[Ardour-Users] Ardour 2.8.12 released

[Paul Davis]

After a year in which Ardour 2 has seen little focused development due
to the work on Ardour 3, the release of OS X Lion finally created the
motivation to consolidate the accumulation of patches and improvements
and release 2.8.12.

You can download it from http://ardour.org/download

The list of changes is suprisingly long for something supposedly in
maintainance-only mode, and its a good list. The most important
changes are probably:

              * binary packages for Linux (these should run on any
Linux system, with no dependencies on your existing system libraries)
              * major (though subtle) fixes to the way Ardour handles
latency and the alignment of newly recorded material.
	      * OS X Lion support

Please note that Ardour now requires the latest JACK latency API which
can be found in JACK1 0.120.2 or JACK2 1.9.7 (on OS X, JackOSX 0.88)
or any later versions. Using Ardour 2.8.12 with older versions of JACK
will lead to random crashes and generally bad behaviour. There's no
reason not to upgrade JACK if you haven't already done so. If you are
on Linux and your distro doesn't provide a new enough version, please
complain to them.

Binary packages of Ardour for Linux means that almost all Linux users
of Ardour can choose to download Ardour directly from
http://ardour.org/download rather than their distribution's packaging
system. In the future, I plan to scale back the support and attention
that I give to users of distribution-packaged versions of Ardour,
mostly because it is so hard to track what each distribution does, let
alone the bugs introduced by their handling of libraries that Ardour
depends on.

New Features or Behaviour and workflow improvements
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

    * OS X Lion Support
    * Linux binary packages (for all versions of Linux on x86 or
x86_64 processors)
    * Correctly align newly recorded material on the timeline
    * OS X: double-click on a session file opens Ardour
    * reinstate "merge files" in import dialog so that 2 mono files
can be imported as a stereo track
    * Forces new tempo and meter markers to start a new bar on the first beat
    * Changes to automation data recording
          - No longer decide automation control point visibility based
on zoom level
          - Remove unnecessary control points in automation data as it
is recorded
          - Allow timecode to skip forwards or backwards or even loop
while recording automation (data is only recorded during forward
playback)
    * Add a second Delete action, so both Backspace and Delete can be
bound to delete. this is really useful on macbooks which have a
backspace but no delete key. to turn on this behavior, users will have
to add the new editor-alternate-delete action to theri bindings, OR go
to Preferences->Mouse/Key and re-load one of the default bindings
files
    * New route groups are turned "on" at creation
    * F4 is bound to the real separate action, not the Separate
sub-menu (ergnomic bindings only)
    * Remove some rhythm ferret options that are not implemented in A2
    * Change order of range menu so more common operations are nearer the top

Crash Fixes
----------------

    * Fix crash when two overlapped regions are selected
    * Fixes crashes when playhead is moved if fader automation is on
the 'write' setting
    * Symptom-fix for an issue with bogus crossfades. Avoids crashes
though it doesn't fix the underlying problem.

Bug Fixes
-------------

    * Fix misbehaviour when freewheeling due to Ardour's own export
    * Change the way we use "physical screen height" to better account
for multi-monitor setups
    * Make sequence-files option for import use file timecode, make
all import/embed ops use per-file TC if timecode was requested, rather
than just the first file's TC
    * Fix occasional deafening noise at region cut points
    * Fix management of fade in/out active management
    * Restore text to the editor canvas on big-endian machines (OS X PPC)
    * Don't try to call "render" on AU plugins with no input elements
    * Some Mackie-emulation systems (e.g. euphonix) send zero for the
tick count when the jog wheel is moved, so accomodate this by
pretending that they reported 1 tick
    * Save/restore environment as needed when forking external apps like JACK
    * Fix possible drift out of sync of tracks during varispeed
    * Don't adjust session end location when any region end is moved.
    * LV2 UI parameter now handled by the GUI thread, not just the
same thread that the update happened
    * Prevent ardour from ever, EVER, EVAH removing an existing source file
    * Make sure declicking fades reach their target
    * Fix Insert Region From List and Fill Range with Selected Region
    * Add support for AudioUnit parameter listening
    * Make timefx thread sleep for a bit after its done, so that the
GUI can process its requests before it dies and takes it request
buffer with it
    * Fix old issue where copy-pasting a range selection from
region(s), each region would inherit the parents full fade-in or -out
even when the region excerpt didnt include the fade
    * Fixes for gcc 4.6
    * Do not try to silence port buffers after a reconnect, since this
violates old JACK policy and new JACK implementation
    * Fix reallocation of silent, passthru and send buffers,
specifically after a reconnect to JACK
    * Fix cut-n-paste typo that caused Session::send_buffers to be the
wrong size
    * Commit patch from colinf to just err, rather than abort, if
::truncate_start() is called on an empty automation list
    * Fixed bug where embedded sources did not correctly obey the BWF
time stamp and would import at the timestamp of the first file
    * When importing sources that are using sample rate conversion,
the BWF start time has to be converted also
    * Fix bug that prevented fade-ins from being restored in an inactive state
    * Remove almost all use of Glib::ustring to avoid issues with
non-Latin characters in file names on some versions of OS X
    * Do not attempt to lookup sndfile constants/enums using a string,
because this breaks when using anything but english
    * Allow correct restoration of Lock Edit mode

Translations
-----------------

    * New Basque translation from Maider Likona and friends

Contributions to this release from: Carl Hetherington, Ben Loftis,
Todd Naugle, Colin Fletcher, the Basque translation team and Paul
Davis