by 
Paul Davis announced today the release and general availability of Ardour 8.5 as a new maintenance update to this powerful open-source, cross-platform, and free digital audio workstation (DAW) for Linux, Windows, and macOS systems.
Coming one and a half months after Ardour 8.4, the Ardour 8.5 release is here to improve Linux support by addressing a crash reported by users in version 8.4 that occurred whenever a file selection dialog was opened. According to the devs, the crash was triggered by the presence of certain icon files. Additionally, this release implements automatic handling of SIG32, which makes it easier to use Ardour --gdb on Linux systems.
Ardour 8.5 also brings improvements to AAF import support, adds support for pitch bend to Reasonable Synth, adds a new option to enable G/YTK debug, adds additional Lua bindings for interpolation, adds Lua bindings to set session range, and adds two new Lua APIs to set the plugin and query plugin properties.
Starting with this release, Ardour now displays grid lines for triplets, quintuplets, and septuplets, adds support for locating the new position of a single control point to make the time/position more clear, adds drum names to general MIDI MIDNAM files, and uses the session-file version as part of backup file names in the backup folder.
Several issues were addressed in Ardour 8.5 to improve snapping of quintuplets and septuplets 2x factor grids, VST3 plugin support, the broken septuplet option, adding new routes in front, setting the correct Timecode widget name, loading of sessions by relative path, and the solo controller for the Monitor bus.
Check out the release notes for more details about the changes included in this release. Meanwhile, you can download Ardour 8.5 as a source tarball from the official website (requires compilation) or install it as a Flatpak app from Flathub in the coming days.
Update: Ardour 8.6 was released a few hours after Ardour 8.5 as a hotfix update to correct a drawing bug that was not noticed too late and a crash that can occur when using JACK2.
Last updated 2 weeks ago
