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Ardour 8.8 (Open Source DAW) Drops Fresh Fixes & Features

Ardour is one of the most popular and powerful open-source digital audio workstations (DAW) around, and a major new update was recently made available.

Now, I can’t profess to be some kind of music-making maestro, though I did spend much of my late teens face-first in FL Studio (formerly Fruity Loops) trying – and failing – to channel my inner Cash Cash (’08 ‘era, before their mainstream genre shift).

Ardour 8.8 is the second update to the DAW in 2 weeks because, as the software’s devs explain, “v8.7 […] turned out to have a couple of major issues that required a hot-fix. Along the way, several other nice improvements happened.”

Some of those bug fixes include an issue with the playhead moving beyond the loop range, a VST3 issue causing ‘possible deadlock when using PSL extension for sends’, and interaction quirks with the snapshot list.

But here’s a concise overview of the changes since Ardour 8.6, which includes most of what was 8.7 but also a couple of changes (beyond the hot-fixes) offered in the newer Ardour 8.8 release:

• Reorder tracks and busses by dragging with mouse in editor and mixer views
• Rulers now reduced to 3: locations, ranges, and arrangements
• Initial support for Parallelised disk I/O
• Option to name new MIDI tracks from SMF (using SMF track name only)
• Support for MIDI scene markers
• New ‘Captain Light’ theme
• Improved ‘Boxy Buttons’ theming option
• Support for querying disk space for disks larger than 16 TB
• “Clear” operation for ranges now removes punch & loop ranges
• The ‘New Session’ dialog is now always centred
• “JACK” renamed “JACK/Pipewire” on Linux
• Double click on mixer strip name button to rename
• Lua script to select region(s) under the playhead
• Lua plugin to map DM10-mkII Studio HiHat MIDI messages

Control surfaces supported in Ardour 8.8 include the newest Novation LaunchKey mk4 series, while many others are improved, e.g., midnam’s added for Kong X50 and Kurzweil K2700, and a MIDI binding map aded for the Akai MPK mini mk3.

There are also a lot of bug fixes, translation tweaks, and other refinements to ensure the app runs better across macOS, Windows, and Linux systems.

Ardour is open-source software and available to download from the Ardour website.

However, pre-built binaries from the official do require a small one-off or on-going payment to help fund the software and provide support. Source code is free, and can be compiled by hand.

If you don’t fancy the fuss of compiling it, you can get Ardour on Flathub. Or check your distro’s package repos for an older version. Ubuntu 24.10 offers Ardour 8.6 in its repos, while Ubuntu 24.04 LTS carries Ardour 8.4.