Ardour 9.0 released

[Posted February 6, 2026 by jake]

The Ardour digital-audio-workstation (DAW) project has announced the release of version 9.0.

This is a major release for the project, seeing several substantive new features that users have asked for over a long period of time. Region FX, clip recording, a touch-sensitive GUI, pianoroll windows, clip editing and more, not to mention dozens of bug fixes, new MIDI binding maps, improved GUI performance on macOS (for most) ...
We expect to get feedback on some of the major new features in this release, and plan to take that into account as we improve and refine them and the rest of Ardour going forward. We have no doubt that there will be both delight and disappointment with certain things - rather than assume that we don't know what we're doing, please leave us feedback on the forums so that Ardour gets better over time. Those of you new to our clip launching implementation might care to read up on the differences with Ableton Live.
In the coming weeks, we'll begin to sketch out what we have planned next for Ardour, in addition to responding to the feedback we get on this 9.0 release.

to post comments

How good?

Posted Feb 7, 2026 17:36 UTC (Sat) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link] (8 responses)

I frequently see people posting that audio editing is one of the areas where Open Source alternatives are still not there yet.

With this release, I am wondering how much they have managed to close the gap. Any professional audio users willing to paint a picture?

How good?

Posted Feb 7, 2026 20:10 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I don't know about details Ardour, but it is mentioned in this migration post[1]. It is also stated that Pipewire is better than Windows for latency at this point. So the foundations might be there at least…

[1] https://www.himthe.dev/blog/microsoft-to-linux

How good?

Posted Feb 7, 2026 21:19 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

> I frequently see people posting that audio editing is one of the areas where Open Source alternatives are still not there yet.

So why is it Audacity seems the "go to" audio editing software supplied with a lot of consumer hardware? (I'm thinking USB record turntables ...)

Cheers,
Wol

How good?

Posted Feb 7, 2026 21:33 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

IIUC, Audacity is like Vi: you edit audio directly and there are tools to help. Ardour is a DAW which is closer to an IDE.

But I've only done cutting and splicing in Audacity for a school project and that is almost 2 decades ago now, so…someone who uses these tools day-to-day should be trusted more.

How good?

Posted Feb 8, 2026 17:59 UTC (Sun) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

So why is it Audacity seems the "go to" audio editing software supplied with a lot of consumer hardware?

Ardour is great but it takes considerable effort to set up and learn to use, especially if you're not familiar with DAWs (digital audio workstations) in general.

Audacity is a much simpler program and tends to cover many use cases for people who like messing around with sound files but are not in fact involved in actual music production from scratch. For example, Ardour is set up to deal with data from complex MIDI input/output setups, which is pretty much indispensable if you have a bunch of MIDI keyboards and sound generators. It is, however, completely unnecessary if all you're interested in is cutting and pasting some WAV files from your USB-based record player, which Audacity will do just fine without all the ballast and complexity.

How good?

Posted Feb 8, 2026 1:28 UTC (Sun) by jimi (guest, #6655) [Link]

I can't comment on the current state of professional audio because I have been out of that world for quite some time now. But years ago I spent a week working at a professional studio that was completely Ardour based. I had come from ProTools at the university and so had that background. I loved Ardour, and used the knowledge I gained from that week to go on and produce my own album. The main difference between Ardour and ProTools was the level of polish on the UI and the quality of the plugins. But I never missed ProTools.

That was a long time ago, but even then Ardour was high enough quality for my needs.

How good?

Posted Feb 8, 2026 1:59 UTC (Sun) by fredi@lwn (subscriber, #65912) [Link] (2 responses)

Audio editing is quite a vast area,might cover from just cut and paste, to serious music production.

Linux today has a great plumbing, and some amazing userspace programs:

Low level:
- SND drivers
- Alsa
- USB

Middle layer:
- PipeWire/WirePlumber, which besides it's API, ATM implements also:
- Pulseaudio
- Jack
- Midi?
- Interop with Gstreamer IIRC
- Video?

User space, just the advanced apps:
- Ardour
- Guitarix
- Auacity

What I find difficult, is especially the middle layer. this, because a lot of the "professional level" apps, have coped with various "ages" of Linux audio / multimedia earthquakes : from OSS to ALSA. ArtsD / Gstreamer -> Pulseaudio (here people complained a lot, but IMHO after the first sharp edges it made Linux media quite better) - Jack. Right now the quality is really good, and especially what the Ardour and Guitarix folks have done is some of the most undervaluated achievements on Linux Audio.

Comparing audio between Linux and the proprietary SW I've tried:
- Linux audio plumbing and quality, is at least on par with MAC if not better in my opinion. Though often needs tuning, documentation is sparse, not easy to use. And unfortunately few people help / appreciate the work done by the audio devs on Linux.
- DAW / Audio editing: I've used both GarageBand on MAC, and Ardour. I would say, Ardour wins hands down.
- While we are here, on guitar side, Guitarix is a really great piece of software. I never tried proprietary here, as there was nothing I was missing from it.

Just my two cents.

How good?

Posted Feb 8, 2026 3:20 UTC (Sun) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link]

Audacity => Tenacitty

How good?

Posted Feb 12, 2026 14:31 UTC (Thu) by MKesper (subscriber, #38539) [Link]

For a complete picture I think you need to include audio plugins (aka VSTs). Many plugins are available, many, even high quality ones as Free Software (e.g. AirWindows, kxstudio collection) or proprietary like Pianoteq.
But if your go-to VST is only published for Win/MacOS it may or may not run to your satisfaction.
Also they're not hyped as much as expensive plugins and probably have no shiny GUI (esp. airwindows...).

https://github.com/baconpaul/airwin2rack
https://kx.studio/Repositories:Plugins