Ardour 7.5 Revamps Tempo Maps Editing, Remembers I/O Connections Per Device

This release also adds the ability to rename loaded plugins in the processor box and other improvements.
Ardour 7.5

Ardour 7.5 has been released as yet another update to this popular, free, powerful, and open-source DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows systems.

Coming two months after Ardour 7.4, the Ardour 7.5 release is here to introduce mapping tempo to real performance, a feature that will allow sound engineers to create tempo map nodes and easily adjust their positions to match onsets in their recordings. The tempo mapping mode can now also be used by default.

Another new feature in Ardour 7.5 is the ability to save and restore I/O connections per device when switching back and forth between multiple locations and audio interfaces (e.g. ALSA and PulseAudio on Linux). Moreover, Ardour 7.5 introduces the ability to rename loaded plugins in the processor box.

This release also makes it possible to automatically activate supported control surfaces once they’re connected to USB MIDI ports. This feature currently works with the Ableton Push 2, PreSonus FaderPort 8, PreSonus FaderPort 16, Softube Console 1, and Contour Design Shuttle controllers.

While Ardour 7.4 introduced sections to mark a range as a chorus and paste its entire contents and automation elsewhere, Ardour 7.5 improves this feature by adding some editor commands like cutting and pasting, copying and pasting, deleting, and inserting.

Among other noteworthy changes, Ardour 7.5 improves support for the Ableton Push 2 controller by adding the ability to send Modulation messages instead of Pitch Bend by holding down Shift while using the touch strip, adds support for Roland SonicCell MIDNAM files, and makes the Dummy backend a real-time option.

Moreover, this release makes several non-editor commands undoable, adds a progress display to session archiving, makes playlist rendering of non-overlapping MIDI Regions and duplication of multiple regions faster, adds support for subgroup busses for MIDI tracks, and optimizes delaylines to support multiple-MIDI buffers.

The Playhead has been improved as well in Ardour 7.5 to make it insensitive to mouse events by default and to allow you to use it as a snapping target. Of course, various bugs were addressed in this release to make your Ardour experience more stable and reliable.

For more details, check out the release notes page on the official website, from where you can also download Ardour 7.5 as a source tarball if you want to manually compile it on your GNU/Linux distribution. Otherwise, you can install it as a Flatpak app from Flathub.

Image credits: Ardour/Paul Davis

Last updated 10 months ago

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com