After a frenetic month getting things ready for the SAE version of Ardour, I am happy to announce the public release of Ardour 2.7. For the first time, this includes public versions for OS X (Intel and (PPC) as well as our usual (source tarball. (Note: new or old users of Ardour or JACK on OS X should read this information before attempting to run Ardour.) This release is dominated by dramatic improvements in OS X GUI performance and startup time, but it also contains a lot of significant bug fixes. However, somewhat to my surprise, Ardour also accumulated quite a lot of nice new features since 2.6.1, which you can read about below ...

In April 2007, SAE Institute agreed to become a corporate sponsor for the Ardour project. Focus of the collaboration between Paul Davis, creator and developer of Ardour, and Armand Klenk, Head Instructor Audio at SAE Munich, was the development of an OS X version of the Linux-based software. A special student version, created in a parallel effort, will now make the open-source digital audio workstation even more accessible to beginners. With contributions from other Ardour developers, particularly Nick Mainsbridge and assistance from the GTK/OSX team, we are pleased to announce the first public release of the Ardour/SAE version. Read more below …

After languishing for months in the horror of hardware construction and the herding of cats, long-time Ardour developer Sampo Savolainen jumped back in to working on his favorite DAW and added support for the Wiimote as a remote control. You just need working bluetooth support on your computer, the right library, and of course a Wiimote. Not only did Sampo implement all this in a weekend, he even made a video showing how to use it. Read more to watch it and get more details ...

Although Ardour 3.0 is not yet ready for serious testing, it is the subject of some cool development work. Hans Baier just added support for MIDI Clock sync, which means that Ardour's transport can now slave to you MIDI sequencing hardware/software without relying on more sophisticated (and better, but less widely used) protocols like MIDI Machine Control or MIDI Time Code. Not only that, but Hans' implementation, like our existing MTC slave code, syncs to the incoming signal amazingly fast. Read more below for a few extra details.

A bit sooner than expected, we have a fix for one very notable and ugly bug that was still affecting 2.6 (plugin automation tracks would be drawn in the wrong place on the screen). As a result, Ardour 2.6.1 is now available. For those waiting on OS X releases, we have a 2.6 native release already, and PPC will follow early next week; both will be updated to 2.6.1. Its not clear if or when there will be an X11-based release. Thanks to Sampo Savolainen for his work diagnosing and fixing this bug.

Ardour 2.6 has been released. This version is notable mostly for many dramatic improvements to GUI performance on OS X (native) and a few very important crashing fixes. But it also contains several interesting and useful new features and some non-crashing bug fixes that are nevertheless extremely significant. Read more below ...

There is a new plugin information page to help those looking for plugins. One of the things it needs the most is a list of recommended plugins (LADSPA, LV2 primarily). If you have some experience with LADSPA plugins that you’d like to recommend, please comment on this story, and I’ll merge responses back into the plugins page. Yes, this is not a wiki :)

As ridiculous as it may be, Ardour has had only one way to change the order of tracks in the editor window since it began - dragging the track names around in the list of tracks attached to one side of the window. In SVN for 2.X, I've just added the new move-selected-tracks-up and move-selected-tracks-down commands, which are bound to Shift-Up and Shift-Down by default. So now you can just select one or more tracks and press a key (or two) to move them up and down. Its a little thing, but little things sometimes matter. On OS X it matters a lot because that dragging method doesn't actually work. There's more to read below ...