After a frenetic month getting things ready for the SAE version of Ardour, the public release of Ardour v2.7 is now available. For the first time, this includes public versions for Mac OS X (Intel and PPC) as well as the usual source tarball. This release is dominated by dramatic improvements in Mac OS X GUI performance and startup time, but it also contains a lot of significant bug fixes. Ardour also accumulated quite a lot of nice new features since 2.6.1.

Features:

• Overall dramatic improvements in OS X GUI performance.
• New action to rotate editor/mixer window stacking.
• New action to cycle through mouse modes.
• Plugin windows can now have keyboard focus locked to them.
• Add missing extensions to exported files based on selected file type.
• Loop/Range ruler now visible by default.
• Default crossfade is now -3dB cut.
• Crossfade presets changed to include -6dB cut and two S-curves (icons sadly not changed yet).
• New support for Wiimote control (experimental, disabled by default and not currently possible on OS X).
• Selected tracks are always visible when scrolling through with select-next-track or select-previous-track.
• Skip non-active and hidden tracks with select-previous-track and select-next-track.
• Several new tooltips all over the place and better tooltip colors.
• On OS X, Button2 can be emulated with Ctrl-Option-Button1.
• Busses are never auto-connected to physical inputs.
• Unmodified clicking in canvas rulers now sets playhead position, similar to existing behaviour in the "real" rulers. Use Ctrl- (Linux) or Command (OS X)-click/drag for new markers/ranges.
• Crossfade-editor specific keybindings: space => play xfade, left-arrow => play fade out, ctrl-left-arrow => dry fade out, right-arrow => play fade in, ctrl-right-arrow => dry fade in.
• Drag-n-Drop from OS X Finder now more reliable but no longer supports MP3 or AAC (will be reverted in the future).
• Start position and Sync position clocks added popup region editor.
• Better stay-on-top behaviour for certain windows.
• LV2 port notification fix for GUI updating.
• New German translation.
• New post-export nag screen.
• Per-track OSC control of solo/mute/rec-enable and gain.

Fixes:

• Removed suggestion that users can save while disconnected from JACK.
• Corrected reversed handling of "show-editor-mixer" state on startup.
• Fixed crasher caused by changing gain with transport stopped & panner bypassed.
• Correct reverse logic for making h/w monitoring available given h/w capabilities.
• Fix confusing relabelling of plugin bypass button.
• Prevent double registration of ALSA sequencer ports.
• Correctly initialize JACK timeout parameter when starting JACK.
• Ignore triple-clicks on mute/solo/rec-enable button.
• Momentary solo/mute now works.
• Fix serious error when calculating interpolated Curve values (will cause tiny, almost certainly undetectable changes in automation and fade curves, but may also remove clicks).
• Fix quoting in TOC files wrap PBD::Thread... signals in a mutex to avoid crashing during startup as multiple threads "emit" the signal.
• Make comboboxes a little bigger on X11.
• B|B|T clocks measuring duration now use zero-based values.
• New regions created by AudioFilters (Reverse/TimeFX/Transpose) inherit all relevant settings of their ancestor.
• Fix for incorrect reading of fade out curve under a few circumstances.
• Catch exceptions while loading AudioUnits.
• Correct some glitches with playhead motion when looping/reversing.
• Fix failure when opening a session by double-clicking the session file icon (OS X).
• Fix loss of "current dialog" tracking when exiting a dialog via a button (could cause crash on next Ctrl-w).
• Detect no-installed-JACK on OS X to avoid silent crashes for new users.

Development

• GTK/OSX patch now in SVN.
• Check build host for broken mutex-based glib atomic ops.
• Two versions of clearlooks now in SVN - older, for X11 (crisp!), and newer for OS X (faster!).