<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><div class="gmail-cooked"><p>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
<strong>NOT</strong> 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.</p>
<p>The nightly version is now (as ever) available at <a href="http://nightly.ardour.org">nightly.ardour.org</a>.
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Linux Package Maintainers</strong></p>
<p><em>If you maintain a Linux distribution’s package of Ardour, please <strong>DO NOT</strong> consider packaging this version. This is <strong>NOT</strong> a release of Ardour 6.0, but merely a call for testing.</em></p>
<p>Here are some of the things the project needs right now:</p>
<p><strong>Testing</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="http://tracker.ardour.org/">bug tracker</a>
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).</p>
<p><strong>Bug Triage</strong></p>
<p>If you have ever reported a bug in Ardour, please give 6.0-pre1 a try and then head over to <a href="http://tracker.ardour.org">tracker.ardour.org</a>
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.</p>
<p><strong>Theme Updates</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Documentation</strong></p>
<p>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 <a href="http://manual.ardour.org/">manual</a> to reflect all these changes. Please get in touch if you’d like to be a part of this effort.</p>
<p><strong>Translation</strong></p>
<p>Ardour has been translated into 15 languages:</p>
<p>French, German, Spanish (unified Castillian and Latin American),
Portugese (Brasilian & Portugese), Russian, Swedish, Czech,
Norwegian, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, English (UK), Polish, Greek</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Ardour/ardour/master/TRANSLATORS">https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Ardour/ardour/master/TRANSLATOR</a></p></div></div></div>