Open-Source Music Production Software “Ardour 6.0” Released, first major release in two years

Editorial Staff

May 24, development team of open-source music production software “Ardour” announced the latest major release “Ardour 6.0”. It introduces new features like latency compensation as a result of their work on architectural changes.

Ardour is a DAW (digital audio workstation) software equipped with functions such as recording, editing, and mixing audios. It runs on all platforms (Windows, macOS, Linux, and FreeBSD). It supports both audio and MIDI and can create files in various file formats like WAV, AIFF, CAF, BWF, FLAC, Ogg/Vorbis, and MP3. It supports different plugins such as LV2, VST, and AU (AudioUnits). It is licensed under the GNU Public License v2.

The latest version Ardour 6 is the successor of version 5 series, released in 2016. There has been a long gap since the release of version 5.12 in September 2017. The reason for this was because they needed time to work on internal engineering.

Latency in signal processing flow is improved with full latency compensation along any signal pathways. This version contains high-quality resampling engine to deal with Varispeed, functionality for changing playback speed.

This version provides “cue monitoring” functionality, which lets users hear existing data while listening to the input signal. Also, users can now record from any positions in a Channel’s signal flow.

They also focused their attention on improving MIDI handling. They have completely changed the way MIDI data is handled during playback. They have been able to fix a large number of issues. They say that they will continue to work on improving the MIDI workflow.

The new “Pin management” system supports arbitrary connections between plug-ins.

In this version, FLAC has been added as an option for native recording format. Also, it now supports MP3 audio files for both import and export across all OS platforms, and export supports meta-data-tagging.

There are many other enhancements. After the release of version 6.0, the development team is willing to go back to the every-other-month release cycle. 

Ardour
https://ardour.org/