Ardour 3.3 released

  <p>
    Keeping up with our roughly monthly new releases, Ardour 3.3
    is out and includes a few new features and the usual
    assortment of bug fixes. Developers Robin Gareus and Colin
    Fletcher did some great work to push this release forward.
  </p>

As usual you can download it from the usual place, and as usual subscribers get this update without cost. Thanks to everyone for their support (and encouragement).

  <p>
    Regrettably, the OS X release situation has still not
    improved, with a variety of things that require attention
    there (particularly plugin support) before a real release can
    be considered. A demo copy of 3.3 is <a href="/osx-demo">available</a> (fully featured
    except that is has no saving or restoring of plugin settings,
    and no plugin presets).
  </p>

New Features

  <h3>Metering</h3>
  <p>
    3.3 brings some significant changes to the metering both visually and
    technically.
  </p>
  <p>
    Visually the meters have been spruced up somewhat to look more appealing and to
    aid legibility and reading. Meter colours now have hard changes between them
    rather than gradients, with the colour changes being at significant levels,
    some of which are configurable, -18 or -20 dBFS meter line up levels, for
    example. Green, yellow, orange and red have been chosen to indicate an
    increasingly high level signal, which in the track header particularly,
    increases readability even when track heights are small. Levels reaching 0dBFS
    also now give a red background to the whole meter. Left clicking the overload indicator at the top of the meter clears this.
  </p>
  <p>
    Meter scales have been made more detailed and should allow for more accurate
    reading.
  </p>
  <p>
    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
  </p>
  <p>
    Right clicking on a meter now offers two different meter choices, either
    Peak, or a combination of RMS + Peak.
  </p>

  <h3>Meterbridge</h3>
  <p>
    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.
  </p>

  <h3>Freesound Searching and Usage</h3>

  <p>
    There have been  a variety of visible and internal-only changes to
    Ardour's interactions with the Freesound database of sound samples:
    <ul>
      <li>Use the new <code>freesound-download-dir</code> config variable to decide the location
        of sound files downloaded from Freesound.</li>
      <li> 
        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.</li>
      <li>    Sound files download into a file with a '.part' suffix, which is then
        renamed to the intended name on success.</li>
      <li>    Add a 'Similar' button, which searches Freesound for sounds similar to the
        currently-selected sound in the results list.</li>
    </ul>
  </p>

  <h2>GUI Changes</h2>
  <p>
    <ul>
      <li>Make scroll-wheel modifier keys consistent in main editor window and editor
        summary pane.</li>
      <li>If the ScrollZoomVerticalModifier key is used with the scroll wheel over
        the editor summary pane, zoom the editor vertically.</li>
      <li>New track height button icons</li>
    </ul>
  </p>

  <h2>Fixes</h2>

  <p>
    <ul>
      <li>Avoid symbol name conflicts with Aspect LinuxVST plugin, making it possible to
        use the plugin without semi-random crashes.</li>
      <li>Previous "free" binary
      versions from ardour.org for Linux did actually save and
        restore plugin state. No longer. Consider the old stuff a
      gift :)</li>
      <li>Updated version of ffmpeg included for video timeline work</li>
      <li>Video timeline: avoid problems with frame numbering
        (particularly in Quicktime movies) by using avi/mjpeg (insted of mpeg4) for video proxy.
        Average picture quality is slightly worse, but seeking works accurately.</li>
      <li>Video timeline: remember original video-file for later export/mux</li>
      <li>Prompt the user for confirmation before removing an export format.</li>
      <li>Fix display of meters when track outputs change repeatedly between audio and MIDI</li>
      <li>Fix crash when showing external send GUI</li>
      <li>Fix empty Locations window</li>
      <li>Make the CD track details visible whenever the CD range box has been
        ticked, rather than only when the user toggles the box on.</li>
      <li>Fix alignment of meters on midi-tracks</li>
      <li>Fix race/endless loop on exit</li>
      <li>Reset meters when changing metering-point or ports</li>
      <li>Fix save/restore plugin windows position and size (without an explicit save)</li>
      <li>More extensive centralization of window visibility management.</li>
      <li>Update plugin UIs at reasonable rate (25Hz) and clean up plugin-ui meter
        layout, including colors.</li>
      <li>Make Help > About > Configuration window suitable for small[er] screens</li>
      <li>Ignore mouse-scroll if scroll-bar is not present.</li>
      <li>Load bundled LV2 plugins in LV2PluginInfo::discover() later in startup process, 
        to make it actually work.</li>
      <li>Remove old CMT animatics code (functionally replaced by the video timeline)</li>
      <li>Do not expose freewheeling or samplerate controls/ports on LV2 plugins</li>
      <li>Compilable (almost) with Clang++</li>
    </ul>
  </p>

  <h2>Contributors</h2>
  <p>
    Robin Gareus, Colin Fletcher, Robin Gareus, Michael Fisher,
    Robin Gareus, Ben Loftis, Robin Gareus, Julien de Kozak, Robin
    Gareus, Adrian Knoth, Robin Gareus, Alexandre Prokoudine,
    Robin Gareus, Paul Davis.
  </p>

  <h2>Translation Updates</h2>
  <p>
    Russian translation updated (Alexandre Prokoudine)
  </p>

thanks! great release pace!

The meters are a big improvement (as is the addition of a meter bridge) however I’m finding that the meter scale text doesn’t align / fit properly with the scale markings (dependent on screen resolution, fonts, system configuration etc, amongst other things…) which can spoil the way they look :frowning:

Did you forget to include Robin Gareus as contributor ?? :wink:

Did not notice this joke was already made… Sorry, Anyway, nice work…

Thanks for your great work

in OS X, maybe theres a little tricky solution to keep different settings of for example a reverb plugin:
add some tracks, in the mixer window, copy the plugin by holding down -alt- key from one track to another , make changes in every track plugin setting, save the sessioon.
All settings are avaible on different tracks, and some day, these settings can be saved…

Lovin it! Thanks guys.

linuxdsp,

This has just been fixed in rev 3.3-6-gd51a1ec.

Meters+bridge are still work in progress with more to come…
However, we felt that in their current state they’re already very useful and along with the many other bug-fixes a release is due even though it’s incomplete.

Cheers!
robin

JL - I don’t really have any idea what problem your description is intended to solve.

Paul- sorry, Ill try to be more precise: for a reverb plugin, for ex., its possible to start with no preset, and edit directly values. But cannot save. ( A3 in OS X)
So an idea is to have several effect busses with variations of a reverb plugin on each. Make all changes on each, and keep them accessible by muting the others, to choose the final sound. By saving the session with the x effect busses ( each with a reverb variation ), all can be found and some day, saved as different user presets…
-without any pretensions, just a little thing to avoid losing plugin variations.

Paul- sorry, Ill try to be more precise: … ( A3 in OS X)
sorry, came twice

JL,

This work-aound for the ‘free version’ seems inconvenient enough to me to shell out some of bucks (or spend the time to compile from source).
The main advantage of presets is that they’re not limited to a single session and the main disadvantage of your approach is that it may take up some more CPU for all the busses.

…but yeah it’s a workable solution for the OSX version until someone steps up and fixes the remaining major issues so that a official release can be made…

Thanks Paul

robin,
That’s great, I’ll try it out, the meters are a big improvement compared to previous releases, as is the addition of the meter bridge. It will be interesting to see how that develops. I guess I was being a bit pedantic - ironically, stuff which is way wrong I can normally tolerate, better than that which is just almost right, but, I have also had to spend a lot of time porting things to Mac recently, so it was a bit of a culture shock coming back to linux again… :slight_smile:

Very impressed with the recent update, the new metering graphics look very professional. Ive had some unusial instant quits but they are all plugin related when opening the gui during playback, so its probably more to do with expecting too much of my machine since its not the greatest setup and not the most stable PC i have owned.

There seems to be some serious bugs with editing in midi causing fatal crashes and lost data. Ive submitted a bug report, i dont know if anyone is experiencing the same problems, i did notice in some of the bug output that it mentions that ardour is built on gcc 3.3 and on my system i have a newer version 4. somthing

Currently using 3.2, but serious crashes only occur if I edit MIDI-data while playing back. Always stop it before editing!

I get crashes even when its not playing and ive narrowed it down to notes being moved hard against regions, i think theres some buggy behaviour when dealing with regions as ive had notes disapear if i move a region to line up with the beat and the note at the beginning is right on the beat.

Im gonna have a go at compiling ardour 3.3 from source since gcc on my system differers from what ardour was built against.

I wouldn’t recommend Ardour for serious MIDI work at this time. Tested it recently and stability was OK, but I had all sorts of other problems: notes dissapearing, looping not working correctly, MIDI playback sometimes stops while transport is running. Too many bugs for such a short test I performed to consider it useable.

good to hear its not just me having these problems, i have found that v3.0 is the most stable and at least doesnt crash often, infact its only crashed once in the project im working on. its not a serious project.

problem is i have had the exact same problems using muse, infact muse is worse which is a shame because it supports more plugins than ardour does or atleast more synths show up in it.

but because ardour has such good audio abilities and the workflow is good, i can put up with the different method of midi because i can work with audio so much better and with better audio editing.

Ive had instances of midi playback appearing to stop during plaback but i think its to do with note handling and if notes somehow overlap without you seeing and it interupts the next note, well that seems what like it happening because if i shorten the notes where it was happening so there was a gap the notes that wouldnt play would now play. its hard to track down because it would only happen with 1 soundfont i was using and that was a drum sound font, but it would not happen consistently if i had notes run up to the end of the next note and only in random places. it didnt happen in my bass parts using a different sound font where all notes run to the beginning of the next note with no gaps and they all play fine.

My recomendation is to stick with 3 it seems the most stable. For me i can work round some of the quirks because i work mainly with audio.

Lets not forget that we are really lucky to have access to software that we can choose to pay what we want, and i am very pleased with what i have been able to do considering i have only donated $5. I could have payed alot of money for commercial software and still have had similar problems (though maybe not as several and often).

My intentions are still to donate more money when i can. I dont use ardour for anything that makes me money but it has been usefull to promote what i do, and in the future i intend to use it in some form as part of my business.

for now im trying to promote ardour as much as i can. If i get any business that involves ardour and i get paid for it id donate something from anything earned and obviously promote that i used ardour.

For now since i dont earn anything from using ardour, i mention that ardour was used and inlcude a link, infact i need to update some of my songs or projects to inlcude links to this site.