Ardour 4.7 released

Ardour 4.7 is now available, including a variety of improvements and minor bug fixes. The two most significant changes are:

  1. A new dialog that shows a detailed and wide-ranging analysis of the audio file(s) generated by export. It shows waveform, spectral and level distribution views as well as peak and true peak level information and allows for previewing of the exported files. The development of this dialog was sponsored by Harrison Consoles, and represents another great example of their collaborative engagement with the Ardour development process.
  2. The greatly improved version of Mackie Control support that we're really excited about. Ardour's support for these devices is now very close to where we want it to be in terms of using the visibly obvious features of most Mackie Control surfaces. We still plan to go deeper into plugin control and more in future releases.

The full list of changes is shown below.

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Additions

  • New Post-Export Analysis window
    the new post-export analysis window
  • Add display of signal level during latency measurement
  • Add support/options for the Presonus FaderPort footswitch
  • OSC: allow logging/debugging of incoming messages
  • OSC: add new messages addresses to allow enhanced control with TouchOSC
  • Add a "zoom-to-10-seconds" action/menu item
  • Add an "record-enable all tracks" action/menu item
  • Add option to always use mouse position for zoom focus, making zoom scroll behaviour consistent across rulers and main track area
  • New MIDI binding map for Akai MPK Mini, and Novation LaunchKey 25
  • Add a button to the Audio/MIDI Setup dialog to choose between the callback and blocking version of the Windows audio/MIDI I/O backend. There still appear to be devices and conditions where one of these choices gives better results than the other, but unfortunately no way to tell without just trying them both.

Improvements

  • Turn out all lights on a Presonus FaderPort when exiting the program
  • Duplicate range can now work with multiple time ranges
  • When using stationary playhead mode, keep the playhead centered
  • Group edit dialog is no longer modal, so you can continue working while it remains visible.
  • Take snap settings into account when stretching regions
  • "Insert Time" now ignores mouse as the edit point, just like "Remove Time"
  • Implement MIDI device enumeration and latency calibration for the Windows audio backend (PortAudio)
  • Allow removing the timespan name from export filenames
  • Subtly improve general scrolling behaviour in editor window
  • Improve import of ProTools 5 sessions
  • Add preliminary support for import of ProTools 10 and 11 sessions
  • Better support for VST plugins with an interest in transport state
  • Make it clear that a missing plugin may have been blacklist
  • Improve the accuracy of the tap-tempo estimator

Fixes

  • Various fixes for incorrect visibility of MIDI ghost notes in the GUI when editing.
  • Toggle transport state (normally bound to the space bar) now works even when using JACK Transport
  • Fix incorrect movement of regions glued to BBT time after a tempo change
  • Improve handling of MIDI note selection in the GUI, dramatically speeding up some operations in larger sessions
  • Generic MIDI: midi controller buttons now trigger only on the push message, not the release
  • Generic MIDI: if a CC message is bound to a toggle control, toggle the control only when the incoming value is greater than 0x40 (64)
  • Force LV2 plugins to save some state when creating track or session templates
  • Fix ipMIDI support on Windows (affects use of SSL Nucleus control surface)
  • Fix behaviour of fader numeric displays when leaving an active automation state
  • Allow use of UTF8 characters in filenames during export
  • Fix an unlikely, subtle bug on OS X when the list of available audio devices is changed by the operating system (e.g. device hotplugging)
  • Fix a crash when an export is cancelled before it finishes
  • Fix display of MIDNAM-provided note names while dragging MIDI notes
  • Fix crash when right (context) clicking in the name box of the selected track
  • Fix inactive MIDI track headers on session reload
  • Fix failure to show text selection in track name entry boxes
  • OS X: Cmd-<key> now works in some situations where it was failing before
  • Avoid generating zero-byte files when exporting using normalize + trim silence at end

Developers

Robin Gareus, Len Ovens, André Nusser, Nick Mainsbridge, Tim Mayberry, Ben Loftis, Julien Roger, Paul Davis, Damien Zammit, Pavel Potocek

Updated Translations

Czech