Thanks to the amazing hardwork of Robin Gareus and funding from Harrison Consoles, ardour.org now has
nightly builds of the development version of Ardour available.
These builds are NOT SUPPORTED, and they do not exist
to replace releases. They are a way for users who have an interest or
need to try the very latest version of Ardour to do so without
needing to build the program themselves. You should
NOT use these builds on existing sessions that you
care about. Doing so may irreversibly damage those sessions (we hope
not, but these are snapshots of our development process, so we can
offer no guarantees). Consider them for testing only.
Builds happen during "the night" as defined roughly by Central
European Time. The precise time at which each build will be available
will vary from day to day. The correct term for the process is "nychthemeral" - there's more here for word fans.
Available Builds
There are builds for the following platforms:
Linux, 32 bit
Linux, 64 bit
OS X, 32 bit
OS X, 64 bit
Windows, 32 bit
Windows, 64 bit
Subscribers
Subscribers to ardour.org can get free access to fully enabled
builds for each platform listed above, and can also choosen between
debug-enabled and fully optimized builds. You will need to login using your regular ardour.org username and password on the Nightlies site.
General Public
Non-subscribers are limited to downloading versions of each of
these builds which do not save or restore plugin settings, and are
compiled to enable debugging. This is the same policy as for the
zero-cost downloads of official releases.
Windows?
For those paying attention, yes, that list included Windows. Support
for Windows is still evolving but Ardour does build and run on
Windows (and has done done for some time).
Great idea guys, and well done. If less techincal people can get bleeding-edge builds more easily it should encourage more sponsorship/donations. I hope, anyway.
Ardour nightlies do not seem to be compiled for VST support ...
If true, can this be (re)enabled? It disappeared from the paid download briefly at some point too I think and / or got switched off by default in the build config at least once (all of which causes much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and finger-pointing at us poor hapless plug-in developers if / when things fail to work as expected...)
Likely the next release will be optimized (but with debug symbols, which does not affect performance).
The reason why 3.5.403 is not optimized is because optimizing it introduces undesirable side effects.
[tech details] among other things, Ardour 3.5.XXX relied on assert() to catch various known and unknown issues, particularly midi related ones. Those issues have meanwhile been addressed. The reasoning was that one rather wants ardour to exit (a controlled crash) than corrupt the session.[/tech details]
The current nightlies are not far away from what will become the next ardour release. There are a couple of details to be sorted out, esp transition of theme and config and there are a few bugs remaining to be squashed.
Anyway, just like with self-built versions, we welcome reporting issues pertaining the nightlies on the issue tracker at http://tracker.ardour.org/. After all, one motivation for the automated builds was to allow bug-reporters to check up on bug-fixes before the release.