Ardour 8.11 has been released, addressing critical workflow-blocking issues for users on Linux. This update comes approximately three and a half months after the previous version, Ardour 8.10, and is considered a vital hotfix.
The main issue rectified in this release involved a significant bug that affected sessions using musical time as the default time domain. Users who performed operations like time-stretching, pitch-shifting, or reversing faced high risks of being unable to reopen their sessions in the future, according to Ardour developer Paul Davis.
Additionally, Ardour 8.11 resolves a crashing bug that impacted users working with meters not measured in quarter notes (like 6/8 or 5/8). This crash was triggered when adding BBT markers in such sessions.
Though Ardour 8.10 was anticipated to be the last of the 8.x series, developers are now focusing on the upcoming major release—Ardour 9.0—which will introduce several new features yet to be disclosed. Users and Linux distribution maintainers are strongly encouraged to upgrade to Ardour 8.11 as soon as possible.
The latest version can be downloaded from the official website. Users can install Ardour from their distribution’s stable repositories or as a Flatpak app via Flathub. For those interested in building from source, detailed instructions are available here.