Ardour 2.8.11 is now available. It contains only 1 change from 2.8.10, but its an important one:

• Do not prevent transport operations after an export (and potentially at other times)

All users are strongly recommended to upgrade. Remember that if you have a subscription or paid for an earlier 2.8 version, and were logged into ardour.org at that time, upgrades are free!

(this announcement comes from John Emmas, developer of ArdourXchange)

Owners of Harrison's Mixbus can now obtain a very cheap copy of ArdourXchange if they act quickly. Throughout July 2010 AxC will be on sale for just $20 (US) - that's less than half its normal retail price.

Listed below are URLs for websites that have arranged for people to come to this forum and post links to their sites, even though their sites are totally unrelated to Ardour, audio engineering or anything remotely related to what this site is about. Quite a few of them are probably scams as well. This post will be updated and their names will be added. Google is quite good at indexing ardour.org. You spam our site, we add your URL here. You want results? Try googling for "Printing Blue" ...

Ardour 2.8.10 is released into the wild today, primarily to fix an annoying regression in 2.8.9:

• keyboard presses and releases are now correctly sent to Ardour created plugin GUIs (e.g. for LADSPA plugins), making it possible to use the keyboard to set parameter values and define preset names.

In addition, Ardour will no longer abort if your home directory is not writable, but exits cleanly with a (hopefully) clear error message. This bug really only affects first time users who have been playing around with their system in an unwise fashion.

AATranslator is a Windows program that converts sessions created in one DAW (or video editor) into formats understood by others. It supports session formats used by ProTools, Nuendo, Cubase, PreSonus Studio One, Vegas, Reaper, Wavelab, Pyramix, AMS Audiofile, Fairlight, Waveframe, DAR, N-Track, Sadie, Soundscape and more.

We heard today that its support for Ardour is now complete (for the moment), meaning that it can both import and export to/from Ardour. Read on below for more details on what it can do ....

Although Ardour 2.8.9 no longer suffers from the subtle bug that caused the mute button(s) to no longer work by default, many users of Ardour will not see the situation change until they remove their ~/.ardour2/ardour.rc file. This probably contains default settings for mute like this:

    <Option name="mute-affects-pre-fader" value="yes"/>
    <Option name="mute-affects-post-fader" value="yes"/>
    <Option name="mute-affects-control-outs" value="yes"/>
    <Option name="mute-affects-main-outs" value="yes"/>

If your version of this file has value="no" for those options, you should either edit it by hand (its just a text file) so that it says value="yes" instead or just remove the file entirely. Editing is preferable, but removing the file will not hurt. Note that the following values y,Y,1,yes,Yes,YES are all equivalent to "yes" and similarly n,N,0,no,No,NO are all equivalent to "no".

You should also check the file /etc/ardour2/ardour_system.rc, or a related location if you installed Ardour somewhere non-standard) for the same issue, though it is less likely to be seen there. Do NOT remove this file - if it contains "no" as the settings for these options, you should edit the file.

Just a couple of days since 2.8.8, and Ardour 2.8.9 is here. Why? It turned out that the infamous mute bug (which caused the mute button to do nothing) was actually not fixed in 2.8.8 (or prior versions where this has been claimed). This has been one of the worst regressions of recent versions of Ardour, and I mistakenly blamed packagers and distributions for it. Thankfully ardour.org member the_CLA spent time with me on IRC and we finally proved to my satisfaction that the bug was really in Ardour. Its now fixed, hopefully forever. Two other smaller but important bug fixes are described below ....

Its June and Ardour 2.8.8 is finally here. Time for everyone to upgrade!

Although this is primarily a bug-fix release, some of the "bugs" fixed are so pervasive and significant that they could almost count as new features. In particular, automation editing has finally arrived at a place that people with experience on other DAWs may consider actually usable. Issues with alignment of new and existing recorded material are addressed too, and there are lots of other bug fixes for issues small and large (including 3 or 4 crashing bugs). Thanks to motivation provided by the Mixbus project, there are also yet more improvements to AudioUnit plugin handling on OS X. Anybody using Ardour 2.8.7 or earlier should upgrade to enjoy increased stability and better functionality. Read more below ...

Max Breakwell has done what looks like a great job at providing a TouchOSC template for controlling Ardour. He has written all about it and for those of us with iPhones, iPod Touch or iPad (not sure if TouchOSC is available yet, but it will be), it looks really interesting and useful. Great job Max!

(Edited April 7th with some updates)

Ardour 3 has a relatively sophisticated mechanism for creating predefined mappings for MIDI control surfaces. We need people with MIDI control devices to help create a rich set of default (or even non-default) bindings for their equipment. To do this, you need to be comfortable using a text editor. The rest of the document will explain how to create a binding. Please help us out so that Ardour 3 will have a great collection of bindings right from its initial release. You can email bindings to the ardour-users mailing list or provide URLs for them in comments to this post. Don't be afraid to ask questions if things are not clear.