Ardour drops version 8.8 of open source, Linux friendly DAW

Ardour has announced the latest dot version 8.8 of its open source, free DAW, available on Windows, macOS and Linux. Users of Linux definitely should take note, as there are far fewer big hitters in the DAW world for the platform.

It’s a quick turnaround from version 8.7, which had a couple of major flaws, with the rest of the feature set being mostly the same.

New Features

Track dragging

Can now use the mouse to drag selected tracks and busses up or down.

Ruler changes

A reduced set of rulers, to aid simplicity and lower confusion: one for locations, one for ranges, and one for arrangements.

MIDI Scene Markers

Additional features for those using external hardware that sends MIDI program and bank changes and replay them from the timeline.

Parallel disk I/O

In preparation for version 9, Ardour now parallelises disk read/write of audio and MIDI, of most benefit on multi-core machines.

Improvements

Arrangement DnD now defaults to move (not copy).
Arrangement markers are named “section N” by default.
The “boxy buttons” theming option now works more fully, as intended.

Fix inconsistent selection behavior between editor & mixer.
Support querying disk space for disks > 16TB.
The “clear” operation for ranges now removes punch & loop ranges.

Use (a translatable) alphabet instead of numbers for new group names.
Be more strict about uniqueness of track names and track name characters.
Provide new actions to jump to prev/next location marker (no other markers).

Always center the new session dialog.
Show master bus comment on session load #9718.
Add a new “Captain Light” theme.

RF64 files now suffixed with “.wav”. RF64 is a WAV-related audio file format that can contain more than 4GB of data. Additionally, files with the “.rf64” suffix in their names show up in the audio file search results & listings.
On Linux, “JACK” renamed as “JACK/Pipewire” as a backend name, given Pipewire’s growing adoption on that platform.
Change default MIDI bindings that use plain ASCII characters to use a different modifier key. This affected bindings for extend, invert and duplicate selection, which moved from Ctrl/Cmd-{e,i,d} (respectively) to Shift-{e,i,d}.

Add (bindable) actions for region lock/unlock.
Add a preference for MIDI Machine Control (MMC) FastWind command which allows skipping to markers.
Tweak MMC behavior: ffwd should start rolling immediately; but disallow ffwd during active recording.

Much better handling of modal dialogs on macOS.
Live theme color editing now successfully changes the automation tracks’ background color.
Make double click on mixer strip name button start a rename.

Sort MIDI Ports by human readable name in connection matrix.
Add action to reset all meter peak hold.
Add action to reset all peak-hold (incl input meters).

In the case of a missing color theme file, fall back to ‘dark’.
Update libaaf to v1.0-11-gb04c547.
Update mixer and lock icon.

Update AAF import UI.

Features and Fixes in v8.8

Add option to name new MIDI tracks from SMF with just the SMF track name.
Fix for LV2 plugins whose GUI depend on a “changed” signal (e.g. ZynSubAddFX).

Fix MIDI Clock output times by using the correct call to get tempo at a position.
Overdubbing in non-layered mode no longer assignes regions to the wrong groups.
Add build support for latest versions of macOS.

Generic MIDI: do not send touch events for all mapped controllers when one is touched.
Fix fan-out of instruments with illegal path-chars in their name.
Require user’s own color theme files to be versioned.