Just a couple of days since 2.8.8, and Ardour 2.8.9 is here. Why? It turned out that the infamous mutebug (which caused the mute button to do nothing) was actually not fixed in 2.8.8 (or prior versions where this has been claimed). This has been one of the worst regressions of recent versions of Ardour, and I mistakenly blamed packagers and distributions for it. Thankfully ardour.org member the_CLA spent time with me on IRC and we finally proved to my satisfaction that the bug was really in Ardour. Its now fixed, hopefully forever.
In addition, a new Ardour user on OS X pointed out two rather unfortunate problems that have now been fixed:
If a plugin has existing presets, the preset selector in the plugin editor window would steal key events, possibly causing an unintentional (and unrecoverable) reset of the plugin state (very annoying)
All canvas items except for the text used to label and regions could have their color adjusted. These two exceptions have now been added to the set of things that can be tweaked by, for example, a color-blind user, or someone who just wants dark colors for tracks and white text on region names.
Many thanks to the_CLA and Maurits Lamers for patiently getting me to understand these 3 bugs.
while the mute button bug was there for some time, I did not have problems muting all possible route (inp, pre, post, main) on a track. Sure it was annoying to have mute not working by default but it was not impossible to work around the bug in the mean time as soon as you created a track and set the mute behavior. But this being said, having this bug crushed is really cool!
Great work with these new releases! Finally I can start to work with Ardour again. I had so many crashes with 2.8.6 that I couldn’t use the program at all for a while. The mute bug was also annoying… 2.8.9 feels sooo much stable and reliable. Thanx!
Cette version semble bien fonctionner sauf la localisation en français sur un macbook Pro. J’avais la version 2.8.5 localisée en français, c’était très bien. Merci quand même pour le travail.
Thanks for a new, even more stable release!
However, in this version I encountered some strange behavior. I used to be able to enter values in plugins manually not using the slider or the mouse but using the keyboard (eg. the number pad). This does not work in 2.8.9 anymore. Is this a bug or a change in the design?
It is nice the bug has been fixed. Hope this will not happen often. Check this tutorial http://www.tubestime.com/watch/ardour-extra-tutorial , I think it is very informative and can help to handle some problems if they appear.