Ardour 3.3 – the latest version of the open source DAW for Linux & Mac – is now available.
Ardour 3.3 includes a few new features and the usual assortment of bug fixes.
Here’s what’s new in Ardour 3.3:
New Features
- Metering – 3.3 brings some significant changes to the metering both visually and technically.
- Meter scales have been made more detailed and should allow for more accurate reading.
- Meter balistics remain the same but have been better labeled in the configuration dialogue to indicate how they relate to existing metering standards. Meter configurations can be found in Edit->Preferences->GUI
- Right clicking on a meter now offers two different meter choices, either Peak, or a combination of RMS + Peak.
- Meterbridge – 3.3 also introduces a new window, namely the Meterbridge. This is a compact view of all meters in a session and will prove useful for large recording sessions, particularly live recording. This has various configuarble elements that can be shown or hidden via the menu Session->Properties->Meterbridge.
- Freesound Searching and Usage
- There have been a variety of visible and internal-only changes to Ardour’s interactions with the Freesound database of sound samples:
- Use the new freesound-download-dir config variable to decide the location of sound files downloaded from Freesound.
- Make download of sound files multi-threaded. Each sound file download takes place in its own thread, and has its own progress bar and cancel button, which stack up from the bottom of the list of results.
- Sound files download into a file with a ‘.part’ suffix, which is then renamed to the intended name on success.
- Add a ‘Similar’ button, which searches Freesound for sounds similar to the currently-selected sound in the results list.
- GUI Changes
- Make scroll-wheel modifier keys consistent in main editor window and editor summary pane.
- If the ScrollZoomVerticalModifier key is used with the scroll wheel over the editor summary pane, zoom the editor vertically.
- New track height button icons
Ardour is open source, but a donation is required to enable saving of plugin settings. See the Ardour site for details.
Ah, Ardour. The Washington Generals of the DAW world. I supported you when I was on Linux, but I’ll be damned if I support you on Mac. Good luck.
Never heard of The Washington Generals before, lol!
What DAW is the Globetrotter then?
Either you have a Mac, in which case your point is bafflingly stupid (you’d use it on Linux but not OS X!!!), or you don’t have a Mac, in which case your point is also bafflingly stupid because you’re not able to use it on a Mac. You must be an Android user.
How is that “bafflingly stupid”? Ardour is terrible. It also happens to be the best available option for Linux. These two statements are not mutually exclusive. It would, then, make sense to use it when one is running Linux in their music production environment, and not when one is using OS X, for which many superior options are available.
Quick clarification: Ardour 3 for OSX is NOT officially released yet, just a beta. They don’t have enough beta testers, last I heard, so they aren’t making as quick of progress as hoped with bug reporting and fixing.
Anyway, a demo version is available, no preset saving, details here: http://community.ardour.org/osx-demo
And specifically it says:
The free demo version of Ardour does not support saving plugin settings, or using presets for plugins. Any adjustments you make to plugin parameters will be lost when you quit the program.
So I think my point is: go get it and play with it, and report the bugs! So we can eventually get an official release for OSX.