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.
Sampo has also done some preliminary work on a basic take management system. Its fairly simplistic at the moment, but initial reports from a few users are quite positive about its usefulness and usability.
With the other fixes to the 2.X codebase and these two features, I plan to try to release 2.6 by the end of this week (October 12th). Other than bug fixes, that may be the end of the line for the 2.X series, since development work on Ardour is shifting firmly to the 3.X series which is now almost functional.
the difficulty with the subscriptions is that the amount is not freeform the way donations can be - they have to be “pre-registered” with paypal. that means i would need to guess at various amounts, which i feel wary of doing. if someone really believes it would a good idea, i can add, what, US$25/month and US$50/month options?
Although you’ve said in the past that the fst (for Ardour VST) code will not be deprecated it is not functional in 3.0 for the time being. I would respectfully ask that you please, please, pretty please have it functional again as 3.0 gets closer to prime time. I know you don’t officially support ArdourVST or maintain it, but I think outside the developer sphere you might be surprised how many people either use it or are interested in that functionality. There are still regularly posts on the forum about compiling/using it.
DSSI-VST 0.7 is a great workaround as well, but it certainly is no better than a properly set up ArdourVST, and suffers from many of the same limitations.
Thanks for a top notch sequencer! I was tempted back to my Windows Partition for a week or so but I just missed using Ardour too much!
Please consider keeping VST support into version 3.0.
Tremendous to hear this news! Will us users on OS X be able to test the 3.x beta versions? If so, I’d love to be part of it. Also, is there any way to subscribe more than $10 a month? It seems a bit low.
I think that US$120/year is a more than adequate fee for a subscription by anyone in the first world. If you’d like to contribute more, you can also make one-shot donations.
I’ve done that, but also settled on simply funding two subscriptions. I agree that it would be groovy to be able to subscribe at a higher level, but I have a workaround that works for me.
There is so much work going on on 3.x, and some of it at such a low level, that there is really zero chance of us providing betas for some time. We would literally have to release several times a day sometimes, to ensure that you didn’t end up encountering substantial issues that have just been fixed.
Once 3.x gets into more “stable” territory (i.e. most of the functionality in 2.6 is working, and MIDI functionality is being tweaked rather than implemented), we will try to make some 3.0 betas available for OS X as well.
I think that US$120/year is a more than adequate fee for a subscription by anyone in the first world. If you’d like to contribute more, you can also make one-shot donations.
Coming back to subscriptions, I think the 120 USD per year is a decent proposition (to which I’ve been subscribing), and I’ve always thought it was such an interesting way of fundraising for open source development (a tough job, speaking from first-hand experience, see campware.org – we’ll try subscription one day too). Cause all you get is a good feeling, nothing explicit in return (so no extra burden on developers). Perhaps we should have some end-of-year, summer solstice, you name it occasions when we’re prodded as users to give a one-time donation on top of this… What happened to the idea of making money via manual sales (I recall reading that ages ago). Perhaps going with flossmanuals.net would be an option (we’re also considering that).
This is indeed a useful feature! I think many beginners struggled on this in the past because the tracklist was more or less unknown at first.
And hooray for 3.0! Can’t wait to see it more stable (at least the features which are already present in the 2.0 branch) and actually use and test ist. I hope there will be more news regarding 3.0 in the future, so that the normal users like me are getting more behind the scene.
