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Ardour, the open-source and cross-platform digital audio workstation (DAW), has been updated to version 6.6, a release that introduces various new features and improvements.
Ardour 6.6 comes three months after Ardour 6.5 with two new features that make editing automation much faster and simpler than ever before. These include the ability to automatically display the automation-lane when touching a control and the ability for the auto-shown automation parameters to automatically enter touch mode when graphically adding a new control point.
This release also introduces the ability to keep track of xruns (overruns and underruns) per file when recording, support for processing MIDI sysex messages, such as MIDI Tuning Standard (MTS) messages, via the ACE Fluidsynth plugin, as well as new Lua scripts for sending arbitrary 12TET tuning (A = XXX Hz) and tuning defined in a Scala file as MTS messages.
Furthermore, Ardour 6.6 makes the density for the editor grid user-configurable, adds support for 1/64th and 1/128th note positions in the Ruler, adds a MIDNAM file for the Moog Grandmother, and adds support for viewing audio peak levels in an audio region by pressing the Alt key or using the internal edit mode.
Among the improvements implemented in Ardour 6.6, there’s better MIDI note selection behavior that makes it more consistent with the selection rules, the ability to close and save the application even if the audio or MIDI engine is stopped, an improved appearance of the BBT ruler, as well as an option to skip the MIDI track input auto-connect and the ability to sort the input port signal meters by port name.
Dynamic input port meters were implemented as well, along with input port signal meters, scopes and monitors. Ardour now also shows you when the plugin-window MIDI keyboard is not recorded, lets you hide hidden ports in port-matrix, exposes the resampler quality in read-only, and remembers the “Virtual Keyboard” name during engine restarts.
Only on Linux, Ardour now lets you hide the “Midi Through” ports. The ALSA audio and MIDI backend has been improved as well with better lookup of slave devices, the ability to fall back to the nearest available buffer-size instead of reporting an error, explicitly list millisecond buffer-sizes, allow the selection of clock-source when using multiple devices, and the ability to set pretty port names for audio I/O.
The VST3 and LV2 plugins received various improvements as well, and Ardour 6.6 brings numerous bug fixes and a bunch of Lua script changes to make your digital audio editing more enjoyable. You can download the sources of the new release right now from the official website and check the full release notes for more details.
Image credits: Ardour
Last updated 3 years ago
