[LAA] Ardour 2.8.8 is released

Finally, its June and Ardour 2.8.8 is finally here. Although this is primarily a bug-fix release, some of the "bugs" fixed are so pervasive and significant that they could almost count as new features. In particular, automation editing has finally arrived at a place that people with experience on other DAWs may consider actually usable. Issues with alignment of new and existing recorded material are addressed too, and there are lots of other bug fixes for issues small and large (including 3 or 4 crashing bugs). Thanks to motivation provided by the Mixbus project, there are also yet more improvements to AudioUnit plugin handling on OS X. Anybody using Ardour 2.8.7 or earlier should upgrade to enjoy increased stability and better functionality. This is the last feature-adding release of the 2.8 series. The next release of Ardour will be version 3.0-alpha1 (unless notable regressions are discovered in 2.8.8). IMPORTANT FIXES Dramatic improvements to automation editing so that it more or less works as anyone might expect. DOWNSIDE: for this release, the display of automation data is not updated in realtime while in write/touch mode. This will be fixed in a future release. Correct very strange and erratic punch recording behaviour that would create regions on tracks that were not record enabled Fix crash when zooming canvas repeatedly Fix handling of files larger than 2GB that could cause very slow reload of existing sessions (speedup was from 9 minutes to 30 seconds) Subtle but important change that may fix issues with recording not placing material in the correct location on the timeline Correctly order signal processing after adding a send (fixes issues with placement of recorded material) Regions overlapped by 2 other regions will now no longer semi-randomly fail to be audible during playback Region exports and bounces now use region fade in and fade out curves. USEFUL FIXES Save & recall port insert latency values JACK Latency = 256 menu option now works Importing files with the "Sequence files" option now works Cleanup LV2 "external gui" extension support Clear solo state when deleting a route that is soloed Notify user that deleting a route will save the session state Ellipsize long names in the track/bus inspector Force exported AIFF files to be big-endian Anchor the crossfade start and end points so that they cannot be edited Correctly retain MIDI bindings for global transport controls Do not burn 100% of a CPU's available cycles if disconnected from JACK Put the fixed size columns (check marks) on the left side of the mixer's track and group lists for easier access to their functionality Fix strange behaviour when dragging region(s) towards time zero Rationalize track selection and range selection Make selecting a range in mouse range mode work even if there is already a time selection When splitting N-channel regions to mono regions, each new region shows up as its own region, not a child of the original Clearing an automation track of data no longer generates an error when next loading the session ("Cannot reconstitute XML history node ...") HANDY NEW FEATURES Include links in Help menu to the tutorial and reference manuals switch from ctrl-drag to alt-drag for "drag-selection-as-region" change automation track selection model slightly so that auto tracks are highlighted as expected. only show range boxes when the automation will actually get edited. clicking an automation track should show the editor-mixer for the parent track Configurable behaviour when an N channel track plays a region that has less than N channels (silence or replicate the last channel). Default is silence. OS X ONLY Significantly updated version of the GTK GUI toolkit in use, which fixes a number of issues including... Multiple monitors now supported correctly Various fixes for handling AudioUnits, particularly UAD Use Apple's ExtAudioFile API for file types not otherwise handled on OS X (MP3, AAC and others) Use libsndfile to try to get timestamp info because Apple has no API for this Do not categorize AU plugins using the "subtype" property because its meaningless. Use "type" instead which is coarser but has a clear meaning. Added a shortcut to Volumes (external disk drives) when opening a session Add option to enable/disable translation on OS X Remove automation mode selector from AU plugin view window, since it doesn't do anything useful Correctly handle AU parameter types, so that more parameters are available for automation If a plugin has a Carbon-based editor, properly close that window when deleting the plugin (e.g. when closing the session) TRANSLATION UPDATES Spanish (Pablo Fernández) French (Raphaël Doursenaud) CONTRIBUTORS Carl Hetherington, Lucus, DHess, Ben Loftis and Old Man Davis