Ardour 7.1 Open-Source DAW Is Here with Quick Audio Exporting, Usability Improvements

Ardour 7.1

Ardour, the popular free, open-source, and cross-platform digital audio workstation (DAW), has been updated today to version 7.1, a maintenance update to the Ardour 7.0 series that brings more usability improvements and other interesting changes for music production.

Ardour 7.1 is here only two weeks after the release of Ardour 7.0, which was a major update with numerous new and exciting features, to introduce yet another new feature called Quick Audio Export to make it easier for you to export your work in the desired format.

Ardour 7.1 improves the Cue Markers ruler with a new ‘Clear All Cues’ context menu action and a Cue Markers option in the main menu, improves the Clips feature to list the folder where files from FreeSound are stored in the clips list, and improves the mixer scenes to let you restore a mixer scene only for a selection of tracks.

This release also updates the Preferences dialog with new options to let you choose if you want the Plugin Manager to open automatically or not when plugins are missing in The Plugins page, as well as to choose what you want to do with plugin windows they’re closed in The Plugins -> GUI page.

Furthermore, Ardour 7.1 revamps the UI for external sends and returns with gain and panning control, polarity control, and the ability to customize latency, improves the readability of the X-axis units in the Export Spectogram UI, updates I/O Plugins ports to be listed separately in the connection matrix, and improves tempo map editing to make dragging of tempo markers much smoother and fix various bugs.

A bunch of usability improvements are present as well in this release, especially around automation editing to make it less painful to grab automation nodes with a mouse, add points to automation lines that always extend to the edge of regions, and improve the way automation lines are zoomed in time when using the mouse.

Other usability improvements include the removal of the visible spacer to the right of the mini-timeline, aligning toolbar buttons, adding the ability to resize the editor region list, improving labels in the connection button for internal connections, shorting the names of connection matrix tabs, and adding the ability to access the color picker by double-clicking on the mixer strip name label/color button.

Multiple PulseAudio support improvements are present as well in Ardour 7.1, along with a new TouchOSC surface definition for clip launching control, and lots of bug fixes. Check out the release notes for more details, and you can download the new release from the official website.

Image credits: Ardour/Paul Davis

Last updated 1 year ago

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