Ardour 9.8 has been released as the latest stable version of this powerful, free, cross-platform, and open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) software for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows systems.

Coming two and a half months after Ardour 9.7, the Ardour 9.8 release introduces initial scales support to let you visualize out-of-scale notes and choose if you want to avoid creating them entirely when composing and improvising in a specific musical key, as well as support for the Novation Launchkey 88 Mk4 and Arturia Drumbrute controllers.

Ardour 9.8 also brings improvements to session recovery for audio recordings in case the system crashes while Ardour is recording, improvements to clip recording guaranteeing at least a 2-bar count-in with the countdown displayed on the screen in the clip editor, and a new option in MIDI Tools to create arpeggios.

The Transport Masters dialog has been improved as well to report the position when the linear timecode is not moving, and the session locates to static timecode to minimize sync time. In addition, the Cue page has been updated to reorder processors in the track when recording a clip and using hardware monitoring at the same time to get a signal to record.

On top of that, Ardour 9.8 adds UI support for LV2 string parameters, adds lib64 search paths on Linux for VST3 plugins, adds support for handling LV2 parameter updates of any known type, disables VST micro-edit inline controls by default, and adds an “add_section” OSC method.

Starting with this release, Ardour now includes cross-cursor preference in metadata, properly converts sends from old Ardour 2 sessions, enables scrolling for the route comments box, no longer allows end BBT markers after paste, and uses pixel-based logic to determine where to start the edge where resize/reposition occurs.

It also latches the rec-enable control when using a transport master and allows translation of startup profiling messages. Check out the release notes for more details about the changes included in Ardour 9.8, which you can download from the official website as ready-to-use binaries and a source tarball.