Ardour

Ardour 8.2 released

December 13th 2023

Ardour 8.2 is available now for Linux, Windows, and macOS, including the latest release of macOS, Sonoma. Nothing incredibly dramatic for this release, but it completes our support for all current Novation LaunchPad devices (as well as the new SSL UF8 surface) and includes the usual collection of bug fixes, small new features and quality of life improvements.

a screenshot showing Ardour 8.0

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New Features

  • Note tupling: inspired by a feature in the new Ableton Live 12 - while editing MIDI, select one or more notes, then press "s" to split each note into two equally sized parts. Press "s" again to split into 3, then 4, 5 and so on. Reverse the process with shift-S. Use "j" to join selected adjacent notes back together. As you can see in this video this can be a very powerful technique for working with complex rhythms.
  • No-strobe option: a new user preference that can disable all "flashing" and "blinking" elements of Ardour's GUI, intended for users with sensitivity to this sort of visual input. If enabled, clocks do not run, no buttons blink, and meters do not move.
  • Support for the Solid State Logic UF8 (a USB MIDI / Mackie Control Protocol device)
    Image of the Solid State Logic UF8 control surface.
  • Support for the Novation LaunchPad X and LaunchPad Mini devices. This completes Ardour's support for the full range of Novation LaunchPad mk3 devices.
    Image of the 3 Novation LaunchPad devices (Pro, X and mini)

    As with the Launchpad Pro support introduced in v8.0, Ardour's support follows the Novation user manual for the X. We decided to make the Mini behaves identically: it lacks some built-in button labels compared to the X, but in other respects shares the same layout, at a smaller scale.

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Improvements and Bug Fixes

  • Change default sample rate to 48kHz.
  • Keep track of the visibility of GUIs for LV2 plugins using the externalUI extension.
  • When importing tempo maps from Standard MIDI Files, insert the tempo map at the correct position (not always at zero).
  • When editing MIDI notes, show note length with verbose cursor.
  • Add Mute button to recorder view.
  • Allow clearing LV2 plugin scan info.
  • Always allow playback even if there is no session start/end defined yet.
  • Improve straight line drawing for note velocity.
  • Handle situations where user's value for XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not an absolute path.
  • Optimize tempo map operations for trivial (and overwhelmingly common) case of 1 tempo and 1 meter.

Control Surfaces and Devices

  • Numerous Fixes for Console 1.
  • Fix Subsequent_37 MIDNAM file.
  • Websockets: fix startup code confusion.
  • WebSockets: fix crash when switching snapshots (#9506).

Bug Fixes

  • Prevent crash in AudioPlaylist::write() due to lossy time domain convert.
  • Improve efficiency and ordering of marker list display.
  • Add workaround for yabridge threading.
  • Ensure that MidiStreamView calls a color handler for each region.
  • Ignore "stop at end" when exporting.
  • Fix issues with transport masters across sessions and backend changes.
  • Fix buffer-overflow in power range spectral analysis (#9560).
  • Sanitize MIDI track names, remove unprintable chars (#9553).
  • Fix failure to build with libxml2 version 2.12.
  • Import Dialog: clean up MIDI information.
  • Fix crash when clicking on region boundary box to start Drag.
  • Fix crash when freezing a track with > 1 region (#9539).
  • Fixes for the arpeggiator plugins introduced in 8.0 by Albert Gräf.
  • Fix two issues loading tempo maps from pre-7.0 sessions.
  • Fix missing sources after cleanup/rec (#9536).
  • Notes entered via step entry use musical (not audio) time.
  • Temporal: fix error in computation of timecnt_t::end() for specific conditions.
  • Retain Region layering when duplicating Regions.
  • Reduce default size of lollis and make them scale with the UI scale factor.
  • Fix various subtle errors caused by inclusive end arithmetic (i.e. 1-5 includes the 5) versus exclusive end (i.e. 1-5 is terminated by the 5 and does not include it).
  • Prevent duplicate entries in recent session list.
  • Fix MIDI input monitoring without connections.
  • Ioplug: implement reset to default values.
  • Auditioner: fix stuck notes when auditioning different files.
  • Do not automatically set `font-size` on macOS.
  • Unload VST3 modules when closing session.
  • Correctly markup text in the region list.
  • Provide preference for scrolling-adjusts-note-velocity.
  • Fix computing "closest later beat".

New Lua Scripts

  • Add Lua script to sequence mixer-scenes using markers.
  • Fix Lua 1Hz timer signal (#9529).
  • Add Lua script to reverse MIDI notes and regions.

Contributors

Albert Gräf, Ben Loftis, Hoger Dehnhardt, Paul Davis, Renato Luiz de Freitas Cunha, Robin Gareus, Dominik Martinez. Nil Geisweiller, Mate Pušić, Nils Philippsen, George Witt.

Translations

  • Improve translation of English "In/Out" text.
  • Updated French translations (Julien Taverna).
  • Updated Czech translations (Martin Vlk).

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