Keeping up with our roughly monthly new releases, Ardour 3.3 is out and includes a few new features and the usual assortment of bug fixes. Developers Robin Gareus and Colin Fletcher did some great work to push this release forward. As usual you can download it from the usual place, and as usual subscribers get this update without cost. Thanks to everyone for their support (and encouragement). Regrettably, the OS X release situation has still not improved, with a variety of things that require attention there (particularly plugin support) before a real release can be considered. A demo copy of 3.3 is available (fully featured except that is has no saving or restoring of plugin settings, and no plugin presets). Read the full details below ... read more

Ardour 3.4 is released, after a month and half of the lazy, hot, travel-filled days of the end of summer (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, at least). This is primarily a maintainance release, with a couple of new features that will prove useful for various users. Note: one of the fixes addresses a very serious issue with session clean-up in cases where time-stretched or pitch-shifted regions are present. Anyone who ever uses these features of Ardour is absolutely and unequivocally advised to upgrade. As usual you can download it from the usual place, and as usual subscribers get this update without cost. Thanks to everyone for their support (and encouragement). Once again, the OS X release situation has still not improved, though a demo copy of 3.4 is available (fully featured except that is has no video timeline, no saving or restoring of plugin settings, and no plugin presets). Read more below for full details. read more

Another month, another Ardour update release. 3.5 doesn't include any major new features, but does come with a major architectural change and improvements in two significant aspects of workflow. As usual you can download it from the usual place, and as usual subscribers get this update without cost. Ardour is now (theoretically) no longer dependent on JACK. The functionality provided by JACK has been abstracted to allow 3rd parties to provide implementations that directly use various platform native audio and MIDI APIs (such as CoreAudio on OS X or ASIO on Windows). Of course, Ardour can still be run with JACK, and this option is not going away. We hope to see these other "backends" emerge over the next few months. For now, users should not experience any functional changes when using Ardour. This has led to many improvements in the Ardour source code and some visible changes as the program starts up. Read more below for some details. Is Ardour3 released for OS X yet? As usual, OS X users are stuck with a beta demo release though unlike previous releases this is for 64 bit OS X 10.7 and later only. It will not run on early systems. We hope to have some resources to put into OS X after 3.7 is released. What's up next? The next major release 3.6 will feature an entirely new "canvas" for drawing and managing the editor window's main track display. Release 3.7 will be focused on significant fixes and improvements for MIDI workflows. read more

In order to fix a few notable issues with 3.5, we are releasing Ardour 3.5.14 today. Click/Metronome not connected in new sessions Impossible to record when using JACK Transport synchronization MIDI output errors the environment variable SUIL_MODULE_DIR is now overridden rather than appended to (it is not a search path). This fixes issues using the ardour.org bundles on Linux distributions like KXStudio which set SUIL_MODULE_DIR by default. The OS X beta/demo is now enabled for translation if desired. This feature has not been present in earlier 3.x builds for OS X. There are no other functional changes. The OS X 64 bit 10.7 or later beta/demo has been updated. read more

Ardour 3.5.74 is released to make sure that a variety of very useful fixes plus a couple of functional improvements are available to as many users as possible. If you use Ardour with one of our translations, you should almost certainly update, because there we have fixed lot of subtle breakage caused by the translation process. For others, read over the changes and you can decide for yourself if you would benefit from an update. Fetch it from the usual place. The OS X demo version has been updated too. Read on below for more information on what was in 3.5.74 ... read more

This isn't a music site, but Ardour exists mostly for the purpose of about making music and as we draw close to the end of 2013, I wanted to provide my own counter to a few other websites' "Best of 2013" music lists. I listen to music almost non-stop while developing Ardour - often Soma.FM's "Sonic Universe" stream - and it plays a very important role in the process, and my life in general.read more

Continuing on with our cycle of monthly releases, 3.5.143 is a bug fix release that comes out while other major development work continues on in the background. It fixes a handful of major bugs, notably with MIDI Clock, Generic MIDI control and Mackie Control support. You'll also find monitoring source control in the meter bridge, a new K12/RMS meter type, and more than a dozen other bug fixes. As usual you can download it from the usual place, and as usual subscribers get this update without cost. Thanks to everyone for their support (and encouragement). Once again, the OS X release situation has still not improved, though a demo 64 bit copy of 3.4 is available (fully featured except that is has does not have the video timeline, no saving or restoring of plugin settings, and no plugin presets). read more

Continuing on with our cycle of monthly releases, 3.5.308 contains a pile of bug fixes and several very useful new features. Almost entirely the single-handed work of Robin Gareus, you will find significant changes with panning, auditioning and the very striking addition of explicitly-displayed signal router in the mixer strips. As usual you can download it from the usual place, and as usual subscribers get this update without cost. Thanks to everyone for their support (and encouragement). read more

Ardour 3.5.357 is a CRITICAL bug fix release. ALL USERS ARE RECOMMENDED TO UPGRADE. It includes an absolutely vital fix for a bug that could lead to audio files going missing from the session file (though not from disk). Stem export finally works reliably, and touch sensing with Mackie Control devices allows correct recording of automation from the faders of devices like the SSL Nucleus. Another important change that some users will notice: when using the mouse to click to add automation control points, Ardour now just adds a new point where the user clicked, rather than attempting to preserve the line shape. Control/Command-click will use the old behaviour. This change followed some mailing list discussion in which it became clear that although the behaviour now accessed via Ctrl/Cmd-click is occasionally useful, it is mostly wrong. As usual you can download it from the usual place, and as usual subscribers get this update without cost. Thanks to everyone for their support (and encouragement). Once again, the OS X release situation has still not improved, though a demo 64 bit copy of this version is available (fully featured except that is has does no saving or restoring of plugin settings, and no plugin presets). read more

Starting sometime on April 19th 2014, ardour.org began having problems delivering email. This affected the emails sent after registering a new user account, among other things. The problem was caused by time drifting so much that the email server we use to deliver mail was more than 5 minutes off ardour.org's own time, and this caused the server to reject mail. For some reason, ardour.org's email system appears to have discarded the email messages rather than requeued them for later delivery. The problem has now been fixed but it appears that the undelivered messages are lost for all time, like tears in the rain. If you registered on ardour.org during the period April 19th-21st 2014 and did not get the confirmation email, please ause the "Request new password" link under the login section to generate a new password. Apologies for the inconvenience. read more

Ardour 3.5.380 is (another) CRITICAL bug fix release. ALL USERS ARE RECOMMENDED TO UPGRADE. Additionally, ALL LINUX DISTRIBUTIONS SHOULD IMMEDIATELY UPGRADE/UPDATE TO THIS RELEASE. Distributing earlier versions of 3.5 at this point is irresponsible and risks our users' data. This release includes several absolutely vital fixes for bugs could lead to audio and MIDI files being irreversibly deleted from disk. We do not know precisely how these losses happened - no user ever found a reliable recipe to recreate all of them - but reports from several different users did lead to a careful code review which uncovered some potential for file loss. One very repeatable loss of a MIDI file after unlinking a copy of a MIDI region was very definitely fixed. There are a few other minor fixes and improvements described below. As usual you can download it from the usual place, and as usual subscribers get this update without cost. Thanks to everyone for their support (and encouragement). read more

This is being written on June 20th, 2014, basically 2/3rds of the way through the month, and roughly half way through the year. Over there on the right hand side it says that the project has received a total of just under $1800 this month. I really don't like writing articles about Ardour and money. I like to think that successful and worthy projects will magically fund themselves, and obviously, I like to think that Ardour is successful and worthy. This is wrong thinking, however. read more

I have manually synced the subscriptions records with a downloaded report from PayPal. All subscriptions known to PayPal to be active should be marked as active, and all subscriptions not known to PayPal to be active should be dead. The active subscription count dropped by nearly 300. If you disagree with the state of your own subscription, please let me know. I did not send email to each subscriber because I think this information is mostly redundant. read more

The linuxDSP Workstation Plug-ins Bundle is now available as Pay What You Want for a limited time until the end of June 2014. A unique opportunity to add professional console grade processing to your Ardour sessions for a fraction of the normal price (or whatever you think it's worth). Min price £5.00 (to cover payment processing and charges). Get it here: http://www.linuxdsp.co.uk/download/lv2/download_wpp

Make music the free, open and easy way with Libre Music Production! New community driven online project, Libre Music Production (www.libremusicproduction.com), launches today, Sunday 17th August 2014. This new resource focuses on promoting music creation and composition using Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS). The idea of Libre Music Production (LMP) was born out of a perceived lack of integrated resources, and in particular a lack of information aimed at new and non-technical users. By providing hands-on material submitted by the community, such as guides, tutorials, articles and news updates, Libre Music Production shows you that there is great FLOSS audio software out there, and also how to practically use that software to make music. To read the full press release, visit www.libremusicproduction.com/pressrelease read more

Ardour 3.5.403 is (yet another) CRITICAL bug fix release. ALL USERS ARE RECOMMENDED TO UPGRADE. Additionally, ALL LINUX DISTRIBUTIONS SHOULD IMMEDIATELY UPGRADE/UPDATE TO THIS RELEASE. Distributing earlier versions of 3.5 at this point is irresponsible and risks our users' data. As with 3.5.380, this release includes several more absolutely vital fixes for bugs could lead to audio and MIDI files being irreversibly deleted from disk. read more

The cairocanvas branch has been merged into the master branch of Ardour. read more

For about a day from 15:40 GMT on November 13th, all outbound email from ardour.org was being rejected by our outbound email server. The time on ardour.org had drifted more than 5 minutes from the email server's own time. I have corrected the time and installed an NTP client to ensure that this does not happen again. If you were expecting email from ardour.org in connection with a new account, attempt to reset your password and you will get a new email. If you were expecting email from ardour.org in connection with a download, please contact me (paul@linuxaudiosystems.com) and I'll get you the information you need. Apologies for the problems. read more

Thanks to the amazing hardwork of Robin Gareus and funding from Harrison Consoles, ardour.org now has nightly builds of the development version of Ardour available. Read more details below. read more

Thanks to several years of slow and steady work, Ardour now compiles and runs on all versions of the Windows operating system. For several months, we've offered ready-to-run versions via our nightly build site . We're almost ready to release Ardour 4.0, which will make it the first major release of the program that could run on Windows. We'd love to see Ardour running on Windows more and more. BUT ... read more

The Ardour project is pleased to announce the release of Ardour 4.0. This release brings many technical improvements, as well as new features and over a thousand bug fixes. The biggest changes in this release: Better cross platform support. Ardour now runs on GNU/Linux, OS X and for the first time, Windows. JACK is no longer required, making it easier than ever for new users to get Ardour up and running (though JACK is still usable with Ardour). The user interface has seen a thorough overhaul, leading to a more modern and polished experience. Read more below for a more detailed summary of the changes ... read more

There are a number of recurrent questions about subscriptions to Ardour that come up. This article tries to collect them all and provide a coherent set of answers. read more

Several users have reported that the GUI (graphical user interface) of Ardour 4.x is slow on their systems. We know that this is caused by a combination of video interfaces and the driver for the video interface, but we don't know which video interfaces or which drivers are to blame. By default Ardour 4.x tries to get the video hardware to accelerate drawing, which may or may not happen depending on the card and driver. We could use your help in trying to understand what is happening and where. read more

Conor McCormack just posted another amazingly good tutorial for Ardour over at Libre Music Production, this time on using hardware inserts. Read the whole thing: http://libremusicproduction.com/tutorials/how-use-outboard-gear-ardour.