Ardour v2.6 released

24th October 2008 - KVR Audio News

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.