[Ardour-Users] Ardour 7.5 released

[Paul Davis]

Ardour 7.5 is now available. It comes with several important changes and
the usual slew of improvements and bugfixes.

Download as usual from https://ardour.org/download
New Features Tempo Maps Editing

Over the past few releases, we revamped tempo maps editing with one goal:
introduce mapping tempo to real performance.

Musicians often make subtle pacing changes during their performances.
Previously, an engineer or producer would have to slice regions and
time-stretch them to "fix" these changes. Now you can do it the other way
round: create tempo map nodes and easily adjust their positions to match
onsets in the recorded material.

You can access the tempo mapping mode by going to "Edit / Tempo / Map
Tempo". It's also possible to use this mode by default. The setting is at
the bottom of the "Metronome" page of the "Preferences" dialog.

The basics of this feature have been available for some time now. But the
UX of mapping tempo to performance has finally reached the stage where we
feel comfortable pitching it to users and collecting feedback.

We will provide more documentation (the manual, videos etc.) for this
feature in the near-term future, but if you want to get a sense of how this
works, there is a Harrison Mixbus video
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyrcR2-puvg> about it.
Sections Elements

We've been slowly introducing sections to Ardour in versions 7.4 and now
7.5. The general idea is that it should be possible to mark a range as e.g.
chorus, then copy/cut and paste the entire contents of that range
elsewhere, along with automation.

The foundation of that feature is now in place, some editor commands are
available (cutting and pasting, copying and pasting, deleting, inserting).
The next step is to create a new dedicated ruler where sections can be
visualized and operated on.
Saving I/O Connections Per Device

When switching back and forth between backends (e.g. ALSA and PulseAudio on
Linux), Ardour now restores I/O connections per device. This is useful when
you move around multiple locations and audio interfaces with a laptop
running Ardour.
Renaming Processors

Loaded plugins can now be renamed in the processor box. Hover a plugin
strip, right-click, choose "Rename" in the menu, submit a new name and
press "Rename". If you want to go back to the original name, open the
dialog again and press the button to the right of the text input box.
Control Surfaces

Some of the supported control surfaces now get activated automatically upon
connection to USB MIDI ports. This currently works for PreSonus FaderPort 8
and 16, Ableton Push 2, and the Contour Design shuttle devices.

Additionally, Softube Console1 controller is now supported
<https://manual.ardour.org/using-control-surfaces/Softube_Console1/> thanks
to Holger Dehnhardt.
Improvements

   - Playhead can now be used as a snapping target. There's a "Playhead"
   item in the grid mode drop-down list and a toggle in the "Preferences"
   dialog on the "Editor / Snap" page.
   - Playhead is now insensitive to mouse events by default (can be changed
   in preferences).
   - Performance improvements: faster playlist rendering of non-overlapping
   MIDI Regions and faster duplication of multiple regions
   - The "Appearance/Editor Waveform section" of the "Preferences" dialog
   has been split into a separate page to reduce the vertical size of the
   dialog.
   - Session archiving now has progress display and can be aborted.
   - Toggling selected track solo status in the Mixer is now accessible via
   keybindings (s by default).
   - Multiple non-editor commands are now undoable, such as recording and
   playlist switch.
   - Freewheel exporting on Windows works faster now
   - Rarely used meter types like K-meters can now be used with tracks
   - Region layering is now retained for cut/copy/paste
   - Playlist paste now always pastes on top
   - Time-stretching can now be started from the left side of a region
   - The virtual keyboard now has F5 through F8 shortcuts to select note
   velocity presets
   - Added Roland SonicCell MIDNAM file.
   - The Dummy backend now has a real-time option.
   - New preferences options on the "Appearance / Colors" page allow
   disabling the use of color palette to assign colors to new tracks, buses,
   or VCAs.
   - Markers are now properly themable and use color names.
   - Delaylines have been optimized, multiple-MIDI buffers are possible now.
   - On the Push 2, holding down shift while using the touch strip will
   send Modulation messages instead of Pitch Bend.
   - Subgroup busses now available for MIDI.

Notable Fixes

   - Processor box-specific key bindings ("shortcuts") now work reliably.
   - Fix worst-case and I/O latency report
   - Fix crash when trying to undo region operations across source deletion
   - Fix opaque MIDI region rendering
   - In sessions with multiple tempi, plugins that ask for tempo
   information get the correct value.
   - Standard cut/copy/paste shortcuts now work when entering text.

Lua Scripting

   - New bindings: removing routes, pre-roll/count-in recording,
   std::list/vector clear
   - LuaProc: new option to set time information
   - LuaProc: refined time API
   <https://discourse.ardour.org/t/lua-arpeggiator-plugin-anyone/108862/8>

Translations

Updated translations: German, Korean.
Contributors

Code contributors: Paul Davis, Robin Gareus, Ben Loftis, Colin Fletcher,
Hoger Dehnhardt.

Non-code contributors: Mathias Sterle.

Translators: Edgar Aichinger, JungHee Lee.
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