Ardour 5.0

[64Guitars]

Ardour 5.0 is now available.

http://ardour.org/

This excellent DAW for Linux, OS X, and now Windows adds a tabbed user interface in this new version. Till now, there were separate windows for the tracks and mixer and it could be inconvenient to switch between them. But now you can have a single window with tabs for the track view and mixer view, so it's easy to switch between views. Of course, you can still have them in separate windows if you prefer. For example, if you have two or more monitors connected to your computer, you could have the track view on one monitor and the mixer on another. But, for those of us with just one monitor, the new tabbed user interface should be a big improvement.




Another new feature is Tempo Ramps. Many DAWs lack this very useful feature which lets you specify a starting tempo and ending tempo, then gradually changes the tempo between those two points.




See the What's New page for more new features in Ardour 5.0.

http://ardour.org/whatsnew.html

[Flash Harry]

I'm a Reaper fan, but I'm going to have a look at this, thanks for the heads-up 64g!

[Johnny Robbo]

Just downloaded the trial version on my Win7 machine. I'm thinking about going to Ubuntu on this PC & want a good DAW that will work in that OS. I thought I'd try out Ardour in Windows & if I like it, then I'd make the switch to Ubuntu.

Sadly, I couldn't get it to work. At first there was a horrible howling feedback coming through the speakers, then (after me adjusting nothing) it abated and gave me a guitar sound with a load of delay - even though I hadn't added any. I created an audio track & tried to record on it, but nothing happened - no recording.

Then I went into Cakewalk (after first closing Ardour) to check that still worked & it didn't - it froze before it had loaded & I had to CTRL+ALT+DEL out of it. I uninstalled Ardour & Cakewalk went back to it's normal self.

I'll set up my old XP machine with Ubuntu & try again on that I think. It would be good to escape the Windows universe, but I wonder if I'm sufficiently technically skilled to set up something like Ardour, which seems much more involved than Cakewalk on Windows.

Hey-ho... keep trying I suppose 

[Hook]

Intense stuff there, thanks for keeping us in the know.
Rock on!

[64Guitars]

And now there's version 5.1.

https://ardour.org/whatsnew.html

It fixes some bugs and adds some new features. I like that it now has a built-in plugin for fluidsynth which lets you load any SF2 SoundFonts.

[64Guitars]

Ardour 6.0 was released a few days ago.

http://ardour.org/whatsnew.html

It's available for Linux, Mac and Windows.

[WarpCanada]

I'm hoping Ardour gets VST3 support at some point.

The commercial DAW "Mixbus" from Harrison Consoles is built on top of the Ardour source code plus it has its own proprietary closed source bits.

Ah over here on news.ycombinator I found the actual lead Ardour dev, and THEY ARE working on VST3! Yay...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23739517

[64Guitars]

Ardour 6.5 was released a few days ago. It now includes support for VST3, including the Presonus VST3 extensions.

https://ardour.org/whatsnew.html

[Flash Harry]

Oh - I will have to have another look at this.

Thanks 64G!

[WarpCanada]

This is really cool. My day job is that I'm a coder, and C/C++ is what Ardour is coded in.

I think I could probably help this project out a bit.

https://github.com/Ardour/ardour