Ardour 6.9 Open-Source DAW Released with All-New Plugin Manager, Many Improvements

Ardour 6.4

Ardour 6.9 open-source and cross-platform digital audio workstation (DAW) has been released today and it’s now available to download with various new features and many improvements.

Coming about one and a half months after Ardour 6.8, the Ardour 6.9 release is here to introduce an all-new Plugin Manager that shows the user a full list of plugins available on the system along with data about each one, lets you sort and filter plugins by brand, format, name, or tag, and allows you to choose the format that’s best for each plugin and hide the ones that aren’t useful at the moment.

The new Plugin Manager is accessible from the Window top-level menu and comes with new standalone scanner applications for AU and VST format plugins capable of scanning your entire plugin library. In addition, the new scanner dialog lets users skip individual plugins without canceling the entire scan process or you can set it to automatically timeout when taking a break.

Ardour 6.9 also introduces a new GUI control for blocking MIDI patch changes during the loading of a session, new Preference items to enable or disable VST2 and/or VST3 plugin support, support for LV2 plugins with multiple Atom ports, such as fro the Sfizz sample-based musical synthesizer and its SFZ instrument format, as well as explicit actions for changing between stacked and overlaid region views.

On top of that, Ardour 6.9 makes slip-contents editing more easily accessible using the Ctrl+Shift+drag combination anywhere in a region, improves Mackie Control support, makes loop recording work again and correctly computes MIDI capture duration when doing loop recording, and correctly implements MIDI capture alignment.

Last but not least, this release comes with a bunch of improvements to the playlist management capabilities of the software, as well as some Varispeed changes, updated translations, and many bug fixes, all of which are detailed in the release notes. You can download Ardour 6.9 right now from the official website or install it from the software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution.

Image credits: Ardour/Paul Davis

Last updated 3 years ago

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