Ardour

Ardour 7.5 released

June 22nd 2023

Ardour 7.5 is now available. It comes with several important changes and the usual slew of improvements and bugfixes.

a screenshot showing Ardour 7.5

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New Features

Tempo Map Editing

Over the past few releases, we revamped tempo maps editing with one goal: introduce mapping tempo to real performance.

Musicians often make subtle pacing changes during their performances. Previously, an engineer or producer would have to slice regions and time-stretch them to "fix" these changes. Now you can do it the other way round: create tempo map nodes and easily adjust their positions to match onsets in the recorded material.

You can access the tempo mapping mode by going to "Edit / Tempo / Map Tempo". It's also possible to use this mode by default. The setting is at the bottom of the "Metronome" page of the "Preferences" dialog.

The basics of this feature have been available for some time now. But the UX of mapping tempo to performance has finally reached the stage where we feel comfortable pitching it to users and collecting feedback.

We will provide more documentation (the manual, videos etc.) for this feature in the near-term future, but if you want to get a sense of how this works, there is a Harrison Mixbus video about it.

Sections Elements

Another major new feature in Arodur 7.5 is section editing. The general idea is that it should be possible to mark a range as e.g. chorus, then copy/cut and paste the entire contents of that range elsewhere, along with automation and all playlists.

The operations works on the given time-range rather than explicit selection of objects. Editor commands for cut/paste, copy/paste and delete are available. Pasting is implicit and ripples at the insertion point.

Saving I/O Connections Per Device

When switching back and forth between backends (e.g. ALSA and PulseAudio on Linux), Ardour now restores I/O connections per device. This is useful when you move around multiple locations and audio interfaces with a laptop running Ardour.

Renaming Processors

Loaded plugins can now be renamed in the processor box. Hover a plugin strip, right-click, choose "Rename" in the menu, submit a new name and press "Rename". If you want to go back to the original name, open the dialog again and press the button to the right of the text input box.

Control Surfaces

Some of the supported control surfaces now get activated automatically upon connection to USB MIDI ports. This currently works for PreSonus FaderPort 8 and 16, Ableton Push 2, and the Contour Design shuttle devices.

Additionally, Softube Console1 controller is now supported thanks to Holger Dehnhardt.

Improvements

  • Playhead can now be used as a snapping target. There's a "Playhead" item in the grid mode drop-down list and a toggle in the "Preferences" dialog on the "Editor / Snap" page.
  • Playhead is now insensitive to mouse events by default (can be changed in a configuration file manually)
  • Performance improvements: faster playlist rendering of non-overlapping MIDI Regions and faster duplication of multiple regions.
  • The "Appearance/Editor Waveform section" of the "Preferences" dialog has been split into a separate page to reduce the vertical size of the dialog.
  • Session archiving now has progress display and can be aborted.
  • Toggling selected track solo status in the Mixer is now accessible via keybindings (s by default).
  • Multiple non-editor commands are now undoable, such as recording and playlist switch.
  • Freewheel exporting on Windows works faster now.
  • Rarely used meter types like K-meters can now be used with tracks.
  • Region layering is now retained for cut/copy/paste.
  • Playlist paste now always pastes on top.
  • Time-stretching can now be started from the left side of a region.
  • The virtual keyboard now has F5 through F8 shortcuts to select note velocity presets.
  • Added Roland SonicCell MIDNAM file.
  • The Dummy backend now has a real-time option.
  • New preferences options on the "Appearance / Colors" page allow disabling the use of color palette to assign colors to new tracks, buses, or VCAs.
  • Markers are now properly themable and use color names.
  • Delaylines have been optimized, multiple-MIDI buffers are possible now.

Notable Fixes

  • Processor box-specific key bindings ("shortcuts") now work reliably.
  • Fix worst-case and I/O latency report.
  • Fix crash when trying to undo region operations across source deletion.
  • Fix opaque MIDI region rendering.
  • In sessions with multiple tempi, plugins that ask for tempo information get the correct value.
  • Standard cut/copy/paste shortcuts now work when entering text.

Lua Scripting

  • New bindings: removing routes, pre-roll/count-in recording, std::list/vector clear.
  • LuaProc: new option to set time information.
  • LuaProc: refined time API.

Translations

Updated translations: German, Korean.

Contributors

Code contributors: Paul Davis, Robin Gareus, Ben Loftis, Colin Fletcher, Holger Dehnhardt.

Non-code contributors: Mathias Sterle.

Translators: Edgar Aichinger, JungHee Lee.

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