[ardour-dev] ultra-preliminary alpha ardour2 tarball release available

[Paul Davis]

The following release is available:

        http://ardour.org/releases/ardour-2.0alpha1.tar.bz2


This is an ultra-experimental release, aimed at pulling in a few more
users who don't want to deal with the CVS snapshot releases.

THE PURPOSE OF THIS RELEASE

Ardour 2.0 is not yet ready for release. But it does run and does a very
significant majority of what Ardour 0.99 can do. All the patches made to
0.99 for the upcoming 0.99.1 release have been added to the ardour 2.0
source tree.

Your help is needed to

        1) identify problems with the release tarball
              - can you build it?
              - can you install the program?
              - can you run the program?

        2) identify basic problems with Ardour 2.0

              - what things are just totally non-functional
              - what things are broken to the extent that they
                 are useless

        3) identify areas for improvement
 
               - we've already made a number of changes to 
                 the GUI to try to make Ardour easier for
                 existing and new users. Some of them
                 are probably wrong, incomplete or
                 require subtle tweaks.

Please do NOT file mantis reports on this tarball. Instead, file useful,
cogent reports to this mailing list (ardour-dev at lists.ardour.org) once
you have had some reasonable level of experience with it. Please make
them short: most of the issues are probably known to us, but require
cataloguing and sorting. Your pithy, insightful and accurate reports
will help a lot with this process. Try to avoid issues that also exist
in ardour 0.99, because we have reports on most of them in mantis
already.

Some people have already used ardour 2.0 from CVS for test sessions,
with good success. It seems slightly buggier than 0.99 at this point,
but the bugs are in the GUI, rather than the backend.

Now that we have the tarball-release infrastructure in place, we will
release more of these alpha-tarballs on a regular basis as substantial
work gets done with ardour2. Announcements will be made here.

thanks,
--p