Hi, I would like to work with edit groups but I cannot find any “group tab”, although I correctly created groups und added tracks to them. There simply is no group tab as shown on some pictures, which might come from Ardour 3. Any suggestions how I get to more detailed possibilites to work with these groups? Thanks in advance! - Susanne
They do not exist in the same way in Ardour 2.x. There is really no reason to be using Ardour 2.x at this point.
Edit Groups are controlled in the right hand sidebar in Ardour2. Look to see if you might have shrunk it down to small to see.
SeabladeAhh yea, as Paul mentioned Edit Groups in A2 are a bit different than A3 I believe(Though haven’t personally used them a whole lot in A3 yet). I would also agree that A3 or possibly better yet a nightly build at this point, is a much better option than A2.
SeabladeHi, thank you for your replies! I work on a Mac, for which Ardour 3 ist Beta, that’s why I use Ardour 2.8.16 - I thought that’s the correct way to do it. Is it not…? Susanne
Hi, I would have one more question - I remember, I did try to install Ardour Beta on my Mac, it always crashed, I panicked, and preferred 2.8
Still - how can I make use of my groups there? How do I get to something like group preferences, is there any possiblity?
Thank you! - Susanne
The nightly builds for OS X are better than Ardour 2.x. Ardour 4.0 will be released this week, for OS X and Linux.
@paul: 3.0 to 4.0 sounds like a very significant change? Or is the ardour (major) versioning scheme now taking inspiration from the linux kernel (e.g. entirely arbitrary) ?
the nightly builds are approximately 4000 commits newer than 3.5.403. You can read the release notes when they appear. Entirely new graphics engine for the editing area, new audio/midi I/O architecture, and lots more.
Hi Paul, 4.0 sounds exciting! I just renewed my subscription on my birthday, the perfect present 
I too still have kept 2.x around for legacy sessions recorded with it which include automation, which until ten minutes ago I thought (see below for update) A3 didn’t support opening+migrating. I was too nervous about losing work or not knowing what had been preserved/lost to try and migrate them all to A3. I’d love to move on (as I guess you would too) and not have two different Ardour versions installed so I could just click an .ardour session file to load it rather than have to start the correct Ardour version, as trying to load up A3 projects with A2 by mistake breaks the session (quite understandably).
I was about to ask if there is there any possible work planned to rescue old A2 automation and migrate to A3/A4+ sessions? Then I thought to use the Search facility… (although I do read all interesting posts to this Forum, although not the ardour-users list) …and found these answers:
http://lists.ardour.org/pipermail/ardour-dev-ardour.org/2010-September/013026.html
http://tracker.ardour.org/view.php?id=3436
Paul: "note that we will not implement loading of panning automation. the panning model has changed too much to support this. "
cth103 “I believe this is now fixed (except for panner automation, as noted by Paul).”
http://lists.ardour.org/pipermail/ardour-users-ardour.org/2013-May/026171.html
Jorn:
"From my own experience in upgrading sessions, you can pretty much count
on the following being b0rken afterwards:
- all automation
- most if not all controller mappings
- some plugins seem to get lost
- timecode and sync settings
In rare cases, I’ve ended up with sessions with a broken processing
graph - when playing, you don’t see any channel meters and there is no
sound despite the routing being correct.
I haven’t been able to pinpoint the problem, but I worked around it by
simplifying the session in A2 before loading it in A3.OTOH, the actual sound content and region layout has been preserved
correctly. So I’m now confident to take an edited session from A2 to A3
for mixing, but if you have started mixing in A2 and there is a
deadline, for your own sanity’s sake finish it in A2."
So is all other automation now supported migrating A2 sessions to A3? If so, I’ll give it a try… As an outboard slut I rarely use plugins, and usually only use gain automation - I suppose any wild panning modulation I may have indulged in can be forgotten as too crazy! 
(-: Sorry for the thread hijack and long post
We have no plans to improve the import of A2 sessions beyond where it currently is. There might be a few fixes that come from Mixbus, but I am not sure what they will cover.
Things changed too much between the two programs to fully import all aspects of an A2 session into A3. Since A2 will always continue to be available, we’d rather focus our time (which is in extremely short supply for a project of this size) on development of new features and bug fixes rather than backward compatibility. If we had made it impossible to use A2, my attitude would be different.