Ardour

Ardour is a digital audio workstation that runs natively on OS X. You can use it to record, edit and mix multi-track audio. Produce your own CD's. Mix video soundtracks. Experiment with new ideas about music and sound. Generate sound installations for 12 speaker gallery shows...

Ardour capabilities include: multichannel recording, non-destructive editing with unlimited undo/redo, full automation support, a powerful mixer, unlimited tracks/busses/plugins, timecode synchronization, and hardware control from surfaces like the Mackie Control Universal. If you've been looking for a tool similar to ProTools, Nuendo, Pyramix, or Sequoia, you might have found it.

Above all, Ardour strives to meet the needs of professional users. This means implementing all the "hard stuff" that other DAWs (even some leading commercial apps) handle incorrectly or not at all. Ardour has a completely flexible "anything to anywhere" routing system, and will allow as many physical I/O ports as your system allows. Ardour supports a wide range of audio-for-video features such as video-synced playback and pullup/pulldown sample rates. You will also find powerful features such as "persistent undo", multi-language support, and destructive track punching modes that aren't available on other platforms.

New Features:

• Improvements to the template manager dialog.
• Lua templates for tracks and sessions can now be created/scripted.
• New session dialog functionality improved, with new templates and track wizards.
• New track dialog functionality improved, with new templates and track wizards.
• Expose Lua bindings for VCA create/delete/assign/unassign.
• New patch selector dialog for MIDI tracks. This can be accessed by right clicking in the track header area.
• Ardour's generic GUI for instrument plugins now includes a keyboard to allow auditioning the plugin settings.
• Support for a new LV2 extension to notify the host about MIDI bank/program changes (e.g. driven by the plugin's own GUI).
• Faderport 8: double-click on select button resets gain to 0dB.
• Display playback-only devices when using JACK.

General Fixes and Improvements:

• Fix MIDI quantization when not using US English.
• Fix selection of quantization note-end grid size.
• Catch exceptions thrown from Lua scripts.
• Fix handling of MIDI channels in the Transform dialog.
• Improve the heuristic used to display track/bus I/O connections in a compact form, as well a connection menus.
• Clicks on I/O menus now always connect, rather than toggle connected status.
• OSC: gracefully handle the user sending the wrong number of parameters.
• OSC: changing jog mode no longer stops transport unless started by scrub/shuttle.
• Secondary clock visibility is now a global preference rather than a per-session setting.
• The editor's summary view is now constrained to the extent of actual regions, rather than the session extent, by default. This can be reset from a right-click on the summary.
• New configuration setting for playhead auto-scroll speed. If you want to scroll quickly, it is preferred to zoom out first, then scroll.
• New configuraton setting to define how much zooming will be easily allowed beyond the extents of actual regions in the session.
• Generic plugin GUI: fix sizing and layout for automation state controls in plugins with many controls.
• Increase priority of the thread involved in automation recording. This fixes an issue with sparse automation recording when the CPU is busy.
• Update the included version of NSS (a secure networking library), to provide some features required by some plugins.
• Fix the way MIDI filenames are "bumped" during snapshots and playlist copying.
• Fix crash bug in Ableton Push 2 support, introduced in a recent version.
• Fix various tooltips to avoid problems with special characters in their text.
• Catch some exceptions during session loading.
• Relax some restrictions imposed by the Lua sandbox (for scripts).