How does Ardour compare to something like Logic Pro or Ableton?
Ardour 8.0
51–60 of 156 posts
Re: Ardour 8.0
#52I'm not a musician, but I've been happily using Ardour to edit a podcast for many years now (paying for a subscription the whole time too) and I really like the workflow I arrived at with it. One particular feature I like is the ability to edit while playing the audio at 2x speed, which I use to do a quick first pass where I remove obvious things like dead air, coughs, uhms, etc., before doing a second pass at 1x loo…
> However, I've found that this feature has been worsened a bit since v6
How exactly?
Re: Ardour 8.0
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah, I think it's perfectly fair to charge more for a mac version of a program, especially if it's a donation funded open-source one. If you can afford a macintosh, you're more likely to also be able to afford a couple of bucks to support it.
I'd be willing to bet the demographics of those on Hackernews aren't exactly in the "I'm using Linux because I cannot afford to use any other OS" crowd. It is the other way around. Linux users should be more vigilant about donating to the projects they find important if they care for the longevity of the project continuing as desktop Linux is a very tiny market to support and has heavy fragmentation issues within it.
> as desktop Linux is a very tiny market to support and has heavy fragmentation issues within it.
It's also free to use and distribute software on, regardless of the hardware/software you own. That's the big difference. Plus, MacOS also commands a relatively small market share with it's own fragmentation issues (doubly so if you're cross-platform).
If Mac users want perpetual builds of their software, they have to perpetually fund a development environment. Linux doesn't really work the same way.
Re: Ardour 8.0
#54I really like the UI in the sound production software. It's neat, has good colors and keep being eye candy even given the number of controls and information it provides. Is it some sort of standardized style guide for this kind of UI or everyone just takes inspiration by some industry leader products?
> Is it some sort of standardized style guide for this kind of UI
Anything goes in this industry really :)
Re: Ardour 8.0
#55The screenshot features the excellent Surge synth. Check it out if you don't know it, it's an excellent sounding synth with a gorgeous oscillators section.
Serge is great, but Vital whips the llama's ass: https://vital.audio/
There was a time when Sylenth and Serum-quality synthesizers didn't exist for free. Back then, shit like Serge and Helm were really the best you could rely on. Maybe a few free U-HE plugins or your DAW defaults. Today's producers are downright spoiled with so many excellent free options!
Re: Ardour 8.0
#56Ardour's UI is complicated compared to, for example, Ableton Live. For example, I have added a MIDI track and it is unclear how to add notes to it. Right clicking on a track doesn't give an option to do that. Also on Linux it supports only rarely used plugin formats (LV2, Linux VST), for which there are little plugins.
> Also on Linux it supports only rarely used plugin formats (LV2, Linux VST), for which there are little plugins.
Ardour used to have built-in support for Windows VST via WINE. It was so bad (as in unstable, unpredictable) it was disabled by default and was eventually removed. Yabridge is the usual recommendation to people who really want/need it.
Re: Ardour 8.0
#57From the what's new page: "Some people will no doubt laugh at a few of these "new features", given that they've been in some other DAWs for 20 years or more. That's OK — we laugh too when we see other DAWs finally adding things that Ardour could do in 2005." this made me laugh :-)
I started using Ardour in 2007 and quickly transitioned our studio to it in a big move to Linux for audio production. I'll be excited to reacquaint myself with it later this year on the first analog restoration I've accepted in almost a decade.
The extent of its wonders escapes me now, but I recall with jack+ardour, the new lowlatency/preempt kernel, and some tcp/ip stack fun, we were able to get 40ms network audio latency on commodity hardware, vastly expanding our field processing workflows. Sort of how you can walk out of any venue today and immediately purchase an SD card of the event, we could produce MP3, CDs, and live webcasts of events, ready within minutes of closing with nothing more than a laptop, usb sound card, mics, and the internet.
I also had a little trick for transcription; shorthand with macros! Eventually, I could type them all one handed. Today, you can just pipe through whisper and have subs in every format and language. What an incredible time to be alive.
My lessons learned have been that free, open source software is amazing, and if you don't know something is supposed to be "hard", it can't stop you. Don't let greed or pride make you withhold from yourself.
Re: Ardour 8.0
#58I love ardour, I wish only for native Wayland support.
I believe most plugins expose their GUI only as an X window that needs to be nested in an application window, so any change here would require reimplementing the GUI of a lot of plugins. But even if we do want to take this hurdle, is it even possible yet? What interfaces are available to do this on Wayland and embed a plugin-drawn GUI in a GTK 3, GTK 4, Qt 5 and/or Qt 6 application? My guess is we still need a new sp…
AFAIU Ardour itself is still using GTK 2, which has no Wayland support. You can search around on the Ardour discourse, occasionally somebody asks about the porting effort to a newer GUI toolkit, but IIRC the Ardour devs think it's too much work for little gain.
Re: Ardour 8.0
#59Maybe it's a bit off topic, but I think there is something on the website we can all take a note of: that is, on the download page, it says download "Ready-To-Run Program". Yep, not download "Binary", "Executable", "Package" or any of that non-sense (from user's perspective), just "Ready-To-Run Program", simple and clear, exactly what user wants when they open that page.
Have you tried clicking it? It takes you to a 2nd page where you select the OS.
Then for me (Windows) to yet a 3rd page where I can chose the paid/free version.
Clicking here on "Demo Version" takes you to the 4th page where you can finally download the setup binary. Which is an installer, the opposite of "Ready-To-Run"!!!
Re: Ardour 8.0
#60Looks to be a extensive update with lots of new and useful features, thanks as always PaulDavisThe1st :) Especially Arrangement and Quick Groups will be good time savers for me! > For several years, people downloading Ardour for macOS have had to deal with various kinds of messages (from Apple) saying things like "This program comes from an untrusted source" to "The file is damaged". As of Ardour 8, macOS users downl…
They didn't do that for the Windows version though:
> Because we object to paying Microsoft for the privilege of allowing you to more easily use our work, this application is unsigned (more information here).