Ardour 8.0 is released

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. :grinning:

As usual, full release notes are over here and you can download from here.

61 Likes

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.

Thank you! I’m looking forward to checking out these new MIDI features!

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!

Nice work troops, brilliant news. Can’t wait to test drive it.

Smashing. Thanks very much.

Great Stuff! Test driving today!

I am SO gonna get me a Launchpad Pro.

Haven’t had so much fun making music in ages. :smiling_face:

1 Like

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…

5 Likes

Awesome work :slight_smile: 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…

1 Like

Ardour keeps growing… For better, I’m sure. Thanks for the splendid work, and kudos for the good rests in between.

1 Like

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. :smiling_face:

2 Likes

I’ll be putting up a roadmap post/document sometime this week.

9 Likes

Great, now that we have lollipops, can we use them for something more? The first thing that comes to mind is midi pan ! I really miss this feature.

Thanks.

MIDI pan is just a MIDI CC message and can be drawn like any other MIDI CC.

I can’t tell if this is sarcasm hahaha

Not sure which comment you’re replying to. Deadly serious about both the roadmap and MIDI CC’s 8 (Balance, for stereo) and 10 (Pan, 14 bit, for mono).

A phenomenal release! Thanks so much to all contributors for the hard work :+1: :+1: :+1:

Exciting to see the pooled work coming to Mixbus 9.2 as well!

5 Likes