Version 2.6 of Ardour is now available. This version is notable mostly for many dramatic improvements to GUI performance on Mac OS X (native) and a few very important crashing fixes. But, it also contains several interesting and useful new features and some non-crashing bug fixes that are nevertheless extremely significant.

New Features:

• Make libsndfile work with newer versions of FLAC (enables building a version that can open FLAC files).
• Tracks in active edit groups now perform playlist operations (create, copy, select) in unison for playlists created for the group.
• Embedded LV2 GTK GUI support.
• Allow translated version use on OSX.
• Add session file type icon for OSX.
• Shift-click now works to extend marker selections (click one, then shift-click another to select all markers between them).
• Marker drag moves all selected markers.
• Add initial-program-change support (Ardour can send a MIDI Program Change command on startup to set up external equipment; it can do this at any later time too).
• Add move-selected-tracks-{up,down} commands.
• Add global option to enable/disable region fades.
• Enable activate/deactivate fades in all selected regions.
• Global option to hide/show region fades.

Fixes and Improvements

• Massive improvements for OS X GUI speed and responsiveness.
• Eliminate the double-draw during zoom on linux.
• Fix track+strip ordering issues when sync editor+mixer order is enabled.
• Fix for bad synchronization with other JACK transport-aware clients.
• Fix reload & use of MIDI port configuration, so that per-session setup is actually used.
• Fix URLs for freesound access.
• New swedish translation.
• Fix handling of MIDI pitchbend message.
• Handle missing pixmap files more gracefully.
• Fix import dialog clocks to display times that are correct in the current session.
• Fix up generation of BWF field contents to avoid truncation and use correct date.
• Stop AU plugins that fail to load (e.g. missing dongles) from crashing ardour.
• Handle JACK stopping without crashing.
• Fix audio glitches caused by plugin automation events.
• Fix crash when clicking on certain region list items.
• Security fix for libsndfile FLAC handling.
• Fix position of canvas "time cursor" during dragging.
• Make fonts smaller on location dialog buttons.
• Improve performance when dragging multiple regions on the same track.
• Reduce some redrawing of clocks.
• Speed up track resizing.
• Fix disappearing automation controls when automation track has been made minimum size.
• Change design for how certain region list items operate if there are multiple regions selected.
• Allow glue-to-bars-and-beats to be toggled for all selected regions.
• Set add route dialog non-resizeable so that Window Managers size it more sensibly (looked ridiculous in ion3).
• Repeated time stretches/pitch shifts on the same region now use the correct original data.
• New grid line cache to speed up scrolling and grid display in general.
• Fit-tracks now ignores (and hides) "in-the-middle" unselected tracks.
• Fix possible crash and/or mis-setting of end-marker during session load.

Developer Improvements:

• Compile with gcc 4.3.
• Support building on Leopard.