Ardour overview

Ardour is a digital audio workstation that runs natively on OS X. You can use it to record, edit and mix multi-track audio. Produce your own CD's. Mix video soundtracks. Experiment with new ideas about music and sound. Generate sound installations for 12 speaker gallery shows...

Ardour capabilities include: multichannel recording, non-destructive editing with unlimited undo/redo, full automation support, a powerful mixer, unlimited tracks/busses/plugins, timecode synchronization, and hardware control from surfaces like the Mackie Control Universal. If you've been looking for a tool similar to ProTools, Nuendo, Pyramix, or Sequoia, you might have found it.

Above all, Ardour strives to meet the needs of professional users. This means implementing all the "hard stuff" that other DAWs (even some leading commercial apps) handle incorrectly or not at all. Ardour has a completely flexible "anything to anywhere" routing system, and will allow as many physical I/O ports as your system allows. Ardour supports a wide range of audio-for-video features such as video-synced playback and pullup/pulldown sample rates. You will also find powerful features such as "persistent undo", multi-language support, and destructive track punching modes that aren't available on other platforms.

What’s new in version 6.9.0

Version 6.9.0:

Bug Fixes

Splash screen management has been changed. On Linux, this may conflict with your window manager's behavior - if so, go to Edit > Preferences > Appearance > Quirks and try the "Show/Hide" setting.
Support for a Wine/windows build to run Windows VST plugins "natively" on Linux has been removed. ardour.org has never distributed these builds. There are plugin wrappers/bridges such as Yabridge that do a better job of making this possible.
Muted MIDI regions are now actually muted.
MIDI capture duration is correctly computed when loop recording.
MIDI capture alignment is now correctly implemented.
Loop recording working again after an unnoticed breakage.
Various fixes for recently added region markers during editing.
The "Escape" key now behaves identically while in internal editing modes as when in other mouse modes.
Prevent accidental addition of multiple markers at the same position.
In the Recorder tab, do not show input meters for control-only ports Faderport, Mackie, etc.
During a slip-contents drag, regions are now transparent so that you can align transients.
Fix Apple Coreaudio Source (used for MP3 import on macOS) -- was broken since 6.0

Full list of changes available here

View older Ardour versions

4.3

(12 Reviews of Ardour)

Comments
User Ratings

lemon-kun

Jul 26 2011

2.8.11/7387

0.0

Version: 2.8.11/7387

If you depend on this app, BEWARE: DOESN'T WORK UNDER LION ! ...at least at the moment...

Espiridion

Nov 24 2010

Changes in this release: "Do not prevent transport operations after an export (and potentially at other times)" 2.8.11 came out in July 2010. On more recent news, an alpha release of version 3 will be available soon.

Feb 4 2010

2.8.7

Version: 2.8.7

@JIC, I can understand your frustration. I don't know if they had this in place before: "Consider becoming a subscriber If you became a subscriber then this download and all updates for the duration of your subscription would be available to you for free."

Moogan

2.8.7 from dev site: Smarter decision making when deciding which in/out configuration to choose when handling an AU plugin that has several. When exporting/bouncing/consolidating, tell AU plugins the new processing blocksize so they will actually run during the process. Yes, that means what you think it means. Remove use of std::locale() which is utterly and completely broken on OS X, and causes a program to crash if used with any actual national locale. Don't reconfigure I/O of AU plugins when they already have the correct I/O configuration

Mrboma

Jul 21 2009

2.8.2

Version: 2.8.2

Be aware that this requires Jack. When I installed Jack, it jacked up several of my audio systems. I would rather use a "lesser" app like Audacity or Amadeus that doesn't require Jack or soundflower or any other sound system hack.