Ardour 8.0 is available now for Linux, Windows, and macOS, including the latest release of macOS, Sonoma. Along with the usual set of important and not-so-important bug fixes, Ardour 8.0 brings users substantial quality of life benefits:
“Quick groups” - most mix-related controls now operate on all the selected tracks & busses
Manage sections of a song with arrangement markers. Define your verses, chorus, and bridge. Then rearrange or copy them as you wish.
Create persistent region groups in the editor window, to make multi-region editing easier.
Edit velocity easily on a dedicated automation lane whether it’s a single note or a chord.
Draw automation freely for any controller or press Control (Command) key to enable line-drawing mode. You can also combine free and line segments as you draw just by pressing and releasing the Ctrl/Cmd key.
Fit the tempo map to a human performance, with a new dedicated tool.
If (e.g. drum) note names are available for a plugin instrument or external device (via a MIDNAM file), see those names in the all-new MIDI track header.
Use Novation Launchpad Pro in DAW/Session mode (along with the standalone Sequencer, Note and Chord modes).
Create new interesting progressions with arpeggiator plugins.
Some people will no doubt laugh at a few these “new features”, given that they’ve been in some other DAWs for 20 years or more. That’s OK — we laugh too when we see other DAWs finally adding things that Ardour could do in 2005.
Thanks !
The chnagelog seems a bit buggy… animations are static like pictures, I need to right click on them->Show all controls then click play. This with Chrome on openSUSE TW.
I can’t wait to fit the tempo map to human performance. When recording tracks sequentially, I’ve spent hours and hours trying to work around this in previous versions of Ardour (and sometimes just given into strict tempo since it made everything dramatically easier).
I’ve also been jealous of freehand automation drawing in other DAWs for a while. Now we have it all in Ardour!
Useless, modern rubbish! Who needs a version 8, anyway - wasn’t 7 good enough? Young people, nowadays. Always changing things. When I was your age we didn’t have any version numbers at all and we sure did not miss’em. Now, get off my lawn before I…
“Version 8” - tsss…
Awesome work Thanks a lot for your awesome tool. This open source tool is a proof of how the OSS model brings quality. Many times better than most commercial alternatives.
Thanks!
PS: Just curious… do you people have anything else in the roadmap? Ardour is awesome but as a developer myself I think we always have something on our minds for what’s next…
As a long-time user who uses Ardour for professional broadcast and podcast production, I would like to express my sincerest thanks to the entire development team. I am so, so happy about region grouping and arrangement markers! Ardour just keeps getting better and better.