14 DAY TRIAL // A new important update of the Ardour open-source and cross-platform DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) software was released this past weekend for Linux-based operating systems, as well as macOS and Microsoft Windows platforms.
Ardour 5.6 comes two months after the release of the previous version, and it looks like it's yet another big update implementing numerous improvements and fixing some of those nasty bugs reported by users lately. For example, the transport bar has been greatly revamped to use space more effectively and efficiently, and there's a new design that allows for session navigation while the Mixer tab is in use.
Multiple visible elements have been implemented as well in Ardour 5.6, and the Preferences dialog was redesigned to allow users to browse and find all the available settings a lot more easily than before. Furthermore, the new Ardour release supports session archiving, adds a new General MIDI default synth for MIDI tracks, and allows for quick and direct control of routing for multitimbral synth plugins.
"Another two months of development has rolled by, involving more than 600 commits by developers, and it's time for us to release Ardour 5.6. Although there are no major new features in this release, there is the usual list of dozens of bug fixes major and minor, plus some workflow and GUI enhancements," said developer Paul Davis in the release announcement.
Unloading of large sessions should be a lot faster now
Among other improvements implemented in Ardour 5.6, we can mention that unloading of large sessions has been made a lot faster, as well as the display of recent sessions that contain a large number of snapshots or sessions. A mini-timeline was added to the main toolbar, Apple's macOS 10.12 Sierra operating system series is now officially supported, and the VST scan has been disabled in safe mode.
Support for VST-Mac hidden and favorites audio plugins is now available, along with many new scripts MIDI, Mixer, and Editor improvements, and some important changes to the actions and bindings, which affect quite a large number of actions. Check out the release notes for more details, and you can download Ardour 5.6 for GNU/Linux systems right now from our website.