Ardour 9.8 has been released as the latest version of the open-source digital audio workstation, introducing initial support for musical keys and scales, improved recovery of recordings after crashes, enhancements to clip recording, and many fixes.
The headline addition is the new keys and scales functionality. Ardour can now visualize notes that fall outside a selected scale and, optionally, prevent users from creating them while composing or improvising in a specific musical key.
For now, both visualization and MIDI input correction are opt-in per track. The new Scale Editor provides basic controls for choosing a key and scale, while the Key Enforcement menu determines whether out-of-scale notes are highlighted or actively corrected.
Ardour can now also prevent users from drawing notes outside the selected scale and automatically adjust notes played from a MIDI keyboard, as the developers describe the feature as an early implementation.
Future work is expected to include support for tuning systems beyond 12-tone equal temperament, key and scale changes along the timeline, and loading SCALA files.
Another notable improvement in Ardour 9.8 is session recovery. Audio recordings can now be recovered more reliably if the system crashes while Ardour is recording, with data loss limited to about five seconds.
In addition, recovered regions are placed in the correct positions, including when loop or punch recording modes are used.
For partially written formats such as FLAC and Broadcast Wave files, Ardour can recover the audio data and write it into a new file while preserving the original incomplete file as a safety measure. Broadcast Wave metadata is also correctly restored in the newly created files.
Clip recording has several improvements as well. Recording now guarantees at least a two-bar count-in, with the countdown displayed inside the clip editor when visible.
The audio clip editor fixes playhead positioning when the underlying data is longer than the region, switches its ruler to Bars, Beats, and Ticks, and adds an offset corresponding to the region start.
MIDI Tools now include an option to create arpeggios instead of chords. The MIDI tools panel has been moved into a scrollable area, allowing the editor to remain usable at smaller sizes.
On top of that, Ardour 9.8 also improves Linear Timecode support. The Transport Masters dialog can report a position even when LTC is stationary, while sessions can locate directly to static timecode to reduce synchronization time.
Plugin handling has expanded, adding UI support for LV2 string parameters, improving handling of different LV2 parameter types, and supporting the following LV2 parameters through patch messages.
Finally, control surface and external hardware support sees several updates, including preliminary support for the Novation Launchkey Mk4 88, Arturia DrumBrute MIDNAM support, improvements to Mackie and Push 2 integration, and multiple fixes affecting OSC and trigger-based workflows.
Beyond these changes, Ardour 9.8 contains numerous smaller interface, build system, MIDI, session handling, plugin, and stability fixes. For details, see the announcement. The app is available for Linux, macOS, and Windows from the project’s official download page.
