Ardour 9.8 adds keys, scales, improved session recovery, and advanced MIDI editing

Ardour 9.8 introduces initial support for musical keys and scales, allowing MIDI tracks to identify and manage notes outside a selected scale. Sessions have a default key, while individual tracks can override it, with support for regions and plugins planned for future releases. A new Scale Editor lets users select keys and scales per MIDI track and see how they map to the current tuning system.

Scale visualization and MIDI correction remain optional on a per track basis. New Key Enforcement controls can highlight out of scale notes, prevent users from drawing them, or automatically correct notes played from a MIDI keyboard using three different methods. Future updates are expected to add support for alternative tuning systems, key and scale changes along the timeline, and SCALA files.

The release also improves session recovery after crashes, limiting potential recording loss to five seconds or less and restoring regions to their correct timeline positions, including during loop and punch recording. Partially written FLAC and BWF recordings can now be recovered into new files, with Broadcast Wave metadata preserved while the original partial files remain untouched.