Our friends at Ardour have released Version 6.0, and we would like to offer them a huge congratulations! While the source code and their own builds were available on release day, many of you have been waiting for Ardour 6.0 to come to Ubuntu’s repositories.

Today, that day came. Ardour 6.0 has landed in Ubuntu Groovy Gorilla (future 20.10) and will be on Ubuntu Studio’s daily spins of Groovy Gorilla within 24 hours of this writing.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to backport Ardour 6.0 into Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, nor would we want to. This is because if we do, we might disrupt the workflow of people who are currently working with projects in 5.12 that are relying on its functionality and sound. Ardour 6.0 has an all-new Digital Sound Processor (DSP), and as such it may sound somewhat different.

Additionally, Ardour 6.0 projects are not backwards-compatible with Ardour 5.12 projects; once a 5.12 project is opened in 6.0, it is converted to a 6.0 project and cannot be used in 5.12 again unless restored from a backup.

This is also the reason why we will not be releasing Ardour 6.0 into Ubuntu Studio’s main Backports PPA. However, we are giving Ardour its own Backports PPA so that users may upgrade Ardour in their Ubuntu (Studio) 20.04 LTS installation whenever they are ready.

To upgrade Ardour to 6.0, open a terminal and type the following:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntustudio-ppa/ardour-backports
sudo apt upgrade

If at any point you change your mind and want to revert to Ardour 5.12 (and hopefully haven’t converted any projects):

sudo apt install ppa-purge
sudo ppa-purge ppa:ubuntustudio-ppa/ardour-backports

Enjoy Ardour 6.0!