Is there anyone on here who uses DAW's seriously, and has tried Ardour? Can it compete with the big boys?
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.
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.
I've demoed a large number of open source or Linux-compatible plugins; with the exception of Pure Data and the Calf Studio plugins, they were uniformly awful. Pure Data is still substantially inferior to Reaktor. Last time I checked, the Calf Studio plugins weren't cross-platform and had considerable shortcomings compared to their proprietary equivalents.
A huge proportion of my bread-and-butter plugins have no Linux equivalent that is even remotely comparable: Kontakt, Vienna Symphonic Library, Omnisphere, Melodyne, Izotope Rx and Ozone, Bias FX, the UAD and Arturia emulations etc.
Producing music on Linux would be an exercise in frustration. The plugins available on Linux compare very badly to the bundled plugins that come with Logic or Cubase, let alone the whole market.
The very best open source plugins are mediocre at best. In many absolutely crucial categories, they are laughably bad - compare Freeverb3 with Vienna MIR or Altiverb, for example.
PureData is a VERY VERY different program from Reaktor, capable of things not possible in Reaktor, but also with a totally different work flow and interaction model. There are many PD users who would absolutely disagree with your characterization.
My point was not to say "The plugin situation on Linux is totally comparable to the one of OS X or Windows", indeed far from it. But your post suggested that there's no signs of life at all there, and this just isn't true.
You also seem very focused on a style of music production that is really built around plugins. This is common today, but far from universal. I know many studio owners in the USA and Europe who use plugins very minimally, because they focus on recording performing musicians.
As I've said many times, if you have a workflow that is tightly bound with platform-specific plugins, you should stay on that platform. With this release of Ardour, people are now free to consider using Ardour on that platform. That is all.
I mean some of them are, but there's no sampler that will painlessly play modern sample packs, no usable pitch correction, nothing a tenth as good at noise reduction / audio restoration as Izotope RX.
Also, maybe a violin is as good as a guitar, but you can't hand a guitarist a violin and expect them to be fine with that. Or vice versa, if you prefer.
I like, use and pay for Ardour, but I also like realism.
But why is there no Izotope on Linux? People gripe at free software developers for "not providing Izotope", when in reality that software represents years of dedicated R&D, something that most people are not willing to pay for (even on platforms other than Linux). The simple reason why Izotope and Kontakt and Melodyne are not available on Linux is not that free software developers haven't written them, it is that the companies that do write them have chosen not to make them available.
I was very fortunate to start Ardour at a time when I did not need the income. Expecting to see world-class plugins like these show up without the involvement of the companies that did the R&D (and/or defined the proprietary file formats in use) is naive.
FWIW, I have talked to Melodyne in the past about adding support for their non-linear data access API, but they have been "unable to come to a consensus about how we could permit this in an open source project".
So for sure, these kinds of plugins are not available on Linux: because their developers have chosen that.
Edit: To be clear that isn't intended as a gripe at Audacity, just at the misrepresentation of Audacity.
The point is this: its up to the user to gain maximum value from their investment. Nobody is going to do that for you.
What you tend not to see are large-scale touring bands playing live with plugin synths. This is mostly from fear - that something will crash. There are gazillion of smaller bands performing live with Ableton Live and its own plugins, along with 3rd party engines.
Another popular alternative for that kind of audiences is http://reaper.fm/ , from Cockos from Justin Frankel & co from Nullsoft who made WinAMP.
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.
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.
that's goddamn great. Keep up the awesome work, this program is a masterpiece
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I noticed that, and that's awesome. But, I want to run it on Linux! That's one of the very big selling points of Ardour, for me, and one reason I would pick it over Reaper (on the day when I finally do pick it over Reaper).
I hope I was clear that I'm on your team. I want Ardour to be successful, and I want Linux to be a platform capable of media production. And, when I'm able, Ardour is one of the OSS projects I donate to.
But, maybe I'll try it on Windows sometime. That would certainly solve the VST problems, among several others.