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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

> Our industry feels like it's in the decline of the Roman Empire right now. ....

And here I am, writing a desktop native app that targets a small niche of users, with no marketing, no advertising, and we've had our strongest year yet, and overall usage just grows slowly year over year.

Maybe it's how you think things ought to be that is misaligned with reality, rather than "the decline of the Roman Empire".

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Just because one household in the empire is having a good year doesn't mean the empire isn't on the verge of collapse.

The thing is, it's not one household. Every other company I'm in touch with in the audio software world (quite a few) had a banner year. Yes, the pandemic helped us by forcing lots of people to be stuck at home and turning to that song they'd always meant to record/write. But it was the icing on the cake for a market that generally continues to improve, despite stupid levels of competition.

Now of course, if by "household" you meant "the entire niche of audio software", then sure. Or maybe even more broadly, "the entire niche of creative software", then even more sure.

But these are not tiny niches, even if they are small.

Rome took quite some time to decline, and to fall. And there were always pockets of stability. Maybe your app is Byzantium.

And hopefully it's not Byzantine.

> And here I am, writing a desktop native app that targets a small niche of users

What is it?

Looks like it’s Ardour DAW https://ardour.org/

Yikes, tried to use Ardour multiple times back in the day (I used to work as an independent radio producer and sound engineer). Classic open source desktop software in that it promised the world, but in practice was extremely difficult to even get to install, and reliant on external packages that were themselves glitchy and baroque (I believe Jack was the common issue in this case).

The prebuilt binaries of Ardour that we supply have no external dependencies except for libc, the native window system (X11, Cocoa/Quartz, etc), and libstc++. Since Ardour 5.0, JACK has been optional.

Every week, more or less, someone tells me that Ardour is a piece of shit, and someone else tells me it's the best DAW they've ever used. I gave up believing that any given DAW could ever make everyone happy about a decade ago.

Looks like Ardour is open source. How do you make money?

Source is always available without cost. Pre-built binaries are available via a pay-what-you-want pay tunnel. Subscriptions are encouraged to allow us to continue developing the software. We made on the order of US$200k this year.

Thanks for replying. This is a great approach and seems really well suited for the target audience.

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