In 2006 and 2007, Google's Summer of Code program helped support Dave Robillard's work on MIDI sequencing (which continues in the 3.0 branch). I did not apply to have Ardour to be a part of the Google Summer of Code program this year, but it turns out that Google is not the only SoC program. We were lucky to discover that Sakari Bergen, an open source enthusiast and student at the Helsinki University of Technology, was chosen to be a part of the Summer Code Finland program.
Sakari will be working on Ardour for three months this summer, improving export functionality and adding meta data support. Sakari started working last week, and if you are interested in following his progress during the summer, he will be keeping a blog on his website. Sakari will be working on the 3.0 branch of Ardour, not the one currently being released as 2.X.
The entire Ardour community owes Thorsten Wilms sincere thanks for his excellent conceptual and graphic work on redesigning the export dialog which will be the basis for that part of Sakari's work. Thorsten has also made many other graphical and usability-related contributions to Ardour.