[Ardour-Users] Ardour 6.0-pre1 now available for testing

[Paul Davis]

Well folks, we’ve done it. After two and a half years of development that
has both excluded a few hoped-for features and also expanded to include
many things not originally envisaged, we’re ready for people to start
testing version 6.0-pre1. Please note: this is *NOT* the release of 6.0 -
we’re now entering a testing phase that will continue through several
“-preN” versions until we’re confident that it’s ready for release.

The nightly version is now (as ever) available at nightly.ardour.org. If
you’re a subscriber (or paid US$45 or more for a pre-built version of 5.x),
you can download the fully functional version. Others can get the free/demo
version which periodically goes silent. Obviously, since this is a nightly
version, it will be updated most days to reflect any new development work
and fixes as we move towards the actual release of 6.0.

It will install in parallel to any existing version of Ardour, will not
alter your preferences for older versions of Ardour, and if you use it on
any existing session, it will save a copy of the session file (or snapshot)
just to be safe.

*Linux Package Maintainers*

*If you maintain a Linux distribution’s package of Ardour, please DO NOT
consider packaging this version. This is NOT a release of Ardour 6.0, but
merely a call for testing.*

Here are some of the things the project needs right now:

*Testing*

Although 6.0 does not visibly change the most obvious functionality, design
and workflow of Ardour, internally huge amounts of the code has changed
during development. Several people have been testing it periodically,
including users of Harrison Mixbus (whose version 6 release is based on the
same set of changes). However, it is now time to open up testing to more
people, because we know that this always results in unccovering more issues
- something we’d like to do (and fix!) before the actual release.

We believe that 6.0-pre1 is just as if not more ready for use than Ardour
5.12 was, but we can only establish that with your help. Create some
sessions. Do the stuff you do. Exercise your workflow. And if you find
issues, please use the bug tracker <http://tracker.ardour.org/> to report
them, marking them with the 6.0-pre1 version. Please do not report bugs
here on the forums - we will mostly ignore them here (because there is no
way to properly manage them).

*Bug Triage*

If you have ever reported a bug in Ardour, please give 6.0-pre1 a try and
then head over to tracker.ardour.org and mark your bug(s) closed if they
are fixed. If a bug isn’t fixed, please update the version field to
indicate the bug is still an issue in 6.0-pre1. We may automatically close
all open bugs for previous versions after a fixed period of time, so if you
would like your bug report to receive attention in the future, please go
and update its status.

*Theme Updates*

Many users may not be aware that thanks to the hard work of a user known as
cooltehno, Ardour has 6 different themes. During the development of 6.0,
there were significant simplifications and changes to the internals of
themes, and the 5 themes that cooltehno generated all need updating and
revisiting. If you’re interested in doing this, for one or all 5, please
get in touch.

*Documentation*

As anyone who has seen the various “Development Update” posts along the way
for 6.0 is aware, there are a lot of new and changed features in this
version of Ardour. We need people to update and/or write new sections in
the manual <http://manual.ardour.org/> to reflect all these changes. Please
get in touch if you’d like to be a part of this effort.

*Translation*

Ardour has been translated into 15 languages:

French, German, Spanish (unified Castillian and Latin American), Portugese
(Brasilian & Portugese), Russian, Swedish, Czech, Norwegian, Italian,
Japanese, Chinese, English (UK), Polish, Greek

All of these translations will need significant updates for version 6.0.
Although we are not yet in a string freeze, we hope there won’t be too many
string changes before 6.0, so now is an ideal time for existing or new
translators to get started. If you’re interested in becoming a translator,
please read our guide at
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Ardour/ardour/master/TRANSLATOR
<https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Ardour/ardour/master/TRANSLATORS>
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