Ardour upgrade

[flagos]

Hi. Can anyone tell me if Ardour 3 can open Ardour 2 files? Possible problems upgrading?

Thanks.

[English Guy]

Yes, though if you upgrade Ardour is on 4.

[dawhead]

And 5.0 is due out in a few days (where a few means < 10).

[flagos]

Thanks for the answers. I'm concern about losing old projects. What happens with projects that uses old plug-ins? Can I keep the old Ardour version?

[Frank Carvalho]

Hi!

Ardour is backward compatible. In principle, that is. But I have had many Ardour 3 projects that did not survive the conversion to Ardour 4, so the automatic conversion does not always work. My projects are typically large and complex, so it is perhaps no surprise that I will run into such problems, but my experience is that somewhere between 1/3 to 1/2 of my projects fail to upgrade. I don't know how robust Ardour 2->3 is.

But you will not loose your projects. Ardour makes a backup of the old project before attempting to upgrade.

/Frank

[flagos]

Frank thanks for your answer. It is exactly what I was asking. I'll keep in mind your advice.

[AyeLinux]

Also, multiple versions can coexist on your system. You can keep the old version around for the old, finished projects, and attempt the conversion when you want to use new features in an old project.

[flagos]

That's great! Thanks Aye!!

[CrocoDuck]

Installing multiple versions is probably your best approach. I lost an entire Ardour 2 session just by trying to open it with Ardour 4 due to the fact that the session had automation with old Calf plugins. See here the details. Needless to say: try to convert a copy of your old sessions.