 That clamp has pretty much caused my ears to produce dynamic range compression. Hey, it's Anafa. Have you heard the news? Ardor 6 has been released after what feels like three years since the last version. They've got the newest one out. Oh, that's much better. So on Ardor's website you can find an article about the new release and there's all the different stuff listed there. There's a very big change log, but the most important things they are mentioning are as follows. The whole signal path is perfectly latency compensated now. Previously in Ardor 5 and before, the latency compensation, as they say, was a bit spotty and didn't work ideally in all contexts and I mean, they mentioned this as a big, big point and I get it. It's important. So to me, as an end user, that's probably not going to be a life changer. I don't really think that much of latency compensation when I work, but there's other things that I do think about. And what I do think about is, for example, crash recovery. You see, one of the most important things to me that happened in Ardor 6 versus Ardor 5 is that the crash recovery or periodic backup system has been fixed because Ardor is pretty good at making sure you never lose anything that you record it in terms of audio. But when it comes to working with MIDI or automation lanes or changing effect patches, I have experienced data loss a few times and it's really painful. I think that one of the worst things that Creative Software can do is f*** over your work. That just kills the soul of an artist. That's why I've been pushing Autosave to be on by default in LMS, for example, because they had it and it works, but you need to first turn it on. And if you first make a clean install and you start working and it crashes and you lose your data, then you cry. So finally they made it on by default. If Autosave even costs me extra performance, I don't care. I want to be safe. I want my projects to exist. So Ardor 6 fixes some Autosave problems, namely that it doesn't always work. Now it should be fine, but I still have to battle test it. I haven't been doing too much work with the newest release. I've been using some almost final versions and I've been checking some bigger work projects. For example, I have an Ardor session with like 250 sound effects for a game I've been working on for a client and I've opened this up in Ardor 6 recently and excluding a few sound effects that didn't want to export at all, it seemed to work okay. And when I filled it around with real-time rendering and I restarted it once and finally exported them, then when I compared the files exported from Ardor 5 and the ones exported from Ardor 6, opening the same session, I didn't notice any problems. So that's good because if you're migrating to a new version of software, the last thing you want is to do it and then realize everything is broken. And you can't go back. Especially if you're doing client work and you need to have it done fast and you can't like spend extra five hours just fixing stuff you already had done. So if that would be the case, I'd rather wait and keep using Ardor 5 for these projects. I mean when I'm doing my own stuff, I don't care, I don't care, I don't care, I don't care. But when I'm doing my own stuff, it's not such a big problem because sometimes even errors and bugs lead to some interesting creative decisions. For example, Ardor mistakenly broke a media region and it was not playing and that made me consider, huh, maybe I will mute it in this part and let it come in later. And that actually proved to be an interesting arrangement. Of course it's not that I want something like that to happen, it's that sometimes you can turn it into something good. Another thing I've noticed about Ardor 6 is that the plugin manager has been really, really changed and it looks not much nicer. I've also read that you can now add custom tags to plugins and that Ardor comes with like extensive tag lists for like 300 different plugins. I wonder if these are LV2 like open source plugins or commercial plugins or both. I don't know, I haven't seen that yet. But it seems like there is an option to like better organize the plugins you want to use or don't want to use. When I've been using this version 6 like two months ago, I reported a few bugs that were really irritating and like broke my work that I've been doing with Ardor 5. But when I checked it out like last week, I couldn't reproduce any of the bugs. So I think they fixed that all. Another great thing I think what they did is they changed how Ardor treats MIDI device input. For example, before in Ardor 5, if you wanted to use your MIDI keyboard to play an instrument track, you would have to arm it for recording and make sure that it has the appropriate MIDI input selected. And only then you would press a key and hear something. Because you also would have to turn on input monitoring instead of playing whatever is on disk. So there was quite a lot of stuff you had to do to just touch a note and hear it or if you want to record. Now it's much easier because you can select MIDI input devices in the global Ardor preferences and you can make these devices provide input automatically to any MIDI track that you select in the editor. So you can simply select a MIDI track, press a key on your keyboard and you've got sound. And you can also record just like that. So this is great because there's going to be no more fiddling with MIDI inputs and resigning that and arming the tracks and making sure that it monitors and what if you're recording and what if you're not recording. And yeah, they also introduce something that they call cue monitoring. So before in Ardor 5 and before you could either listen to what is being fed into the track from microphones or maybe a MIDI keyboard or you could listen to what's already captured on disk but not both. And now you can do both. Now one thing I'm not very fond of is how they change the time grid display. In Ardor 5 I can clearly see where are the beats when I zoom in to edit my MIDI. In Ardor 6 so far that is a problem. The beat lines are not emphasized and so what ends up happening is that I start counting the beats from the bar line because I can't see which beat am I just hovering my mouse over right now which is kind of silly and that really slows down my MIDI work. So I hope they address this quickly. I have already reported an issue in Ardor bug tracker about this. Also another interesting thing that they mention in their release notes is that they've been revamping the very speed playback. Very speed is the functionality of dynamically changing the speed of audio playback so you can use Ardor like a tape machine like sloping stuff. Speed them up. Play them backwards. And they said that before it wasn't very flexible and now what they've done is revamped it and made it better so that possibly in the future Ardor could be sample rate agnostic. Just like audacity. Because you see right now if you create an Ardor session that Ardor session is going to be created with a determined sample rate and that's going to be the sample rate that you set up in your audio interface when you create the session. So for example if your jack server is running at 48kHz and you created session that session will be created with 48kHz. And all audio that you record in it will be sampled at 48kHz. And all audio that you bounce and all the processing inside will be at 48kHz. If you ever want to import a file at a different sample rate than that sample rate of your session it will have to be re-sampled before it can be imported or it will play back at the wrong speed. Which I think is understandable because having the program like re-sample all audio files on the fly is probably going to be CPU intensive. For example that's why I would not record my audio into FLAC files directly and then playback from FLAC files because that would require quite a lot of CPU power. You know maybe it's not much when we're talking about 1, 3 tracks but when you start going with 40, 50 tracks it's probably going to end up pretty quickly and maybe it's better to just use more disk space and a dumb PCM format like WAV instead of using that smart FLAC compression but forcing the CPU to do more work. However that's interesting they have also enabled FLAC as a format for all the audio interchange which I think it's cool to be able to do because maybe sometimes you're very low on hard disk space but you have plenty of processing power and you can do that. I haven't tested it, don't know how it works, don't know how it performs, might be cool. Another nice thing is that you can finally import and export MP3s, yay! About the sample rate independency, I think that would be really cool if we could just stop caring about sample rates. The biggest problem I have with this is that if you create an order session, for example I work on 48 kHz and I want to send my project to someone else and collaborate with them and they work in 44.1. Now they have to stop their jack server and start at a different sample rate to be able to open up my project without everything going completely sideways. This part is not gonna work anymore. I'm looking forward to that but well they just said that they laid groundwork so it's not a feature that's already there. Okay I think that's enough for this video. Go to ardor.org and check out the detailed release notes. Let me know if you already knew that Ardor 6 is out or if you didn't know. By the way I have an Ardor 6 quick start guide, it's gonna be a longer video showing the process of starting Ardor for the first time and creating a short project, a short podcast project I would say, from start to finish. So I think that should be pretty helpful for new users. What are you doing? It's go time! Oh, I forgot. Thanks for watching and also big thanks to all the people who support my work financially. If you dear viewer would also like to join them and help keep this show going, please go to patreon.com slash anfa or liberapay.com slash anfa where you can give me a buck or two every month. Go get Ardor and make some music. Bye.