14 DAY TRIAL // Ardour, one of the best free, cross-platform, and open-source DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) software, has been updated earlier today to version 4.7, a release that introduces a significant amount of new features, as well as the usual improvements.
According to the release notes, the best changes implemented in Ardour 4.7 are improved support for the latest Mackie Control surfaces and the addition of a new dialog, which displays wide-ranging and detailed analysis of audio files that have been generated via the export functionality of the software.
However, Ardour 4.7 includes many other interesting changes, such as a Post-Export Analysis window (see the image at the end of the article), a "zoom-to-10-seconds" action/menu item, a brand-new MIDI binding map for Novation LaunchKey 25 and Akai MPK Mini, as well as support for the Presonus FaderPort footswitch via new options.
"The greatly improved version of Mackie Control support that we're really excited about. Ardour's support for these devices is now very close to where we want it to be in terms of using the visibly obvious features of most Mackie Control surfaces. We still plan to go deeper into plugin control and more in future releases," developers explained.
More new features, improvements and bug fixes
Besides all the goodies mentioned above, Ardour 4.7 ships today with a "record-enable all tracks" action/menu item, enhanced control with TouchOSC, support for debugging and logging incoming OSC (Open Sound Control) messages, along with the ability to show the signal level during latency measurements.
A new option lets users use the mouse position for zoom focus, which promises to make the behavior of the zoom scroll functionality more consistent across the main track area and rules, as well as a new button for switching between blocking and callback version of the Windows audio/MIDI I/O backend, implemented in the Audio/MIDI Setup dialog.
There are, of course, multiple improvements, in particular for things like Presonus FaderPort's lights, duplicate range, playhead mode, group edit dialog, snap settings, Insert Time, MIDI latency calibration and device enumeration, ProTools 5, 10 and 11 imports, VST plugins, and tap-tempo estimator. Also, the Czech translation has been updated and dozens of bugs fixed.
Download Ardour 4.7 for GNU/Linux and Mac OS X.
