The latest stable release of the open-source Ardour DAW adds scale-aware composition tools, alongside improvements to recording, MIDI, hardware controllers, plugins, and synchronisation.
Open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) Ardour 9.8 is now available as the latest stable release for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows, adding initial scales support aimed at making music composition and improvisation more key-aware.
The new scales feature lets users visualise notes that fall outside a selected musical scale and choose to avoid creating out-of-scale notes when composing or improvising in a specific musical key. The release also adds support for the Novation Launchkey 88 Mk4 and Arturia Drumbrute controllers.
Ardour 9.8 improves session recovery for audio recordings if the system crashes during recording. Clip recording now guarantees at least a two-bar count-in, with the countdown displayed in the clip editor, while a new MIDI Tools option creates arpeggios.
Transport Masters now report positions when linear timecode is not moving and can locate sessions to static timecode to reduce synchronisation time. Cue page changes also improve processor ordering when recording clips with hardware monitoring.
The release adds LV2 string-parameter UI support, Linux lib64 search paths for VST3 plugins, broader LV2 parameter-update handling and a new add_section OSC method, alongside several other workflow and compatibility fixes.
Released about two and a half months after Ardour 9.7, Ardour 9.8 is available as ready-to-use binaries and a source tarball, maintaining its open-source distribution model.
