Ardour 8.4 Open-Source DAW Released with Experimental AAF Import

This release adds a new "adwaita" color theme based on GNOME's Adwaita theme and ensure support for modern Linux distros.
Marius Nestorby Marius Nestor0
Ardour 8.4

Paul Davis announced today the release and general availability of Ardour 8.4 as a new maintenance update to this powerful open-source, cross-platform, and free digital audio workstation (DAW) for Linux, Windows, and macOS.

Coming a little over two months after Ardour 8.2 (the Ardour 8.3 release was skipped due to a critical bug), the Ardour 8.4 release is here to introduce experimental support for importing AAF (Advanced Authoring Format) files. Since this feature is experimental, the devs ask users to send feedback and report bugs.

Another important change in Ardour 8.4 is an updated GUI toolkit (GTK) to ensure the application will be supported on current and future versions of popular GNU/Linux distributions. This change will allow users and Linux distro maintainers alike to continue building Ardour from sources.

“Perhaps the most important change is that we have moved the source code of our GUI toolkit (GTK v2) into the Ardour source tree,” said Paul Davis. “This leaves us free to (slowly) strip down aspects of the toolkit that we do not use, and potentially modify it as needed in the future. It also means that even the distribution builds of Ardour for Linux will contain our patches to GTK, which has historically not been the case.”

Also for Linux users, this release introduces a new “adwaita” color theme based on GNOME’s Adwaita theme. Moreover, it improves support for newer Linux distributions by allowing the use ardour --gdb.

Ardour 8.4 also updates support for several controllers including Akai MIDIMix, Lexicon MPX100, Yamaha SY85, Donner DMK25, Arturia MiniLab 3, and FaderPort 8. In addition, this release sets the default MIDI CC values to be more in line with MIDI specs.

Various other changes include updated region groups to no longer group multiple takes on a single track, tooltips to describe ops on the pianoroll header, metadata for the session property editor to enable search support, as well as support for capturing MIDI notes that were already on/down when recording starts.

Of course, several bugs were addressed so make sure that you check out the release notes for more details. Meanwhile, you can download Ardour 8.4 from the official website or from Flathub if you want to install it as a Flatpak app.

Image credits: Paul Davis

Last updated 2 months ago

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