Currently one of the best cross-platform, open-source and freely distributed DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) software, Ardour, received today, August 12, 2016, a major milestone that introduced a multitude of new features and countless improvements.

Yes, that's right, we're talking about Ardour 5.0, which has been in development for the past six months since the release of version 4.7 announced back in February. It sounds strange to jump straight to the 5.0 milestone from 4.7, but looking at the huge release notes, we can't blame the development team, who worked hard on the new features.

"This is a major release focused on substantial changes to the GUI and major new features related to mixing, plugin use, tempo maps, scripting and more," reads the announcement. "Ardour 5.0 can be parallel-installed with older versions of the program, and does not use the same preference files. It will load sessions from Ardour 2, 3 and 4, though with some potential minor changes."

Prominent new features of Ardour 5.0 include tabbed user interface, support for control masters (VCAs), support for tempo ramps, support for writing scripts in the Lua programming language, support for sidechaining and pin connections, plugin inline display, as well as new plugins, namely a-comp, a-reverb, a-eq, a-delay, and a-high/low pass.

Additionally, Ardour 5.0 comes with Harrison's high-quality commercial plugins, support for handling MIDI and audio to busses, Open Sound Control (OSC) support, five new color themes, a greatly improved GUI (Graphical User Interface) with lots of changes, new preferences and dialogs, better export functionality, and lots of updated plugins.

The control surfaces have been improved as well in Ardour 5.0 with MIDI map support for M-Audio Oxygen 61 v3 (preset 1), M-Audio Oxygen 61, and AKAI MPD32, as well as updated MIDI map support for M-Audio Axiom Air 25. There are also new language translations and lots of bugfixes since the Ardour 4.7 release. Download Ardour 5.0 right now via our website.

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