Ardour 3.4 released

Ardour 3.4 is released, after a month and half of the lazy, hot, travel-filled days of the end of summer (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, at least). This is primarily a maintainance release, with a couple of new features that will prove useful for various users. Note: one of the fixes addresses a very serious issue with session clean-up in cases where time-stretched or pitch-shifted regions are present. Anyone who ever uses these features of Ardour is absolutely and unequivocally advised to upgrade.

As usual you can download it from the usual place, and as usual subscribers get this update without cost. Thanks to everyone for their support (and encouragement).

Once again, the OS X release situation has still not improved, though a demo copy of 3.4 is available (fully featured except that is has does not have the video timeline, no saving or restoring of plugin settings, and no plugin presets).

New Features

  • 7 new meter types: DIN, EBU, Nordic, BBC, VU, K14 and K20 (total meter types now stands at 9)
  • optional master bus meter now available in transport bar
  • MIDI data is now forwarded "around" plugins with no MIDI output/input
  • for export, add CAF to support audio file formats

Fixes and Improvements

  • fix extremely hard-to-fix damage done to session when cleaning up any session containing time-stretched and/or pitch-shifted regions.
  • fix issue with timecode subframe rounding
  • fix issue tracking LTC when locate occurs when stopped
  • fix issues with removing ports from tracks + busses (they were never completely removed)
  • fix a crash when deleting a bus
  • MIDI Clock can now send positional information correctly
  • MIDI trace window now prints human readable version of MIDI clock messages
  • fix long term issue that could silence or add noise to channels not processed by a plugin
  • make K-20 the default meter type for the master bus
  • some meter polishing (font, colors, NaN & inf protection, etc)
  • when importing audio with "1 track per channel", correctly name each track with a different name, to fix problems when reloading the session
  • meters cannot be deactivated anymore
  • support for LV2 plugins using the KXstudio:external-ui extension
  • fix special handling of scroll wheel when vertically zooming
  • fix crash if a folder being added to the shortcut folder (in the generic GTK filechooser) is already there.
  • re-organize library initializations during startup

Developers

Robin Gareus, Michael Fisher, Tim Blechmann, Colin Fletcher, Tim Mayberry, Paul Davis

Testers

Many Ardour users have tested aspects of 3.4 during development, but particular thanks for their intensive testing and extensive feedback go to Chris Goddard, Axel Mueller, Conor McCormack.

Translation Updates

  • Czech translation updated (Pavel Frich)
  • German translation updated (Edgar Aichinger)