Ardour 5.9 released | Hacker News Reader

Ardour 5.9 released

community.ardour.org

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If you like Ardour, consider a monthly donation! As other mentioned, it's a longtime work of Paul Davis and a close-knit community. Paul works full-time on Ardour thanks to these donations.

See "Finance" sidebar at https://community.ardour.org/community

Another contributor that is even at least as active, in Ardour and the general Linux Audio community, is Robin Gareus (rgareus, x42) [0].

[0]: http://gareus.org/

Yes! I wasn't trying to put Paul on a pedestal, only pointing out he hacks full-time on Ardour and the way donations (currently) work is that money goes to him for this.

I just thought worth mentioning, I am not aware how donations work today.

Didn't Ardour use to sell binaries? I was looking at it a while ago for inspiration on how to make money for Octave. Have they switched to a monthly subscription donation service?

They still do. I've only ever used it within ubuntu studio though.

If you follow the "Ready-to-Run Program" prompts on the official download page[1] as an anonymous or unsubscribed user, you will reach a page that explains their method/philosophy.

I'm sure Paul would be happy to speak to you on IRC (#ardour on Freenode) about successes/failures but of course I can't say this for sure.

Also, I am awaiting a stream of Paul's upcoming talk (as I can't get to France for LAC2017[2]) "20 years of Open Source Audio: Success, Failure and The In-Between"[3]. I hope part of the talk will address the financial aspects that are of interest to you.

[1] https://community.ardour.org/download [2] http://musinf.univ-st-etienne.fr/lac2017GB.html [3] http://musinf.univ-st-etienne.fr/lac2017/lacProgramGB.html

Ardour is one of my favorite open source projects, and it's especially admirable considering that it's not a developer and/or server admin tool. It's rare to see people hack away for years on open source desktop software and constantly improving it.

Blender is another excellent example of this.

Add Inkscape to that list :)

And Krita

And Gimp

In time for the Linux Audio Conference in Saint-Etienne, which starts this Thursday. (http://musinf.univ-st-etienne.fr/lac2017GB.html)

For anyone going, I highly recommend checking out the printing museum in the wonderful twisted wooden building that is the old city hall of Lyon (50km away).

I just downloaded Ardour (after trying it out a while back and somewhat giving up) and it's a pretty fantastic application.

What prompted me to get into it again was that I wanted to combine it with Hydrogen (http://hydrogen-music.org/hcms/) using JACK (http://www.jackaudio.org/).

I can _immediately_ see the power of JACK, but I just can't get my immediate use to work, which is when I hit play/pause in one application, the other starts as well.

In general though the potential in JACK just seems awesome, it's almost as intuitive as just routing patch cables in meatspace and I can't wait to get into it more. It also seems like something that'd be brilliant for a touch-screen.

I'm considering setting up another partition just for audio work.

I always used hydrogen as just a drum sampler, and did all the midi work in ardour. I have since switched back to cubase / superior drummer 2 for most stuff, but I still have a subscription for ardour.

> which is when I hit play/pause in one application, the other starts as well.

Is this the problem you are trying to avoid, or what you are trying to achieve? Assuming you want the play button in Hydrogen to start the other apps, you need to use the "J-TRANS" and "J-MASTER" buttons at the top of Hydrogen. In Ardour there is a toggle button for "Internal" or "JACK" and you need to set it to JACK.

> when I hit play/pause in one application, the other starts as well.

This should work automatically. If not 50/50 chance you can blame it on Lennart Poettering:

http://jackaudio.org/faq/pulseaudio_and_jack.html

I'm here late but wanted to mention what I consider to be Ardour's "younger sibling" (functionality-wise): Audacity.

It's usually enough to do what I need, clipping & cropping existing audio.

http://www.audacityteam.org/

Now that the MP3 patents are expired, it'd be nice if Ardour added MP3 import / export. I understand why they didn't in the past, but it's been a showstopper for times when I wanted to recommend a FOSS audio editor to non-technical friends.

Here's the latest discussion I saw on it: https://community.ardour.org/node/14616

Export works for me in 5.8.

Ardour if fantastic. Its mixer is better and more usable than pretty much any other DAW I've tried. They are competing with software that costs hundreds of dollars and winning in many aspects. They should be an example.

Another thing I like is the routing grid. So flexible. Along with Jack, this does add some complexity and sometimes extra manual configuration, but the expanded possibilities are worth it for me. I have yet to encounter a patching scenario I can't handle with Ardour and Jack. Including things like playing an Ardour session over Skype to a music teacher while doing real time effects processing on my guitar all while recording the audio of the Skype session. Ardour + Jack is a powerful combo.

Absolutely. Another added bonus: it is really easy to use Ardour as a mixer and effects plugin host for experimental synthesis software like Supercollider or PureData

I have been very pleased with Ardour - only took me a few minutes to have my XLR mic go through a compressor / limiter / expander virtual rack effects setup for better screencasting.

For people without any audio knowledge (potentially: Just me..), can you expand what you're trying to do with your microphone and how Ardour helps?

He's trying to make his audio easier to listen to by using various effects provided by Ardour. The most significant of what he listed is the compressor, which is great for spoken podcasts. It will take any sound that is over a certain threshold and start to to reduce it's volume (eg. compress it), so if he's talking really quietly and then yells something really loud, the person listening isn't subjected to as large of a volume range in their ears.

The limiter just limits the maximum volume, and I'm not sure why he's using an expander.

After comp/limit, a little expander can make the audio less dull sounding.

I'm not sure I understand the point of using an expander after a compressor as one reduces the dynamic range but the other increases it again. What about a little eq cut/boost instead?

There are all sorts of reasons to use an expander after compression/limiting:

https://www.gearslutz.com/board/so-much-gear-so-little-time/...

Sorry I still don't get it. That thread explains some uses for expanders, just not after compressor or limiters in the same effects chain. Surely if you need an expander after a compressor then you've got your setting wrong on the compressor, or maybe you need a noise gate before it.

I've used it for recording music, combining some MIDI tracks with many audio tracks and samples. Once the audio system was set up and stable, working with Ardour was a pleasure and results were very good.

The main problem was getting high quality effects/plugins, paid or free. There are a couple, but in general life is much easier in this sense outside of Linux. That was 2-3 years ago, and hopefully things have improved since.

The CALF Plugins are pretty excellent, for the most part. Those are free (as in beer and as in speech, IIRC).

http://calf-studio-gear.org/

Those were the main ones I worked with, plus another commercial package, I forgot its name, which was decent.

The Calf compressor and bass enhancer were very good. I'm seeing that a lot of plugins have been added in the time since I last worked with Ardour. Makes me want to start making music again :)

Nothing like knocking the rust off :-)

Unfortunately, the CALF series have been notorious for having problems or causing crashes in the past. If you do want to try it out, I highly recommend getting the latest version or building from git as a lot of distributions package an older version in their repositories.

I actually didn't experience that issue.

Things are slowly getting better if you want to run Windows VSTs under Linux. I found this very interesting as a overview of some of the current possibilities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsZnSg4DKDU It is a demonstration for a proprietary DAW, Bitwig, but he does talk a lot about Windows plugins under Linux that I imagine applies to Ardour as well.

I'd love an open source DAW that was easy to use and didn't slavishly follow the UI constraints of a physical mixer (which works great on a physical mixer, but not so great when you're trying to control it with a mouse). Is there one?

What exactly would a mixer with a better ui look like?

If you are curious about Ardour (or creative software for Linux in general) I highly recommend back issues of the Linux Voice magazine (RIP) which often reviews and explains such software:

https://www.linuxvoice.com/creative-commons-issues/

For example issue 24 reviewed Ardour 4.6 and some plugins.

(no affiliation. the issues are under CC BY-SA )

Worth mentioning: http://libremusicproduction.com/

For those interested in learning Ardour, YouTube has a lot of tutorial videos that have helped me. Seeing someone do something is sometimes easier than RTFM, especially when it comes to workflow. You do need to use some caution because there are so many videos and some are outdated.

I bought Ableton years ago after trying really hard to tame JACK, Ardour, Hydrogen, and a handful of associated utilities unsuccessfully.

It makes me REALLY happy to see this community still going. I know it takes time but the results are usually well worth-it, to get open software ecosystems thriving.

There are some Linux distros, like AVLinux[1], which do all the heavy lifting for you.

Just boot in to them and you've got Ardour, JACK, Hydrogen, and a whole ton of other music apps all ready to use.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVLinux

That would have been really nice 9 years ago when I was trying to assemble a linux based DAW. I might check it out one of these days.

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