[LAA] Ardour 2.8.8 is released

Finally, its June and Ardour 2.8.8 is finally here.

Although this is primarily a bug-fix release, some of the "bugs" fixed
are so pervasive and significant that they could almost count as new
features. In particular, automation editing has finally arrived at a
place that people with experience on other DAWs may consider actually
usable. Issues with alignment of new and existing recorded material
are addressed too, and there are lots of other bug fixes for issues
small and large (including 3 or 4 crashing bugs). Thanks to motivation
provided by the Mixbus project, there are also yet more improvements
to AudioUnit plugin handling on OS X. Anybody using Ardour 2.8.7 or
earlier should upgrade to enjoy increased stability and better
functionality.

This is the last feature-adding release of the 2.8 series. The next
release of Ardour will be version 3.0-alpha1 (unless notable
regressions are discovered in 2.8.8).

IMPORTANT FIXES

Dramatic improvements to automation editing so that it more or less
works as anyone might expect. DOWNSIDE: for this release, the display
of automation data is not updated in realtime while in write/touch
mode. This will be fixed in a future release.
Correct very strange and erratic punch recording behaviour that would
create regions on tracks that were not record enabled
Fix crash when zooming canvas repeatedly
Fix handling of files larger than 2GB that could cause very slow
reload of existing sessions (speedup was from 9 minutes to 30 seconds)
Subtle but important change that may fix issues with recording not
placing material in the correct location on the timeline
Correctly order signal processing after adding a send (fixes issues
with placement of recorded material)
Regions overlapped by 2 other regions will now no longer semi-randomly
fail to be audible during playback
Region exports and bounces now use region fade in and fade out curves.

USEFUL FIXES

Save & recall port insert latency values
JACK Latency = 256 menu option now works
Importing files with the "Sequence files" option now works
Cleanup LV2 "external gui" extension support
Clear solo state when deleting a route that is soloed
Notify user that deleting a route will save the session state
Ellipsize long names in the track/bus inspector
Force exported AIFF files to be big-endian
Anchor the crossfade start and end points so that they cannot be edited
Correctly retain MIDI bindings for global transport controls
Do not burn 100% of a CPU's available cycles if disconnected from JACK
Put the fixed size columns (check marks) on the left side of the
mixer's track and group lists for easier access to their functionality
Fix strange behaviour when dragging region(s) towards time zero
Rationalize track selection and range selection
Make selecting a range in mouse range mode work even if there is
already a time selection
When splitting N-channel regions to mono regions, each new region
shows up as its own region, not a child of the original
Clearing an automation track of data no longer generates an error when
next loading the session ("Cannot reconstitute XML history node ...")

HANDY NEW FEATURES

Include links in Help menu to the tutorial and reference manuals
switch from ctrl-drag to alt-drag for "drag-selection-as-region"
change automation track selection model slightly so that auto tracks
are highlighted as expected. only show range boxes when the automation
will actually get edited. clicking an automation track should show the
editor-mixer for the parent track
Configurable behaviour when an N channel track plays a region that has
less than N channels (silence or replicate the last channel). Default
is silence.

OS X ONLY

Significantly updated version of the GTK GUI toolkit in use, which
fixes a number of issues including...
Multiple monitors now supported correctly
Various fixes for handling AudioUnits, particularly UAD
Use Apple's ExtAudioFile API for file types not otherwise handled on
OS X (MP3, AAC and others)
Use libsndfile to try to get timestamp info because Apple has no API for this
Do not categorize AU plugins using the "subtype" property because its
meaningless. Use "type" instead which is coarser but has a clear
meaning.
Added a shortcut to Volumes (external disk drives) when opening a session
Add option to enable/disable translation on OS X
Remove automation mode selector from AU plugin view window, since it
doesn't do anything useful
Correctly handle AU parameter types, so that more parameters are
available for automation
If a plugin has a Carbon-based editor, properly close that window when
deleting the plugin (e.g. when closing the session)

TRANSLATION UPDATES

Spanish (Pablo Fernández)
French (Raphaël Doursenaud)

CONTRIBUTORS

Carl Hetherington, Lucus, DHess, Ben Loftis and Old Man Davis
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Received on Wed Jun 2 12:15:01 2010