Ardour 3.0 alpha 6 released

As usual, somewhat later than expected, but here is the 6th alpha release of Ardour 3.0. A little bit of new functionality here, a bit of GUI polishing, and quite a few crashing bugs fixed. Ready-to-run binary packages can be found here:

Note: with this release, the session file format has been altered. The changes should cause no data loss but automation track visibility may be different when loading sessions created with old ardour3 versions.

Newness

  • New implementation of AudioClock widget that reduces overhead and increases flexibility
  • New "time info box" in transport bar shows dynamic duration information on the current (relevant) selection (object selection when in object mode; range selection in range mode) and the current punch range.
  • "Click" button moved and granted a new lease on life with a metronome icon from Thorsten Wilms.
  • New "delete" operation that works similarly to "cut" but does not put deleted objects into the cut buffer (i.e. you can't paste them, and whatever was in the cut buffer stays there). This works for regions and automation data right now - for MIDI notes it still works like "cut". To use this from the keyboard (would you believe it - the Delete key?), you'll need to remove any ~/,config/ardour3/ardour.bindings file that you may have, or use the keybindings editor.

Fixage

  • Handle install paths that include spaces
  • Hide MIDI notes after track height drops below 20 pixels (too small otherwise)
  • Compile time fixes for gcc 4.6
  • Fixes crashes caused when refilling diskstream buffers with compound regions
  • Properly queue "immediate" MIDI data (e.g. a MIDI panic message block) if it cannot all be delivered in a single JACK process callback. Previously Ardour would just throw away the data that could not be delivered within 1 cycle.
  • Various fixes for compound region display and handling
  • Properly handle locating deep inside the MIDI machinery and use an equivalent to "MIDI Panic" when this happens rather than trying to just send NoteOff messages for on notes (this fails to turn off notes played while the MIDI sustain control was on).
  • Correctly turn on and off notes just before the loop point
  • Create and destroy (non-external) LV2 plugin UIs as window is shown/hidden.
  • Quantize notes to session tempo time, not relative to start of region (fix issue #4069).
  • Fix a few untranslatable strings, or badly formed-for-translation strings;
  • Updated Czech translation
  • New Spanish translation
  • Fix crashes when double clicking on fader plugin in 'Tracks & Buses' window (#4082)
  • Remove "smaller" track height (basically just a broken version of small anyway).
  • Remove no-longer-necessary cruft related to non-editable track names (which do not exist).
  • Fix smallest height to be correctly padded (just large enough to hold the button row without ugly clipping).
  • Fix resizing of tracks when renaming (issue #4075).
  • Make button 1 rather than button 3 the default for inserting notes via modifier shortcut in object mouse mode
  • Remove "Off" as a clock mode
  • Split style files apart to better maintain consistency (generates a useless error during program startup - thanks GTK);
  • Fix serious breakage with setup of plugin automatable controls/parameters, causing crash during loading sessions with plugin automation.
  • Major, substantive reworking of how we store GUI information (visibility, height) for automation data.
  • Changed labelling of automation tracks to just show the name of the controlled parameter - more info can be viewed in the tooltip for the track headers.
  • Build against latest releases of lilv and suil, to fix some issues with some LV2 plugin GUIs.

This release contained work from Paul Davis, David Robillard, Carl Hetherington, Todd Naugle, Colin Fletcher, Pavel Frich and Pablo Fernandez.

Exciting!

great work devs!

dont know if im the only one with this issue but… after looping a range for a while with the click on ardour crashes and says “click pool out of memory, recompile with larger size”… is that an issue with ardour (that i should report on mantis) or with my PC? if i should recompile with larger size as it says… how do i do that? (sorry… not an expert at all)

@fernesto: no, it means there’s a bug. Can you give me a rough idea of how long the loop was, what your JACK period size, and how many repeats around the loop it took to generate the message?

the loop is about 3 minutes long, probably 4-5 cicles ----> crash with big noise, jack is Alsa 2048 period size 2 buffers @ 44.1Khz (should be running smooth), i know Alpha 6 is changing session file format and its probably the cause but when i open this session from Alpha 4, even saved IN alpha 6, i get all pannig restored to Mono, every time, hope that helps

@fernesto: fix for panning will be in alpha7, out before 1pm eastern today.

@paul: that’ll be great, hey… i just suscribed to Ardour but its not been reflected on my profile, is that right? will it be eventually? its a very modest subcription but i want it to count (the little grain of sand…)

@fernesto: missed my 1pm deadline, but i’m cooking up alpha7 tonight. trying to see if i can get in a fix for some LV2 external GUI issues too.
What’s the subscription ID? I’ll check the records and see if I can understand why its not reflected on your account status page.

@paul: Paypal sent me this profile ID: I-X7TJ349B1SU2