New in Ardour 3

State of the Art

If you're already familiar with Ardour, the current version 3.5.40 doesn't have much to offer at first glance. However, the application looks better and renders the waveform graphics with nice gradients in the audio region. Minor yet ugly errors, such as text running out of frames, are a thing of the past. The first obvious changes are in the channel views on the left, where the developers made the meters more accurate and configurable.

After loading a project with many MIDI tracks, more audio tracks, and some send channels, many subtle and other more obvious enhancements become apparent. Most of the new switches and controls provide better configuration options or simplify actions that might have been more complicated in previous releases.

The Rhythm Ferret tool, with which you can split individual instrument tracks into separate regions, has been moved from the main menu into the Edit context menu of the audio regions. There you can also find a new tool for removing soft passages in recordings, which automates the chore of removing pauses between words in vocal tracks to reduce the noise in the overall mix.

Owners of large monitors will appreciate the Meterbridge (Figure 4), which shows all the tracks even for very large projects. To enjoy the special features of the software, see the "More Than Just Mouse Clicks" box.

Figure 4: The Meterbridge provides a better overview of all tracks on larger monitors.

Projects also can be continued from those developed with the previous Ardour Series 2. You can open them in the current Ardour, but you will be faced with certain (ugly yet solvable) problems.

Ardour, however, creates a backup of the old material to protect it from serious errors. If, as in the test case, there are only null mixer channels, it's advisable to solve the import errors with onboard tools in the new version.

Digital Sheet Music

The relatively simply designed Ardour MIDI tracks have been improved. You can select the connectivity descriptions for external hardware synthesizers from a list of about a hundred entries.

Among them are not only popular keyboards, such as some Yamaha PSRs, but also some top-range devices such as the Clavia Nord Lead Synthesizer and classics like the Prophet 600, the very first MIDI-compatible synthesizer.

The previously rather abstract matrix for selecting MIDI channels has evolved into a clear and comprehensible dialog (Figure 5).

Figure 5: The new MIDI channel selection in a synthesizer track with expanded automation track used for the synth plugin filter.

Ardour remains true to its classic concept in MIDI tracks, based on methods particularly suited to music played by hand. Composing music in the tracks works well but is simplistic. Certain comfort feature such as automatic key changes, groove templates, or innovative loop functions are missing. MIDI works best in Ardour if you record notes and controller events while playing on a keyboard.

Our test nevertheless showed some difficulties in the MIDI area that should never occur during professional music production. Querying Ardour main developer Paul Davis revealed that one of the problems resulting in a constantly recurring error message (Figure 6) will be solved in a development branch of the program. Thus, it's likely that some of the MIDI problems will be resolved in the next Ardour release.

Figure 6: The message window showed frequent errors in projects with MIDI tracks.

The conditions of the crash indicated that a plugin was responsible. The project involved two instances of Monosynth from the Calf collection; other tone generators used in similar projects caused none of these problems.

An application should be protected against such possible plugin behavior problems. As with all professional applications, you should thoroughly test all relevant tools, including the Ardour plugins, before putting them into production.