)
    • Context-menu offers both choices.
    • Use Tooltip for to make it discoverable.

Bug Fixes

  • some licenses fixes in source code files
  • properly handle closing of various file descriptors, to fix issues with LinuxDSP plugins and xjadeo
  • fix AudioUnit GUI window sizing
  • improve relationship between ArdourDialog and Splash on OS X
  • hack up AU GUI support to handle AUSampler resizing better.
  • fix operation of right-click on selected MIDI note to bring up the note editor. this is still not really right long term, but it is better than displaying the channel selector
  • fix crashes and session file corruption caused by not zeroing text buffers passed to VST plugins (from Mixbus)
  • fix crash on export if no master bus is present in the session
  • On OS X, use "hw.physicalcpu" to get a more accurate CPU count (the previously used "hw.ncpu" count includes hyperthreading cpus)
  • Text in warning window for memory limit not displayed in full.
  • fix jack session filename (colons are invalid)
  • when using a MIDI keyboard for step entry of MIDI data, use the note length set in the step entry dialog
  • Remove special handling of session range in export. Fixes things when the session range is renamed.
  • Fix loading of old sessions' previously-used export timespans
  • Various LV2 plugin handling fixes
    • skip LV2 ports on GUI according to port-properties: notOnGUI and reportsLatency
    • honor LV2 rsz:minimumSize for Atom Event buffers
    • properly clean up LV2 world
    • lilv_port_get() for LV bufsize query requires new lilv
    • lilv-backwards compatible min buffer-size implementation
  • fix memory leaks and compiler warnings in LXVST code
  • fix an unusual problem in some LinuxVST plugins by disabling symbol export
  • when a track has audio and MIDI output, display an audio fader rather than a MIDI fader (this is a display change only - the fader has effect on all MIDI and audio data passing though it regardless of the type of fader shown)
  • prepare font-styling meter labels
  • decrease size and weight of midi-velocity - make '127' fit,...
  • use correct quoting in OS X startup script (allows passing of arguments on the command line)
  • add test for writability of /usr/local/lib in OS X startup script (notifies user about an issue created by Audacity)
  • save and restore Generic MIDI threshold/smoothing value
  • fix crash when using internal edit mouse modes to drag a non-MIDI region

Contributors

Robin Gareus, Adrian Knoth, John Oliver, Sakari Bergen, Colin Fletcher, Paul Davis

Translation work by: Robin Gloster (de) and jpeg129 (fr)