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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what advantages, if any, Reaper has over Ardour.

Reaper is just Rock. Solid. It is very feature complete, and extremely flexible. It's fast, small, no-nonsense, and works well on every platform.

I've only tried Ardour a bit, but the first word I'd use to describe it is: Janky.

Been a Reaper user for 6+ years now, after many years on Cubase and a stint on Ableton Live. It's perfect.

"I've only tried Ardour a bit, but the first word I'd use to describe it is: Janky."

How long ago did you try Ardour?

Ardour's development is very, very active, and it regularly gets mountains of features added to it every year.

There seems to be way more 3rd party plugins. Reaper has quite an extensive API while Ardour is open source. There was quite a long discussion about this on the Ardour forum. It seems that the Reaper API and general extensibility gained more traction than Ardour being open source, as counter intuitive as that seems. Having used both pieces of software a reasonable amount, Reaper has a slight edge in terms of usability and customisation of the layout and look and feel. In particular the midi editing is smoother. That said, Ardour is a fantastic piece of software and a great open source success.

Ardour can run VST plugins, so I don't think it's limited in this way at all, as VST is the most common plugin format in the world and there are literally thousands of VST plugins that one can use.

Ardour can also run LV2 plugins, which is another plugin format. It's not as popular as the VST format but gives Ardour users even more options.

So, yeah, I wouldn't say that plugin availability is a limiting factor for Ardour, any more than it is for any other DAW.

Sorry I probably used the wrong terminology. I didn't just mean DSP plugins but more general third party extensions to the DAW.

I'm a long time ardour user so i'm wondering about that too. Could anyone do a quick comparison please?

It doesn't seem possible to easily write your own plugins or extensions in Ardour? Which is rather trivial to do in Reaper. Also, Reaper automation and customization is limitless.

But, Ardour is free, Reaper isn't, so that is a big difference.

My understanding is that Reaper has a more mature feature set in this regard. That said, it is possible to do a number of things in Ardour already using Lua scripts: https://manual.ardour.org/lua-scripting/ and https://github.com/Ardour/ardour/tree/362b9cb4fa4fbacd0660b1...

I wrote some plugins for fun a few years ago in Lua: https://github.com/robsco-git/ardour-plugins

My understanding is that the plugins one writes for Reaper are compiled on the fly so I imagine they offer better performance.

As an Ardour user, you don't actually have to write your own plugins.

You could just use any of the thousands of VST plugins out there, which Ardour fully supports.

Yeah, of course Reaper also supports all types of plugins, including of course all types of VSTs (32 or 64 bits), and DX, LV2, etc.

But sometimes the thing that you need does not exist. I needed a "MIDI notes compressor" and couldn't find one, so I wrote it (the compressor brings all notes to a chosen range, so for example if the range is A3-A5, a C7 will be converted to C4).

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