News

There have been issues in recent months with people subscribing (providing a monthly payment of US$1, US$4 or US$10 to help support continued development of Ardour). The problem was discovered today - the module we use to track subscription payments assumes the use of a single PayPal account, but in order to utilize PayPal's micropayments option, ardour.org uses two different accounts with PayPal. It didn't prevent subscriptions from working, but ardour.org did not know about them. This has affected all new subscriptions since I started using the micropayments system a few months ago.

The issue is now fixed, and I'm working with everyone affected by it to get them correctly registered on ardour.org.

I've recommended to quite a few Ardour users that they consider using AATranslator for handling import/export to other session file formats. It is a proprietary Windows application, but it runs well inside Wine and has dedicated and skilled developers who are focused on improving it. It would be lovely if there was an open source tool that did what AATranslator can do, but there isn't, and so I'm happy to run the following "public service annoucement" from the AATranslator team:

Its that time again – another AATranslator release! Read more below for details ....

We are happy to announce the first alpha release of Ardour 3.0. This is not the final release of 3.0, and its not even a beta release. Please read more below on what to expect from this alpha version.

Great news from Harrison Consoles .... and yes, for those who are curious, your purchase of Mixbus does generate some income for Ardour.

Mixbus™ is a full-featured Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) with "True Analog Mixing"™: a combination of Harrison's world-renowned sound and features in a knob-per-function interface. Now cross-platform on both Linux and OSX, Mixbus provides a solution for engineers and mixers who need a recorder, editor and mixing system with world-class sound and features.

Announcement from Mr. LinuxDSP: LinuxDSP has recently released the MKII Graph-EQ. This is a significant feature upgrade to the original graphical eq, and not only adds a much improved user interface which shows individual frequency bands in addition to the main EQ curve, but also adds another type of parametric filter which uses innovative DSP processing to provide a de-cramped frequency response similar to analogue EQs.

Plugins offering similar functionality on other platforms can cost as much as $500 and sometimes require extra DSP hardware, which makes this plugin a very cost effective solution. Combine it with the MBC2 multiband compressor to provide a high quality mastering solution. It can be found here:

http://www.linuxdsp.co.uk/download/lv2/download_mkii_graph_eq/index.html

Tom Szilagyi recently announced a working release of his new LV2 plugin, IR, about which he says "IR is a zero-latency, realtime, high performance signal convolver especially for creating reverb effects. Supports impulse responses with 1, 2 or 4 channels, in any soundfile format supported by libsndfile."

The feature list looks great:

• Zero-latency convolution of impulse responses with stereo audio
• Supports Mono, Stereo and 'True Stereo' (4-channel) impulses
• Realtime operation
• Very reasonable CPU consumption
• Maximum impulse length: 1M samples (~22 seconds @ 48kHz)
• Loads a large number of audio file formats
• High quality sample rate conversion of impulse responses
• Stretch control (via high quality SRC in one step integrated with impulse loading)
• Pre-delay control (0-2000 ms)
• Stereo width control of input signal & impulse response (0-150%)
• Envelope alteration with immediate visual feedback: Attack time/percent, Envelope, Length
• Reverse impulse response
• Autogain: change impulses without having to adjust 'Wet gain'
• Impulse response visualization (linear/logarithmic scale, peak & RMS)
• Easy interface for fast browsing and loading impulse responses
• Free software released under the GNU GPL v2

More information is available on the IR website. Tom thanked Fons Adriaensen for his work on zita-convolver and Erik de Castro Lopo for both libsndfile and libsamplerate, so we should too.

Forwarded from Mr. LinuxDSP ...

As announced recently on the linuxDSP website, the Pro-EQ, Dynamics and Gate plugins have recently been updated. We have recently been doing some work to improve compatibility with different distributions and out of the work done to improve functionality with Meego Linux several usability improvements have been ported back into the mainstream versions of the plugins.

Most notably, the plugin UI windows now open directly under the mouse pointer the first time they are opened, and subsequently remember their last on-screen window position. In Ardour, this means that the plugin UI now opens straight out of the mixer channel.

The plugin bundle includes mono and stereo versions of the Pro-EQ Pro-Dynamics and Pro-Gate plugins. These can provide channel Equalisation, Dynamics processing , Gate, Phase alignment, Switchable High Pass Filter and Gain in each mixer channel.

linuxDSP is one of the few, if not the only full-time commercial plugin developers to support the LV2 standard and these plugins bring DSP processing to Ardour and other compatible DAWs from developers who have over 20 years experience of the pro-audio industry and have previously worked with some of the worlds top pro-audio companies. The plugins can be found here:

http://www.linuxdsp.co.uk/download/lv2/download_pro_channel/index.html

An opportunity not to be missed.

Trying to solve a bug with importing audio, I spent the last couple of days adding a new feature to Ardour 3 that many people have been asked about for quite some time. Historically, Ardour has always stored the names of the audio files in one of two ways. One would indicate that the file lived inside the session, and the other indicated that it lived outside, somewhere else in your computer's filesystem. This meant that if you ever moved the location of the external files, Ardour wouldn't be able to find them at startup, and if you wanted the session to work, you'd need to hand edit the session file.

Well, now this is no longer true. Ardour will use a search path for all the files (audio & MIDI) that it needs for the session, and if it can't find them as it loads the session, it will ask you where to look for them. You can also edit the search path from the session properties dialog.

Just another reason for us to hurry up with the first alpha release of Ardour3, coming soon.

Linux audio documentarian (as well as swell guitar player, teacher, CSound wrangler and all around nice guy) Dave Phillips has written a very nice article for Linux Journal that describes "the ecology of Ardour", and covers a number of "off-screen" developments and collaborations that some readers might not be aware. Thanks to Dave for the nice article.

Quite a few people have been asking about the status of Ardour3. The short story is that we are getting closer to a beta release every day, in large part thanks to the outstanding work of Carl Hetherington and also a small group of very dedicated and helpful testers. Almost of the basic functionality planned an initial release is in place, which means that MIDI recording, playback and editing is in reasonable shape for use and that the audio side has too many improvements to count or even list here in this modest posting.