Ardour 5 released

https://community.ardour.org/node/13842

by ashitlerferad • 10 years ago

157 64 10 years ago

community.ardour.org

ronjouch7• 10 years ago

Ardour and JACK are fantastic pieces of software, and the love children of core developer Paul Davis, and many contributors. Paul is trying to make a full-time living with it, but funding is still far away from even modest objectives (he blogged about it, see [1]). The donation sidebar currently says:

- August goal: US$6200 (US$74.4k/yr)

- Total till now: US$2923.52

If you're into Linux/OSX audio (and now Windows, with Ardour 5!) and can afford it, I encourage you to donate :) . See the "Ardour Finance" sidebar of the linked post.

[1] https://community.ardour.org/node/8288

K_REY_C• 10 years ago

I've purchased in the past just to support (and to keep going the illusion that I'll create some audio for /me/ in the future).

spriggan32• 10 years ago

That's not that much money, they need grants from OSS foundations, OSS like that need to get better at funding. How many millions the Mozilla foundation gave away this year ? and to only what, 8 projects ? The Gnome foundation could also help , instead of the financing dubious programs I won't name. But I guess it's better to waste money on hype rather than supporting well established projects.

ronjouch7• 10 years ago

Agreed, qualifying 75 k$/yr in the US as "not much money" is hyperbole for a developer with 20 years experience of multithreaded multiplatform C++.

As to funding from big OSS players, the problem is that Ardour is niche software, far away from the interests of those big OSS players. Regarding your examples,

- Mozilla has interest and invests into web/infrastructure tech (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11956234 ), Ardour doesn't fit in here.

- GNOME... can you name these dubious programs you are referring to? To my eyes, GNOME just tries to survive with limited funding.

pjmlp• 10 years ago

That is the biggest problem with FOSS for desktop use, you cannot hide it behind paywalls or consulting gigs, which makes very hard to make a living out of it.

I always try to donate to the projects I use frequently, as if I just had bought a software package.

roel_v• 10 years ago

Is there anyone on here who uses DAW's seriously, and has tried Ardour? Can it compete with the big boys?

spriggan32• 10 years ago

Is there anyone on here who uses DAW's seriously, and has tried Ardour? Can it compete with the big boys?

Can it compete? Yes, a DAW hardly decides what the final result sounds like. The problem is integration. Often controllers come with presets for Pro-tools,Logic, Cubase, Live so integration is seamless, there is virtually no need for configuration. Now Is Ardour popular ? right now not that much. But it's a great project non-less and perfectly capable.

dawhead15• 10 years ago

Ardour has builtin support for many hardware controllers. Our support for Mackie Control is as good as anything in the proprietary world, ditto for things like the FaderPort. Generic MIDI controllers can have MIDI maps, and we have at least a dozen predefined ones already.

Ardour 5.1 will also see support for the Ableton Push 2 device.

Popularity: right now, someone starts a bundle of Ardour obtained from ardour.org roughly once every 4 minutes. There were 10,000 downloads of Ardour 4.7 from ardour.org. We're more like the members of the Fight Club network than we are like the ProTools club: we're everywhere, but you can't see us. Every laptop distributed to the favelas by the Brazilan government comes with Ardour. There are at least 10,000 users of Ardour in each of the USA and Germany alone.

Are we "as popular" as Reaper, Logic or Cubase? Almost certainly not. Are we popular enough? Sure.

ronjouch7• 10 years ago

I'm not qualified to comment as a "serious" user (as would be, say, someone doing mix/production for a living), but as a hobbyist it has been a joy and powerhouse to use and produce two little homebrew albums.

Another popular alternative for that kind of audiences is http://reaper.fm/ , from Cockos from Justin Frankel & co from Nullsoft who made WinAMP.

diminish• 10 years ago

As a serious hobbyist, ardour is on the way to compete with pro tools. I decided to use ardour, musescore and ableton live for different purposes 3 years ago and I m happy. Reaper, logic pro, garage band etc don't give anything extra to Ardour after 6 months of trials I can say that.

jdietrich2• 10 years ago

I'd say that it's competitive with older versions of the major DAWs. It's reasonably stable and has a reasonably complete feature set.

The problem for Ardour on Linux is the plugin ecosystem. Any serious DAW user has invested thousands of dollars in plugins, none of which will run on Linux. For Linux to be a serious platform for audio work, it needs much more than just a DAW; it needs samplers, synths, reverbs, dynamics and EQ processors, pitch correction, restoration and mastering tools, etc etc.

Ardour is a noble effort, but I can't help feeling that it's a little bit futile. The sheer scale of the audio software ecosystem seems insurmountable for free software.

dawhead15• 10 years ago

Every day, there are NEW DAW users who have no plugins.

I think you're also not fully informed on the scale of existing plugin development on Linux. Several commercial developers now produce plugins for Linux, and there are some open source ones for many tasks that are actually outstanding. Noise removal/restoration is one particularly weak spot.

Finally, Ardour doesn't run on just Linux. Anyone on OS X or Windows can use the program, along with their full set of VST (Windows) or AU (OS X) plugins on those platforms.

polotics• 10 years ago

I would say that with Ardour on Linux, the lack of plugins will allow you to jump straight up to hardware synths and effects. The big boys are not using very much in the way of plugin synths, there are a few good plugins but they are at the price of hardware. Unless you intend to do your own mastering (don't) you're good to go with Ardour and a good analog mixing board plus a compatible high-quality DAC/ADC (if you're like me, an Apogee ONE is all you need).

s_kilk• 10 years ago

Eh, it's pretty good, but as another commentor noted, Ardour has tended to lag behind other DAWs.

For example: Ardour didn't get full Midi support until 2013, approximately twenty years after Pro Tools 1.0 launched with MIDI support from the start.

dawhead15• 10 years ago

Do you seriously want me to list all the features that Ardour had for 10 years before they showed up in ProTools?

This is a recent list of PT user's most-wanted features.

http://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-page/2016/6/21/which-of...

Every single one of the 7 completed items out of the 20 existed in Ardour for years before they were in ProTools.

We were the first DAW to provide anything-to-anything routing. We were the first DAW to have sub-sample accurate timecode lock. We were the first DAW to have sample-accurate automation. We were the first DAW to allow in-track mixing (transparent regions). We were the first DAW to offer PFL/AFL solo models in addition to solo-in-place. We were the first DAW to offer a dedicated monitor section in addition to the master outs. We were for a very long time the only DAW that could handle multichannel master outs (used, for example, in ambisonics set ups - 40 channel master bus, anyone?).

There are certainly areas where our functionality is behind the current state of one or more other DAWs. That's true for all DAWs. Our MIDI workflow is still weak, but evolving. But the idea that we generally "lag" behind other DAWs is mostly a conception of people who like and use what I term "modern pop production techniques", which has never really been my own personal focus. If there's another DAW out there that works better for you than Ardour, you should use it. But you might also be surprised at how well Ardour works for you, especially if you record people playing instruments.

SwellJoe2• 10 years ago

I've been trying to use it off and on from the very beginning of its development. And, I've been a subscribing contributor off and on for a long time, too. I say "trying to use it" not so much because Ardour is inferior to other DAWs; it isn't. It's pretty solid, pretty capable, and pretty fast, compared to all the big ones (and I've used many of them in a professional and hobbyist context). It is a great piece of software, honestly.

But, I keep ending up doing my actual work in Reaper; not because Ardour is inferior, but because audio on Linux is inferior. At least, it historically has been. It's always been a bastard step child. To run Ardour, say, five years ago required a custom kernel, a non-standard audio server that was incompatible with any of the Gnome/KDE audio servers (there were compatibility layers, but they never worked, so switching back and forth was the only way to do anything...meaning your normal desktop lost sound when Ardour was in use, I wrote a script to switch them), running VSTs was possible but challenging and limited to those that would run under WINE (often with very buggy results), the surrounding ecosystem was just a mess, in general.

If you had the ability to build a perfect system, and never touch it, it might have been OK, but I never could keep the whole stack working for more than a couple of weeks; a kernel update or something else would break it, and I'd be in for another day or two of fucking around with kernels and ALSA drivers and WINE and whatever else. It just wasn't a usable system, even though it has always been a very powerful DAW.

Many things have improved in the intervening years. Enough of the RT work has been integrated into the mainline kernel that you don't need to patch your kernel anymore (though I think there are still some folks who apply some additional low latency patches, that's probably not necessary; Linux is now, I think, competitive with macOS and Windows when it comes to audio latency). WINE has gotten better, though running VSTs with Ardour is still a rough afternoon of effort, in my most recent experience. It's been a couple of years since I last tried to use Ardour for recording; the last time I gave up (again) and went back to Reaper, so I could get some recording done without spending two days making my system work for audio.

The sad thing is that Linux has been my primary desktop for over 20 years now; I never need to reboot into Windows anymore for anything, except audio...even games are fine, for me, on Linux now that Steam offers so many great titles for Linux. I never thought I'd be saying "games are fine" before I was able to say "audio is fine", and I've been trying to use Linux for audio all those years...I was working in recording studios and attending college for audio recording when I first started using Linux, even, so it was a thing I spent a ton of time tinkering with.

So, in short: I don't know where it stands today. But, I've been disappointed pretty much every time I've tried to use Ardour for anything serious; it's not Paul's fault. Ardour is great. But, it's historically just really tough to do audio work on Linux. I'd be surprised if it's gotten as good as Windows or macOS in the past two years; it's surely gotten better. But, I'd give good odds that it's still an afternoon, or even multi-day, project rather than a "install it and press the record button" process.

dawhead15• 10 years ago

The purely technical aspects of audio on Linux have always been better than Windows and OS X. Linux had lower latency than them more than a decade ago.

The user experience is a different story. That's the result of choices made by Linux distributions, most of which can be avoided by picking the right distribution or by doing some work. The biggest issue is the decision made some years (partly at my suggestion, ironically) to adopt PulseAudio as a desktop sound server (rather than JACK). This situation has been compounded by long-lived bugs in the versions of PulseAudio shipping with distributions that blocked the long-planned ways to tell PulseAudio to give up an audio device for "pro" use.

If you install the right Linux distribution (eg. AVLinux) then I would wager that its about 20 minutes from starting the install to "press the record button", with almost all of that being the distribution installation (it comes with Ardour already installed).

There's nothing to be done about the proliferation of Linux distributions that are not suitable for pro-audio or music creation workflows. It is a natural consequence of Linux' ecosystem that there are many, many distributions, each with different goals. A lot of people expect that "Linux is Linux is Linux", but for audio work, this isn't true. Installing Ubuntu and expecting that tools like Ardour will just work is incorrect and bound to lead to disappointment. It just isn't their target.

Note that Ardour no longer requires JACK on Linux. And this thread is actually about the release of Ardour 5.0, which runs on OS X, Linux and Windows. It seems a bit sad that people just want to talk about the situation on Linux as though that's the only place the program runs.

laveur• 10 years ago

It disappoints me that that they charge for pre-built binaries... Yes I can go and build it from source but it just doesn't feel right to have an open source project distributed like this. Shame on them for flaunting what I think is the spirit of Open Source.

ashitlerferad2• 10 years ago

I think it is a great way to fund development. In any case various Linux distros will have gratis packages available at some point.

archimedespi3• 10 years ago

That's already happening: KXStudio, a Linux distro for audio work, has pre-packaged Ardour binaries.

ronjouch7• 10 years ago

- First there's nothing wrong per se about charging for binaries in a GPL project, other projects did it before them (XChat comes to mind) and others will do. Doing so is absolutely not flaunting anything for a GPL project, if you think so you should read about what Free Software means.

- Second, in the case of Ardour, just read https://community.ardour.org/node/8288 . These people are doing what they can to keep the project alive.

dawhead15• 10 years ago

Thanks for digging up that link. I had forgotten I wrote that. Things have been better since it was written, but the project could still really use at least another 1/2 full time developer (it could use 50 more, but hey ...) let alone someone to do web stuff rather than me.

penagwin• 10 years ago

I think this is a great method. People always want more Open source software right? Look at this a different way, if you can't charge money for it to be OSS then it will have to be closed source right? (Advertising 'nstuff, I don't think that pays well...reddit...)

RIMR• 10 years ago

Just build your own binary if you don't want to pay. You can't really complain when they're giving the source code to you for free.

spacelizard2• 10 years ago

Yes you can, but that's beside the point. For a complicated application like this there obviously is value in both the source code and the pre-built binaries. I think people would be a little less annoyed if this didn't seem to be copping sales techniques from sketchy outdated proprietary business models (Prices not posted up front? Free version has time limitations??) and instead did something that was more sustainable. What this would be, I'm not quite sure of. Part of the problem probably is that desktop applications are not really a big market anymore. Maybe they should run a proper marketplace for free (as in freedom) audio plugins?

tunesmith• 10 years ago

The Lua scripting is interesting, I wonder if it's possible to basically mix an album with a text file you can check into Git.

I've already made that transition with my music notation projects using Lilypond, I actually have a (very short) full orchestra film score written in Lilypond - full text, nice diffs, revision history, committed to github.

em3rgent0rdr2• 10 years ago

Scripting with version control sounds very useful to me, since I typically use a very similar recording setup, but may do slight modifications.

dawhead15• 10 years ago

Ardour session files are just text files. Scripts used within the session are saved as part of the session file, so that the session can be used on any Ardour installationg, without having to 'get the scripts'.

I know of a few Ardour users who are using git to collaborate on sessions. Once you figure out how best to deal with the audio data, it seems quite promising.

em3rgent0rdr2• 10 years ago

Definitely like the new feature for tempo ramps...great for dealing with decel/accelerandos.

wiradikusuma• 10 years ago

For anyone who's doing personal podcasting, is this the software you'd use, or is there any (simpler) free/affordable software good for typical podcasting (I occasionally want to interview people over Skype and stuff)?

Ardour 5 released

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