Ardour

Ardour 5.4 is now available, with important bug fixes for MIDI (including looping), dozens of less significant but still noteworthy fixes and new features, plus the first version of our support for Ableton's Push 2 surface

The Ardour project is pleased to announce the release of Ardour 4.0. This release brings many technical improvements, as well as new features and over a thousand bug fixes.

The biggest changes in this release:

Better cross platform support. Ardour now runs on GNU/Linux, OS X and for the first time, Windows.
JACK is no longer required, making it easier than ever for new users to get Ardour up and running (though JACK is still usable with Ardour).
The user interface has seen a thorough overhaul, leading to a more modern and polished experience.

New MIDNAM file for the Korg Volca series
Use 1-based numbering for MIDI controllers, rather than 0-based
"Show All Automation" for MIDI tracks shows all named controllers
Support channel NoteNameLists in MIDNAM files
amend the list of known video file extensions
New versions of jadeo and harvid for video work, providing better compatibility with video drivers on various Linux systems.
Fix rounding error on rulers and BBT grid

Improvements and New Functionality

MIDI channel control expanded
Freesound improvements

support for the Non Session Manager (NSM) session protocol
treat file names ending in .midi as well as .mid (case-insensitive) as MIDI files
correctly handle multiple export files with the same extension (e.g. WAV) but different formats (the format name is appended to the filename)
when searching for various kinds of files, expand "~" if it is found in the search path, following POSIX conventions (~ => home folder/directory)
dynamically update plugin menus when "Hide" is used in plugin manager so that it is not necessary to restart Ardour to see the result
make 0 and keypad-0 keys reset the mono panner, to match stereo panner
add export track output option to stem export dialog
use LILV state API to load LV2 presets, thus supporting presets that have extra information associated with them
improve error reporting when realpath(2) fails
document -a (no announcements) option on man page

Drag-n-Drop Fixes and Improvements

fix drag and drop from region list so that it actually works, even though it is not as pretty as it was
allow Drag-n-Drop onto the blank track area of the editor once again
correctly indicate during drag-n-drop where a drop is possible and where it isn't (though the clarity of this depends a bit on your desktop environment)
correctly honor ctrl/command modify during drag-n-drop (to indicate copy vs. embed)
always import (copy) MIDI files since Ardour considers them writable
correctly handle drag-n-drop of mixed file types (audio & MIDI)

Fixes

create "been here before" file even if a first time user doesn't modify the default configuration options
fix crash on some systems during fetching announcements from ardour.org
fix incorrect listing of MIDNAM files in the event of the user having their own private set of them in addition to those supplied with Ardour
fix mishanding of LXVST (and windows VST) plugin names where the path includes a directory with a period/dot in its name such as ~/.lxvst
fix crash when deleting non-existent plugin presets
fix crash when using multiply-nested compound regions
fix undo/redo of deletion of note, patch change and sysex events
make track header faders insensitive to vertical scroll wheel events (again)
make MIDI clock synchronization work (again)
Don't include unselected regions in edit grouped region operations
Ignore track selection if there are any selected regions.
fix behaviour when switching into automation write mode while the transport is moving
"Hide All" in editor track list functions more consistently
Tracks/busses created from templates get names based on the user-supplied value, if given

Major New Features

MIDI recording, playback and editing, including plugin instrument support for LV2, VST and AudioUnits
Parallelization of DSP operations to use any number of processors
Matrix-style patching/routing
Overhauled export system (multiple formats at once, stem exports, multichannel exports)

New & Improved Audio Signal Handling

Monitor section
Solo operation redesigned, includes Solo Isolate and correct AFL/PFL modes
Per-channel visible phase invert buttons
Internal aux sends and explicit aux busses
Improved send control
Stereo panning via width+position
Track/Bus groups extended

Audio Editing

Option for Automation moves with Regions
Rhythm Ferret improvements
Vertical stacking of overlapping regions in tracks
Non-destructive, non-overlapping recording mode
New region editing features
Strip Silence
Media search path

New & Improved GUI details

Session overview pane
Unified processor list (plugins, sends, returns etc)
Extended Region list
Extended Track/Bus list
Improved and expanded editor cursor set
Dynamically resizable big clock window
New and improved preferences dialog(s)
New editing implementation for clocks

External Control

MIDI binding maps
Dramatically improved Mackie Control support
Linear Timecode support
Improved MTC chase
MIDI Clock chase

Miscellaneous

64 bit timeline
Dynamically resizable disk buffers
JACK Session support
Undo system internals use less memory and improve speed

NEW FUNCTIONALITY/CHANGES
Visualization of automation while recording it has returned (this was removed during the development of Ardour3 as we merged some improvements in data handling from Ardour2/Mixbus). Several other less notable changes to the way automation data is handled add up to a vastly improved system, with more to come. One important missing piece right now: undo/redo for automation capture does not work.
Handle AudioUnit plugin GUIs that want to resize themselves
Working handling of LV2 plugin presets
Touch automation now works for AudioUnit plugins, at least those whose GUIs do the right thing
Provide an easier way to add mixed (audio+MIDI) tracks to a session, to facilitate the use of plugins like Reaktor which accept both audio & MIDI data.
Name insert and send ports as "return" and "send" rather than "in" and "out". It is possible that this might break some connections in some existing sessions.
Allow alt-drag on stereo panner to move just one side of the stereo field. this wiggles a bit, possibly because of rounding, and that probably needs to be addressed
Send automation now works
Smooth 0.5 second fade out during quit, plus MIDI panic to turn everything off

MIDI FIXES
Fix issues with MIDI note selection when entering and leaving leaving internal ("note") edit mode, starting rubber-band note selection drags, and when changing region selections.
Fix crash when quitting with MIDI notes selected
Add "v" as a new MIDI editing key for velocity, add a velocity editing dialog, and allow all selected MIDI notes to have their velocity set to the same adjusted value
Remove extra .mid suffix added to cloned MIDI region names
Properly handle zero-length MIDI files during import
Improve vertical positioning of MIDI notes during drags
Disallow import-without-copy for MIDI files
Prevent exit from note edit mode on double-click with a modifier held down - prevents creation of malformed notes
Do not mark imported MIDI files as un-writable - all MIDI files are subject to rewriting at any time
Rename MIDI "Fork" operation to "Unlink from other copies"
Make a few more MIDI track menu options apply to the current selection
Remove believed-unnecessary and broken MIDI thru option
Extend a previous region if we click in a MIDI automation lane where there is no region

GENERIC MIDI CONTROL SURFACE SUPPORT
Fix generic MIDI bindings that use note on/off commands
Add BCF2000 device info file for Mackie Control
Alternate Korg nanoCONTROL MIDI binding map
New Korg nanoControl2 MIDI binding map
Allows definitions in a binding map that refer to elements that have not yet been (and might never be) created in a session. When those elements are created (e.g a send, or a plugin) the binding will start to work.
Add a set-bank function to MIDI binding map support
Add optional threshold for catch-up with non motorised controls in generic MIDI surfaces. This is very useful when working with devices that vary in the "gaps" they may generate when sending a continuous fader motion (i.e. sending non-contiguous controller values). The default value, for example, does NOT work well with a Peavey PC1600X controller, but when tweaked, the faders work very well.
bindings to MIDI note on/off messages that involve non-toggle controls (e.g. transport) now do something sensible.
bindings to transport controls for "goto start", "goto end" and "play selection" now work)

MACKIE CONTROL SUPPORT
Quite a lot of work was done to polish up the revised Mackie Control support that surfaced in Beta4. The code has now been tested on the SSL Nucleus, Mackie Control and Mackie Control Pro, Steinberg CMC and Behringer BC* devices, and all work well modulo issues with the ALSA/JACK MIDI bridge. Specific details that were addressed included:
metering now works on MC Pro
fix V-Pot displays for Mackie Control
fix 100% CPU use when using Mackie Control other than SSL Nucleus
timecode display works

MIDNAM, Plugin preset & Program Changes
Some major reworking was done to integrate the handling of patch/instrument data, regardless of whether a MIDI track is being used to drive external synthesizers or plugin instruments. This is not complete, and may never be because the two concepts do not really fully align (plugin presets are NOT program changes). As part of that work, some other details of handling MIDNAM files (used to define programs for external synthesizers) were addressed:
fix search path for MIDNAM files
add MIDNAM data into patch change dialogs
fix lookup of MIDNAM patch data
save MIDNAM settings for each track
Stop s with unresolved s to stop errors on startup
add a General MIDI MIDNAM file

GUI BEHAVIOUR
Add option to not use gradients when rendering waveforms
Outline fade in/out handles in black
Provide some numerical data during automation trim (range) drags
Shift-click on shuttle controller in wheel mode resets it to 1.0 (100%)
Move binding for duplicate-region to secondary-d rather than d, use d for draw notes mouse mode
Introduce the idea of a "default transport speed", used whenever Session::start_transport() is called. Only the shuttle controller alters it, and even that only alters it in wheel mode, which means that stopping the transport does not rever the default speed back to zero. To get back to zero either switch the shuttle controller back to sprung mode, or change the speed back to zero
Keep latency dialog for plugins above the plugin GUI
Add a menu option and key press (F) in port matrices to flip the selected row and columns in the matrix.
Middle-click on a location clock still works even when the location/clock is locked
Filter the existing session chooser to .ardour files, as with the open session chooser.
Hide patch changes if they are too wide for the region at a given zoom level
Move delta-to-edit-point options to the main clock context menus
Make faders visually desensitised when their tracks are in automation-play.
Properly manage the splash screen, particularly on OS X
Add primary-modifier click on monitor knobs to go to -inf dB
Try to provide some rationality for region gain line visibility (and automation line visibility in general
Paste to the track under the mouse if we are using the mouse as the edit point, otherwise use selected tracks
Fix for plugin windows reappearing at (0,0) after ardour becomes the active app again on OS X
Remove beta page from startup wizard
In startup wizard, use dbl-click to activate "what would you like to do?" radio buttons, rather than click
Fix crash on zooming out too far
Grey-out patch changes on inactive channels rather than not plotting them at all
Sensitize region-related actions even in non-object mode
Provide dialogs to edit pan values numerically, at least for mono and stereo panners.
Simplify management of waveform visibility / shape / scale
Add option to disable autoscroll of editor
Fix for track height step losing 'grip' on the track being resized
Add translucent "shade" to playhead cursor
Thicken automation lines (makes dragging them easier, and looks better too)
Make more or less all left-hand-side treeviews use the same style in both the editor and mixer windows
Handle failure to start audioengine correctly, rather than get stuck in an endless dialog.
Force I/O selector windows to stay-on-top (experimental)
Fix display of region names that don't fit inside a region
When sounding notes on selection / note movements, play the note for as long as the mouse button is held dow
Darken light theme treeview text
Add option to add new range marker from the context menu without needing the keyboard
Slightly narrower faders in the editor track controls area

BUG FIXES
Opaque regions correctly overwrite anything in the mix buffer
Fix crash when sum of fade in + fade out is longer than the region
fix (very old) bug when evaluating automation curves at a position before the first point on the curve.
Gracefully handle LV2 plugins without a GUI
Always create short xfades when adding a region after a capture pass
Fix up various loose ends associated with the conversion to the "new xfade model"
Don't alter session search path when auditioning audio files
Avoid splitting unselected regions on the same track as a selected region
Make the "No selection = all tracks" button work
Improve display of timestretching in stacked layers mode
prevent x-axis movement of the end points of region gain lines
Re-implement URIMap to tolerate broken plugins that use the wrong context to map MIDI event types
Fix clear-selection behaviour
Don't reset region fades to default after a playlist edit unless the fades used to be part of an xfade and now no longer are
Fix a variety of issues with mouse cursors
Slightly unpleasant hack to stop control points being unselected when you ctrl-drag a selected point in order to do a push drag.
Correct rounding issues when converting between audio frame and unit/pixel values
Handle discontiguous control point selections properly when dragging.
Allow movement of several vertically-colinear points at the same time.
Fix incorrect automation point drags when a drag is started with push held and finished without it.
Use the same logic to decide on step size when scroll-wheeling faders in the mixer and knobs in the monitor section
Fix subtraction math for ranges used when computing what data to read from regions/playlists
Fix uninitialised variable causing garbage output from panners in some cases.
When we rename a track, only rename its playlist if it has never contained any regions
Prevent latency measurement output buffer being silenced by cycle_end, to fix port insert latency measurement
Claim button release on patch change events so that editing a patch change does not also open the region editor for any selected regions.
Fix non-updated ordinary fade-outs during trim drags
Fix crash when creating a new session after session close
Make automation state management full locale-independent (so sessions can be moved between locales without messing up automation data)
Correctly handle plugins with variable input AND output when they are the first processor in a track/bus
Don't set TimeFXRequest done to true too early, fixes crashes after time stretching
Somewhat primitive implementation of allowing the edit note dialog to handle multiple notes
Try to correctly manage follow-playhead behaviour before and after playhead drags
Make crossfade edge drags undoable.
Make sure that regions created during AsTrack and AsTapeTrack imports are added to the master region list, otherwise if they are subsequently deleted they will be lost. This causes the undo record to go wrong as it references a non-existant region.
Commit one reversible command for the whole of an import, rather than one per region; makes MIDI imports into multiple tracks undoable in one step
Fix off-by-one in computation of crossfade lengths.
Set up layering correctly on compound playlists so that the regions on the compound list are arranged the same as on the original.
Fix incorrect display of automation lines after points are removed.
Don't change playlists of frozen tracks when changing the playlist of a route group
Patch from colinf to put the playlist / take name in the playlist button tooltip
Make "View >> Toolbar When Maximized" act immediately, i.e., even when already maximized changing this toggle changes whenever toolbar is shown or not;
Renames "Toolbar When Maximized" to "Show Toolbar" as it acts whenever editor has maximized space or not.
Escape angled brackets in playlist names for tooltips.
Handle failure of statfs to return available disc space on Samba shares mounted via GVFS
Detect filesystems mounted read-only when determining whether a session is writable
Make fit contents / show full range work for all selected tracks
Fit note range on adding regions to tracks during import
Colour lower stacked regions with a lighter colour and make it configurable
Fix some issues with toggling mixer-on-top status
Use preview filename rather than the first-alphabetically-sorted filename for preview in the import dialogue
Fix broken visibility and size management of piano roll keyboard + scroomer
Fix several crashes during shutdown
Never try to remove state from a read-only session
Fix crash associated with track freezing
Return silence from read_from_sources() if we try to read a channel that our source does not have (if replicate-missing-region-channels is turned off
fix restore of mute control state when loading session
Fix failure to load A2 sessions with a ControlOut.
Make switching between input+disk monitoring work "right" for MIDI track
Fix a bug that led to messages about notes already being on at program start because of a double seek with no read in between
Slighty brighten bar lines and slighty dim beat lines for easier visual distinction
Fix logic for setting mixer strip name button widths
Change option name to clarify that get_default_narrow_ms is applied to the mixer only
Store the topologically sorted order of execution so that even the single DSP processor case uses its
Adds an 'empty' preset to the preset drop-down list, so that plugins can be set back to the 'no preset' state rather than being stuck in the state of 'preset loaded and modified
Make sure we always copy Freesound imported files as well as MIDI ones
Clarify the meaning of the show-region-gain-envelopes option.
Tweak naming of various buttons and labels in the export dialog
Unify clamping of frames-per-unit values during zoom
Declick before the end of seamless loops, not after the end, so that loops are rendered accurately
Fixing issues with opening a browser for web-access
Fix reset of transport speed when seamless looping
Prevent the nastiness that occurs when the RHS editor list is dragged so that the pane handle "vanishes" into the tabs
Don't swallow left/right scroll events in a midi region view when in internal edit mode
Don't try to backup sessions from older versions of ardour that are also read-only
In export format dialog, show preview of generated part of description
Revert to using SSE mix-buffers-with-gain rather than simple one.
Fix stem export. The capturing processor of routes was never removed, and was restored inactive, which made stem export fail.
Change logic for compiling export format descriptions from incomplete formats
Increase the export "chunk size" to speed it up over 10% at least in some situations
Remove some excess commas from the export format description
Drastic rethink of the relationship between remote control ID and route order keys
Don't specify real-time priority when starting JACK
Be more graceful if there is an undo record which references a non-existant object; this shouldn't happen, of course, but there was a bug in some early betas which made it occur
Allow new idle visual changer calls to be requested while the current changer is executing (fixes auto-return even when zoomed in)
Fix some oddities with playhead movement when locating during roll
fix rec-enable toggle with the Korg nanoKONTROL
Set number of process thread buffers based on run-time-discovered num-cpus
Fix missing lock causing erroneous disk space reports when dragging audio clocks.
Don't start a clock drag if we drag to the right of the numbers.
Fix crash on trying to snap to markers when there aren't any
Don't rename playlists on rename track if the track has >1 playlist
Do not deactivate the meter in a frozen track
Fix Jack transport master after session load.
Report correct time instead of old time when locating as Jack transport master.
Set fader and plugin parameter automation curve default values
Don't spin on Session::timecode_transmission_suspended() if disconnected from JACK because it will never be re-enable
Use correct event struct when handling key events in patch changes
Flip semantics for next/prev bank so that the direction in numerical terms matches next/prev patch (i.e. up arrow goes to higher numbers)

BUILD & CODING FIXES
update to Suil 0.6.4 for support of plugins with X11 and Qt GUIs
change build system to support complation with CLANG (via setting the CC and CXX environment variables)
remove more than 500 unnecessary #included header files, thus speeding up compilation a bit
use chrpath to reset RPATH within bundled libraries so that the runtime linker will not go looking in places set by parts of the GTK build stack
adjust bundling/packaging to make SUIL (and thus several LV2 GUIs) work
fix resample-session.pl to work even if there is no automation directory
Use std::string instead of PBD::sys::path
use various g_**** functions rather than versions from PBD::sys namespace
fix osx build script when the path to the plugin folder contains spaces
OS X version can now successfully find an existing running instance of JACK
fix substitution and install of session templates
define CHARSETALIASDIR (again) to stop various bits of the GNU stack from loading a charset.alias file that we did not provide
converge on 3 different search paths (ARDOUR_CONFIG_PATH, for configuration files; ARDOUR_DLL_PATH, for included shared libraries; ARDOUR_DATA_PATH, for other included data files), all of which can be controlled from the environment
Use a map of region names to speed up RegionFactory::new_region_name, which was a performance bottleneck

TRANSLATIONS
Updated Russian and Spanish translations.

CONTRIBUTORS
Carl Hetherington, David Robillard, Colin Fletcher, James Roberts, Antony Gelberg, Dave Flick, Rodrigo Severo, Marcin ?, Tim Mayberry, Lynde ?, Roy Vegard, Thomas Vecchione, Thorsten Wilms, Sakari Bergen, Johan Mattsson, JaaxxOne, Philippe
Demartin, Alexander Prokoudine, Pablo Fernández and Paul Davis.

Build Changes:

Fixed build for VST support.
Switch to new LV2 stack.

Bug Fixes:

Fix various crashes during session open.
Installer works correctly when run as root.
Fix nasty off by one error that put the end of an end-trimmed region one sample beyond where it should be. this would lead to the creation of 1 sample xfades where there should be none, if another region was aligned to the same point that the region had been nominally trimmed to.
Fix modifier definitions to work with newer GTK versions.
Fix direction of zoom wheel in timebar rulers.
Fix crash when deleting some LV2 plugins that have had a GUI on-screen.
Fix click latency correction.
Fix translation of sample rate expressed as kHz.
Fix/workaround bug in GTK that prevents bindings from working.
Fix non-functioning use of arrow keys in keybindings.
Fix bug capable of causing significant "weirdness" when evaluating a curve in a position before the first point of the curve (this bug has existed in Ardour since revision 17, which is nearly 13,000 revisions in the past.).
Fixing issues with opening a browser when using the bundle. Use xdg-open instead of glib functions.
Spelling fixes from Debian.
Fix typo in region fade key bindings.

Improvements:

Switch to FFADO as the default firewire backend for JACK.
Add 176.4kHz rate to audio engine dialog.
Save/goto view bindings are now Shift-Fn to save, Fn to goto (Fn is F1, F2, etc).
Increase the click pool size.
Change reset of the click/metronome to improve behaviour when locating and looping.
Display modifier names in keybinding editor using real key logos (e.g. the "cauliflower" symbol for Command on OS X).
Make sure loop markers are shown when loop is initiated.
Fix odd behaviour of code used to determine if the mouse pointer is inside the track canvas.
Speed up session close by not redrawing stuff as each track/bus is destroyed.
Allow Separate to work on a range selection.
Crop no longer works on all tracks if no tracks are selected.
Improve sensitivity of some menu items based on the currently selected edit point.
Remove (sub)menu items from keybinding window.
Improve ruler text space above baseline.
Clarify what the "precise" button does in the timefx dialog by using a better label.
Various tweaks to Freesound UI.
Apply automation when bouncing with automation in Touch mode, not just Play mode.
Don't distort crossfades when changing their length substantially.
Disallow colons in snapshot names.
Add COMPOSER to TOC/CUE files.
Improved interaction with Freesound.org (backported from Mixbus and Ardour3).

OS X Specific:

If a user has a personal key bindings file automatically switch old OS X keybindings to new modifier names.
Fix potential crashing bug in AudioUnit plugin code for describing parameters.
Fix handling of AudioUnit GUI resizing (as happens on new versions of OS X with the default Apple plugins, and with plugins from various manufacturers).
Save and restore AudioUnit GUI positions whenever they are hidden/shown.
Fix misplacement of Carbon plugin GUI windows because of differences between Carbon/Cocoa/GTK coordinate spaces. (Note: this only affected multi-monitor setups where the user had positioned the menu bar on a non-left-most screen).

Significant New Functionality

Click/metronome is now latency compensated
Monitor Section is now an optional feature that can be added/removed to/from a session as needed.
Restore ability to create TOC and CUE files during export, and improve the formatting of these files
Enter and exit node edit mode with dbl-click in any MIDI region (also leave with a single click on anything other than a MIDI region or note)
Make plugin controls displayable in the mixer strip
Add a way to create a new MIDI track with an instrument pre-selected
Restore independent gain control over click/metronome
Now-functional MIDI list editor
delete notes
full keyboard and scroll editing
keyboard navigation
Primary-z and Primary-r undo/redo, as expected
much more to be done in the future (including note insertion)

GUI Improvements

Smart mode (combined object+range mode) now improved in many ways large and small
Return of the splash screen
More and improved tooltips
Reorganize structure of the Regions and region context menus
Make contents of region properties dialogue expand with the window
Cleanups for the Freesound browser (add stop, remove URI, clear barberpole)
New mouse mode (Draw Notes) rather than overloading range mode
Double click on send "box" toggles the display of its controls in its parent mixer strip
Add option to use plugin GUIs or Ardour generic ones.
"aux-" dropped from the name of aux sends
Add warnings for overwriting marker files
Use the same criteron to sensitize the choose-top-region menu item as to decide whether to open it or not, to prevent a sensitive menu item that does nothing.
Tidy up RegionLayeringOrderEditor a bit, including making it respect edit groups.
Don't offer to save master bus as a route template
Show proper progress information for export while normalizing
Some improvements to the add track/bus dialog to make it more obvious how to add MIDI tracks
Region list now accurately tracks regions' fade in/out status and length
Don't autoscroll right if we are moving left, and vice versa;
Fix issue with export channel splitting getting stuck in the filename
Show an example filename in the main export dialog
Use custom i-beam cursor for range mode
Fix position of viewport after a playhead drag outside the viewport (when following the playhead).
Improve usage of expanded window space in the export dialog + put the "advanced" stuff in a Gtk::VPaned
Fix the width of generic plugin editors
Don't bother opening a time FX dialog if we are just time stretching MIDI regions
Update summary on switching playlists
Button joiner: used to surround the play-range & roll buttons, and also object and range mouse mode buttons; clicking on it toggles special modes ("always play range" and "smart mode" respectively).
Clicking on track rec-enable button while step-editing now exits step-editing mode.
Add delta-time option to MIDI tracer window. Note that its not incredibly accurate or useful right now, because timestamps come from the system clock and are taken when the data is read/written to the port buffer, not its actual timestamp within the buffer
New display of "implicitly on" buttons (rather than using an alternate color, we draw the "actively on" color as a border around the button).

Internal Improvements

Aux sends and regular sends are now numbered independently
Various optimizations for the core processing loop (reduces apparent DSP load, especially with small sessions)
For now, only use the multi-threaded process code if we are using >1 processor for DSP; this involves making the DSP use setting only take effect on a restart of Ardour.
Increase size of click pool to cover longer latency settings
Make adding tracks/busses from templates just like adding them at the start of a session, in that IO connedon't offer to save master bus as a route templatections are prevented until they are all added
Use new Lilv state API to save LV2 plugin state (requires latest lilv version)
Store Region export state in instant.xml
Add aux sends at the position that the menu was opened, rather than always pre-fader
Make crossfade active state and length changes undo-able.
Use musical_time_equal() test for equality when copying notes, not strict floating point equality.
Make crossfade convert-to-full and activate/deactivate work across edit groups
Stop sending MMC/MTC while exporting or freewheeling for any other reason.

Bugs Squashed

Fixed crashing bug caused by Apple's implementation of getmntinfo()
Fix a variety of bugs of varying severity related to the tempo map changes done for 3.0 beta2
Catch exception thrown by SMF code when it cannot write to a file
Fix export threading timeouts when disk operations take long. Might fix other timeout issues also.
Fix failure to find route templates
Clear clicks when auto-returning or looping
Make time stretch respect edit group
Make plugins-stop-with-transport work
Explicitly cancelling solo status when a route's inputs drop to zero
Rework design of midi clock ticker to avoid expensive generalization that has turned out to have no particular use, and fix bug that caused incorrect ticks to be sent (or attempted) as the transport starts up.
Fix timefx on multiple regions, even regions of mixed type
Tape track files need to be created when opened, not when written to
Fix failure to summon the disk butler thread when a track that needs it is followed by a track that does not
Do not crash if an LV2 plugin calls the UI write callback with a port number that ardour has decided is not an automatable parameter
Fix for crash-by-assert just after a MIDI diskstream overwrite (e.g. just after an edit, while playback is active)
Fix bug in MidiClock that sent MIDI Clock messages with negative offsets after a loop point

After a furious 3 months (more than 600 code commits), the Ardour team is pleased to announce the release of Ardour 3.0 Beta 1. This is the first version of Ardour 3 that has support for OS X (Intel only for now, sorry PPC users), where you will find fully functional AudioUnit instrument support among all the other goodies that Ardour 3 brings. The (very long) list below documents the other many changes, including support for Linux native VSTs, an initial new version of Freesound browsing, some shinier (and perhaps out of place) new buttons, and a metric ton of bug fixes and improvements.

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