Ardour 3.5.380 released

  <p>
    Ardour 3.5.380 is (another) <strong>CRITICAL</strong> bug fix
    release. <strong>ALL USERS ARE RECOMMENDED TO
    UPGRADE</strong>. Additionally, <strong>ALL LINUX
    DISTRIBUTIONS SHOULD IMMEDIATELY UPGRADE/UPDATE TO THIS
    RELEASE</strong>. Distributing earlier versions of 3.5 at this
    point is irresponsible and risks our users' data.
  </p>
  <p>
    This release includes several absolutely vital fixes for bugs
    could lead to audio and MIDI files being irreversibly deleted
    from disk. We do not know precisely how these losses happened
    - no user ever found a reliable recipe to recreate all of them
    - but reports from several different users did lead to a
    careful code review which uncovered some potential for file
    loss. One very repeatable loss of a MIDI file after unlinking
    a copy of a MIDI region was very definitely fixed.
  </p>
  <p>
    There are a few other minor fixes and improvements described
    below.
  </p>
  <p>
    As usual you can download it from <a href="/download">the usual
      place</a>, and as usual subscribers get this update without
    cost. Thanks to everyone for their support (and encouragement).
  </p>
  <p>
    Once again, the OS X release situation has still not improved, though
    a demo 64 bit copy of this version is available (fully featured except that is has
    does no saving or restoring of plugin settings, and no plugin presets).
  </p>        

  <h2 class="section-header">Additions &amp; Changes</h2>
  <p>
    <ul>
      <li> do not crash when considering whether a directory called "midi" or
        "mid" might be a MIDI file</li>
      <li>Clarify Audio/Video import options</li>
      <li>Fix black-frame generation when exporting video</li>
      <li>Add option to display the mixer in fullscreen</li>
      <li>Generic MIDI control now correctly handles log-scaled parameters
        (fixes #5890)
      <li>Fix -d (disable all plugins) argument</li>
      <li>Remove all explicit use of the gio library</li>
    </ul>
  </p>

  <h2 class="section-header">Developers</h2>
  <p>
    Robin Gareus, Paul Davis, Adrian Knoth
  </p>

Thanks Paul and everyone, nice release

Thanks for fixing bugs. Now MIDI-Clock also works as it should. Haven’t had any issues so far. :slight_smile:

i lost a really important file on mac osx 2.x i will most likely continue to use it i tried a lot of other apps and they all suck please update the mac intel soon
thanks

@dancameron46

You mean you lost a file using 2.x on OS X? This would be the first case I have heard of of Ardour 2.x doing this(Which has been around for many years), which would make me suspect something else happened. Or do you mean you lost a file using 3.x on OS X, which wouldn’t be but so surprising and in particular is why it is still considered testing because issues can happen and reports are needed to fix them.

I’m sorry to report this, but yesterday on opening of a project, Ardour (3.5.380) complains about a missing Midi-file… :frowning:

The issues with MIDI files are different and separate from the audio file losses that were (partially) fixed in 3…5.380. Once someone comes with a recipe for the missing MIDI file case, I can fix it. Note: I do know about the MIDI issue in the case where an EMPTY MIDI region is created. This needs fixing, but there is no data loss (the region contained no data)

I'm sorry to report this, but yesterday on opening of a project, Ardour (3.5.380) complains about a missing Midi-file... :(

This is quite worrying - seems to me as though the problem can be summarised as:

  1. Files go missing, not always because of a problem with Ardour
  2. FIles go missing because of a problem with Ardour for a variety of reasons, though not always one which is understood.

From a user point of view, its now easy to confuse these two points, and the great danger for Ardour, is that without any clear and precise reason, and possibly even when one is found, these issues are going to persist - even if only because of 1. being blamed on 2.
My worry is whether users can ever have confidence that their work is safe? or has Ardour simply become too complex to ever fully resolve this issue?

@paul: Maybe its an empty region which got lost, I haven’t investigated it further, all data in the currently used playlists is there, so there is no real loss of data. I will check, if there are any missing regions in the unused playlists (which are going to be deleted anyway…)

sadly, i have to confirm that 3.5.380 still keeps loosing files. yesterday i had this experience with one of the channels of a stereo .wav imported previously that day. it was an audio-only session (no midi regions). so, according to linuxdsp’s scheme, this would definitely be case 2, because the splitting of stereo files on import is done by ardour.

@paul: Sorry, for the late reply… After using the latest release for some time now, there aren’t any data losses with midi-regions. The missing files were all empty, as you noted before.

I wonder when the new update will be. Its September now and the last update was in May.

Thanks for replying Paul. Good luck to the whole dev. team.

We wonder too. The development branch is now more than 3000 commits after 3.5 (version the last release which was 380 commits). I am waiting to solve a problem with MIDI files that is very difficult to fix correctly. Once that is fixed, I will release a “hotfix” 3.5 release, and we will move on making the development branch be the new “master”. Still no idea on when that will be released.