Ardour 9.8 released

Ardour 9.8 has been released, bringing new concepts of keys and scales along with quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes. Users can now visualize out-of-scale notes and choose to avoid creating them while composing and improvising in a specific musical key. A hierarchical concept of key ownership is in place, allowing individual tracks to override the session-level key. Visualization and MIDI input correction are opt-in features on a per-track basis.

The Scale Editor allows selecting a per-track key and scale, and visualizing how the selected scale maps to the tuning system. The Key Enforcement menu lets users choose how Ardour visualizes out-of-scale notes and enforces the selected key and scale. Options include forbidding drawing new out-of-scale notes and automatically adjusting them as they play on a MIDI keyboard.

Despite early limitations, the feature set will be expanded in future releases. Ardour now correctly recovers audio recordings if the system crashes while recording, with data loss limited to five seconds and regions placed at correct positions. Some file formats, including FLAC and BWF, may require partial data recovery and be written to new files, retaining the original partial file.

Clip recording now guarantees a minimum 2-bar count-in, displayed on the screen in the clip editor. Shift-Ctrl (Cmd)-drag moves both boundaries simultaneously to maintain precise clip length. The audio clip editor received fixes and improvements, including an option to create arpeggios in the Chord Editing section of MIDI Tools.

MIDI Tools tab is now scrollable, and bidirectional drawing is prevented when starting with a straight line and changing direction. The Transport Masters dialog reports position when linear timecode is static, and recording continues after LTC discontinuities for increased robustness during live sessions.