Ardour 8.8 turned out to have a couple of major issues. Many users experienced crashes at random times that were caused by a subtle change in how waveforms were drawn, introduced in 8.8. It also turned out that MIDI notes immediately at the start of playback were ignored.
Both of these have been fixed (and also the nightly website has been restored to proper functioning), and so 8.9 is now released and available. You can download it as usual.
We apologize for the lapse in quality control that led to these mistakes in the 8.8 release.
Although the issues with the last couple of versions are unfortunate, I’m most appreciative of the transparency, user engagement, and fast resolution.
I think it’s a testament to the small team of people who develop Ardour and, I suspect, a reflection on the open-source nature of the project: I doubt such transparency and direct engagement would be allowed in most commercial products.
This is not trivially repeatable. If you have a small example session in which it occurs, please file a bug report at tracker.ardour.org and attach an archive of the example session.
Ironically I hadn’t upgraded yet. It made me glad I didn’t though. I had my laptop and tower messed up by the botched upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04. Both are unfortunate as I love my open source operating system and software and would never go back to Windows.
I’m of a similar mind and I’ve been holding off on allowing my Ubuntu Studio 22.04 to apply the 24.04 update. Can you share your experience with the update here? What went sideways for you? What are your recommendations and lessons learned? I’m in the middle of my most complex Ardour project to date and I can’t afford to have an OS update come along and disrupt my work. Thank you!
Hi, it’s better to finish your projects on your current system, especially if they are complex.
If you have the possibility of having another hard drive other than the one that has Ubuntu Studio 22.04 installed, install version 24.04 on that other drive.
Test the system, its general stability and install ardour 8.9 and try, first the vst that you are most interested in checking that they work, especially if you use a vst for windows.
Basically check the general stability, because there are people who are having problems, but others are not, especially in Linux, the different possible configurations of the hardware with the software, give mixed results.
In general, it is advisable to wait a while since a new version of the system or of the programs like ardour comes out, in case bugs and possible solutions arise.
I usually install a new version of ardour without uninstalling the previous version and I test my projects, seeing if there is any error with the plugins or the midi or the audio of those projects and if there is no problem I save it with a new name or copy the session (with a new name or the same one) but indicating that it is saved with the new version of ardour and from then on those versions open with the new version of ardour and when I no longer need the old version of ardour I uninstall it.
In short, don’t be in a hurry to update and before doing so make a backup of your current system just in case.
Between now and the end of the year I have to update my PC that is more than 8 years old and I will take advantage of it to install version 24.04 on a faster and more modern disk, so I will have my current system available (on the hard disk I have now) while I test the new one, it is the best way but of course you don’t always have that possibility.
I have a problem with this 8.9.0 release which didn’t happen with previous versions…
Ardour almost always crashes after closing a session.
I use the official release. I give more info bellow.
When I login under Wayland (xwayland actually in my Ubuntu 24.04.01) the problem appears, and it is systematic. Like I mentioned above, this happens only when I run Ardour by clicking the Desktop Icon.
When I login under the traditional xorg mode, everything looks OK.
So, this probably has to do with Ubuntu and wayland, and not Ardour.
But still this does not explain why I didn’t have this problem with versions 8.6 or 8.7