Ardour 8.4 is available now for Linux, Windows, and macOS. Nothing particularly significant in this release, because our two lead developers have been busy with things linked to future releases. (note: there was no 8.3 release due to a critical bug discovered after tagging 8.3).
From a project-level perspective, perhaps the most important change is that we have moved the source code of our GUI toolkit (GTK v2) into the Ardour source tree. This has no impact whatsoever on people using the builds provided at ardour.org.
However, this version of GTK is about to be deprecated by a number of Linux distributions, and without this change it will become more difficult for both individual users and Linux package maintainers to continue building Ardour. This also leaves us free to (slowly) strip down aspects of the toolkit that we do not use, and potentially modify it as needed in the future. It also means that even the distribution builds of Ardour for Linux will contain our patches to GTK, which has historically not been the case.
Meanwhile, we now have beta-level AAF import, some new MIDI device maps, a new color theme, a stack of UX/UI tweaks and several fixes for crashing and workflow bugs.
I’d like to see a more flexible GUI. I mean, nowdays with big monitor, high resolutions, HiDpi screens, you should be able to arrange GUI elements as you wish. For example mixer on the left or bottom of the edit window like in Reaper.
Congrats on internalizing GTK2 and resolving (hopefully) any future GTK2 problems! I wondered how you would resolve that issue! Some may not understand the significance of this change, but this change alone justifies the upgrade! Great job, guys!
I’ve got bigger type on mixer strip and header buttons, automation sliders, recent file list, various other lists, group labels… There is no option to change this in the preferences, (where preferences page list and selection buttons are also affected). I’m using the Arch build.
Is there anything I can do to fix this, or is it a reportable bug?
