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. Carl Hetherington has been working at a furious pace and has not only fixed a lot of small bugs in both 3.0 and 2.X, but has radically overhauled the handling of preferences, and changed the basic design of edit/mix groups to provide a much more flexible, simple and convenient system. Meanwhile, I (Paul) have been busy completely altering the design of Ardour's internal signal flow to allow several things that we've wanted to implement for a long time. Ardour 3.0 now supports internal signal paths (i.e. not exposed via JACK), which in turns makes the correct implementation of subgroups, aux sends and a complete solo model possible. Along the way, this picked up a nice new solo-in-front feature (where soloed material sits on top of non-soloed stuff, which is cut by a dynamically variable dB), as well as after- and pre-fader listen modes, distinct from solo. There's a lot more that could be listed here, but I just wanted to give some sense that things are really happening with 3.0 in ways that are not visible to most people, but will be soon. I am optimistic that we will have alpha releases of 3.0 out this summer.
Ardour 2.8.1
Meanwhile there have been a number of important fixes and a few nice minor features added to 2.8, which means that 2.8.1 is just around the corner. The main blocking factor right now is a bug with deleting AU plugins on OS X - once this is fixed, 2.8.1 will be released. The OS X release will, of course, be free to everyone who paid for 2.8.
Is 3.0 still incompatible with 2.x sessions? I’d love to test it but I’m not willing to throw a real session at it unless I know I can go back to 2.8 if I run into problems…
Yes, it is still incompatible. Moreover, it is even incompatible with sessions from mid-development versions of 3.0, which we have never claimed to be “done”. We are almost done with finishing the 3.0 session file format changes, and after that I will work on ensuring that we (a) backup a 2.X session file if we ever load it and (b) correctly load a 2.8 session. The second of those two tasks will be quite complex because of the breadth of changes in 3.0 … We are still not seeking testers at this stage.
Paul, you mention ardour 3 will support internal signal paths (not exposed via jack) which sounds like a good thing but can you just confirm that ardour 3 will still allow effects to be inserted into channels via jack as is the case with 2.x?
Absolutely. When you explicitly create either Sends or Inserts, they will still be JACK-based. I have just added other internal routing that is used when routing to busses. Its not done by explicitly requesting a new send/insert etc, but instead you do an “assign tracks” operation on a bus (sets up aux sends to the bus). Internally, the objects that handle this are very closely related to a regular send/insert, but they lack JACK ports.
