As of now, June 26th, the financial side of thing only looks OK because of a single payment of US$1000. Last month (May) didn't quite make the $4500 goal, and this month was certain to fall short by quite a significant margin. Before the large donation just mentioned, there was still 28% of June's target unmet with only 5 days left this month. There are no companies backing this project at this time, so its totally incumbent on those of you who use the program and have not yet helped pay to support it to step up and do the right thing. Thanks to everyone who has paid for their contributions and support.

Ardour will continue in some sense even if I find other work, and I believe that Carl, Dave, Hans and others will likely keep up some of their efforts anyway. Since the new download system started, there have been about 15000 OS X downloads and 6000 source code downloads. Less than 3% of the OS X downloads and only 23 source code downloads were associated with up-front payment, though it seems likely than many users donated after the fact. The average price per paid OS X download was about US$10. With a user-base like that, it seems to me that it should be possible to pay one full-time north american developer and to offer occasional payments to others for their outstanding work. What do you think?

There hasn't been a lot to report around here recently, but thats not because nothing is happening. Instead, a furious slew of changes have been under development for 3.0, including some really fantastic new designs to aid workflow in many different situations. Lots more news to read below ...

Its hard to keep track of everything that happened to Ardour itself and to me and my family over the last year, but one thing I do know is that its been a year since I last raced the American Triple T near Portsmouth, OH. This last (US Memorial Day) weekend I returned there for a 3rd time, this time with my wife racing as well. This is a unique event that involves 4 triathlons in 3 days: a very short sprint race on Friday evening, 2 olympic distance races (1500m swim/40km bike/10k run) on Saturday and then a half-iron race (1.2 mile swim/55.5 mile bike/13.1 mile run) on Sunday. Even though Ardour 3.0 is not released yet, I take some comfort from gaining another 7-8 minutes over my time from 2008, and in more difficult conditions. Read on for actual numbers ...

Several people have started to add sponsorships to various outstanding issues (see the "Popular Issues" over on the right). I just want to clarify a couple of rather important points about this system. First of all, everyone participating should be aware that it is a pure honor system - we expect and hope that you will pay up once a bug that you have sponsored is fixed for you. The money you pay will be routed (minus the usual PayPal fees) to the developer(s) who actually fixes the bug. Please read on below for more ...

The bug/issue tracker system has just been upgraded to Mantis 1.2.0a3. This should hopefully fix the irritating problems when using the system via Safari, Konqueror and perhaps a few other web browsers. My apologies for it taking so long to fix these issues.

We are glad to announce the availability of Ardour 2.8 for OS X. Delayed a little by the design and implementation of the new "donationware" download system, these packages for Intel and PowerPC systems bring all the improvements of 2.8 to the OS X platform. As noted elsewhere, you have a choice of paying something (anything!) for the version with AudioUnit state & preset handling, or getting a version without those features for free.

As some of you may already have noticed, the way that downloading Ardour works has changed tonight. Rather than everything be available as direct file downloads, the download system now requires you to go through a "donationware" path that is loosely modelled on Radiohead's recent experiment.

The ardour.org website has been upgraded and slightly redesigned. Its now using Drupal 6, which provides many useful features, better security and more. The theme has been switched to a cleaner, "whiter" feeling (based on the Zen Classic theme for Drupal), although more tweaking is in the pipeline to get things just right. Visiting the site without authentication takes you to a somewhat slicker front page, as you might already have noticed. Financial information (over there on the upper right hand side) is now live (more or less) - new subscribers, donations and on will show up here automatically, subject to a potential 5 minute delay. There is a new "institutional" subscription, and for maximal flexibility you can create subscriptions now for any monthly amount you wish. You can now see the most heavily sponsored issues from the issue/bug tracker (and so can developers) so feel free to sponsor issues that matter to you - its all based on the honor system, so no payment is needed up front. More features will be coming soon.

I am pleased to announce the release of Ardour 2.8. As has been previously announced, the 2.X series is now in a state of "feature freeze" so that we can try to concentrate on Ardour 3.0, but as a gesture of thanks to the community for the support during February, I wanted to release this mostly-bugfix version that also comes with a couple of significant features. These include much more reliable VST support on Linux, track/bus templates and, with some important qualifications, AudioUnit state and preset handling. There are more details below...

For some time there have been reports on IRC from users of various Linux distributions that some feature of Ardour is broken. It is getting increasingly tiresome that we end up as the frontline support for breakages that are distro-specific and that we cannot control. These problems waste my time. It would be nice if they would go away. Meanwhile, there's more below on what users of Ubuntu and Gentoo can do ...