Ardour 8.11 is a hotfix release that contains a fix for a critical workflow-blocking bug. All users of 8.10 and all Linux distributions should upgrade to 8.11 as soon as possible.
The bug occurs whenever the user is working on a session using musical time as the default time domain (Session > Properties > Misc). If they carry out any operation that causes Ardour to write a modified copy of existing audio data to a new file (such as timestretching, pitch-shifting or reversing), there is a very high probability that they will be unable to reopen to the session in the future. Such sessions can be recovered manually with a text editor, but this is not an acceptable pattern for our users.
8.11 includes a fix for one other crashing bug. This bug only affected people using meters not denominated in quarter notes (crotchets) (e.g. 6/8 or 5/8). Adding BBT markers in such sessions would cause a crash soon after.
Thanks very much for this update! I’m sure backtracking a hotfix was not trivial so it is appreciated! For clarification does the tempo mapping fix also address what was discussed here?:
I work almost exclusively in /8 time signatures, so this is a very welcome fix Not that I’ve ever experienced any problems with it, but I’ve not done any grid work so far in 8.10, only opened sessions created in previous versions where I’d already added BBT markers/stretched the grid.
There’s a bug I mentioned ages ago on here but which, to my shame, I never got around to reporting. I was hoping that the BBT fix might have resolved it but it doesn’t seem to have…
When in an odd quaver time signature e.g. 5/8, 7/8, 17/8, with snap to grid turned on it’s impossible to place the playhead on certain bar-lines or certain beats, or to create markers (including tempo map markers) on those same beats. It alternates i.e. if you can put the playhead/a marker on the first beat of one bar, you can’t do so on the first beat of the bar before or the one after, but the next one along is fine. In other words, it seems like Ardour always expects an even number of quavers in a bar (as you’d always have in any /4 time signature) so always snaps to every other quaver beat along the timeline. It can be overcome by zooming in a bit further and then it will be possible to put the playhead on that particular beat, or move a marker to it. I’ve encountered this a lot with the beginning-of-a-bar tempo markers when tempo-mapping a session to recorded audio, having to move every other one back a quaver to the beginning of the bar.
I can also confirm what Glen has found: that the ability to move beats other than the first one in a bar, is absent in 8.11. This is a feature that I’ve made a lot of use of over the past year, so I’m going to have to revert to a previous version.
If that last point is correct, then you’re sailing in dangerous waters. 8.11 contains only two changes … the fix for cannot-reopen-session, and a change that puts bar lines at multiples of the meter denominator, not just multiples of 4. Nothing else was changed. The 2nd fix prevents later tempo map operations from going wrong…
I’ve just done a quick test in 8.9 and it’s the same – only the bar-lines can be dragged but not beats within a bar.
I’ve tried some more quick tests and got some very weird results. Versions 8.8 and 8.6 seemed the same i.e. inability to move anything other than the first beat of each bar.
When I tried with 8.4, 8.2 and 8.1, they’re not putting down tempo markers when I click on a bar-line, which I don’t remember when I was using them in anger last year so I can’t test properly as it just moves everything after the initial BBT marker. Bizarre.
I don’t have time right now to look into it any further I’m afraid.
Thank you a ton for the update! It was getting to the point where I was limiting the amount of reversing I did from fear of triggering the bug.
At least I learned more about how the session files work and how to fix them from it. Amazing work as always, thank you!!
Problem acknowledged, though not yet understood. Copying the actual executable for 8.11 into the install tree for 8.10 works as expected, so the problem is more subtle than “it wasn’t built with translation support”). Will keep you posted.
I’ve done a bit more testing. There’s definitely some weirdness going on with tempo-mapping.
Last night I found that 8.11 wouldn’t move beats within a bar, only the first beat.
I had then installed multiple earlier 8.x versions, some of which I have used in the past year and moved internal beat lines without issue.
I experienced a couple of versions that tempo-mapping didn’t work correctly (tempo markers weren’t placed where I tried to drag the first beat of the bar) and none of the versions I tried (8.1, 8.2, 8.4, 8.6, 8.9, 8.10, all downloaded from here) allowed me to move non-first-beat lines.
However, tonight it’s a different story. I went back to a session where I know I’d dragged beat lines around within a bar and found it was created with 8.6.
I created a new session in 8.6, imported the original guide piano part from the above-mentioned session and successfully tempo-mapped the bar – and the beats within that bar – where there was a rapid slowing down of tempo. In other words, where it didn’t work last night, it worked as expected just now. I’d created a new session yesterday and recorded audio to tempo-map and only the first beats could be moved then. Not so tonight.
Opening tonight’s 8.6 test session in 8.11 and it too worked as expected i.e. any beat could be dragged around.
I repeated the same test in 8.11: creating a new session, importing the guide piano part, tempo-mapping the bar with the rapid ritardando, including all beats within that bar, not just the first one i.e. it worked as expected where last night it hadn’t done so when I created a test session and recorded audio.
Sorry, i should have mentioned it in my first post, but i already tried to deactivate and re-activate translations and restart Ardour in between. Which didn’t change anything.
I can live with it that said, but i guess it might be uncomfortable for some.
The Linux packages for 8.11 on Intel/AMD x86_64 architectures have been updated so that translation works again. Download it again and things will be working.
macOS packages will be updated later this evening (in a few hours).
There was no bug with the executable program at all, but the packages contained incorrectly built “message catalogs”. It was actually sort of a cool bug, but it took a day or more to figure out what was going on.
I believe that is the responsibility of the ubuntu package maintainers. The official Ardour builds are available here - Download Ardour | Ardour Community