Ardour -Audacity Alternative to Record, Edit, and Mix on Linux, OS X and Windows | Hacker News Reader

Ardour -Audacity Alternative to Record, Edit, and Mix on Linux, OS X and Windows

ardour.org

131 pointsnoyesno55 comments

Ardour is a different tool to Audacity, it's meant to be used as a full on DAW, rather than just recording/editing audio.

Right, this is a right-tool-for-the-job thing. Ardour is a chainsaw, and Audacity is a penknife. Can you cut down a tree with a penknife? Maybe, but that's clearly a terrible idea and will take ages. Can you remove the tape sealing closed your Amazon shipment with a chainsaw? Maybe, but you'd better be amazingly skilled with that chainsaw or it'll be very frustrating.

Tools like Ardour are intended to have users who are mostly experts. It's OK if this is slightly harder to understand so long as it's also just better once you do understand. In contrast Audacity has a lot of users who've no intention (for now) of using it after today, they just want to fix one small thing about an audio file and they heard Audacity can do that.

Once upon a time, a lot of tools in the space Audacity occupies had significant technical misunderstandings baked into them. So by exposure to those tools, people learn things that aren't true about digital audio, and that causes ongoing pain. But Audacity is much better about this, and so today I don't think you're more likely to actually understand what's going on with digital audio in Ardour than in Audacity.

As with the penknife, if your experience with Audacity is "this wasn't powerful enough, I'll be here all week" then it is time to try a DAW (such as Ardour) but unlike the old days I don't think you'll spend the first week unlearning myths about digital audio that your editor taught you and the DAW now has to dispell.

Can you remove the tape sealing closed your Amazon shipment with a chainsaw? Maybe, but you'd better be amazingly skilled with that chainsaw or it'll be very frustrating.

Youtube video coming soon...

There is a guy on YouTube that reviews the durability of tools, he usually opens the boxes in some convoluted way, like with an electric chainsaw.

https://youtu.be/ztpWsuUItrA

Funnily enough the musician Burial used a "pen knife" to craft entire albums:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burial_(musician)#Style_and_co...

> Ardour is a chainsaw, and Audacity is a penknife. Can you cut down a tree with a penknife? Maybe, but that's clearly a terrible idea and will take ages.

Does "DAW vs. sound editor" really require an analogy?

Yes. Not for you or me, but outside of the audio niche one may not even know what "DAW" means, let alone how it differs from a sound editor.

What does DAW mean?

EDIT: Digital Audio Workstation?

Yes, Digital Audio Workstation

As someone that worked in this area, IMO, the difference between DAWs and modern audio editors (especially a complete one like Audacity) is massively overstated.

DAWs make fine audio editors for 99% of cases. The non-destructive workflow might even be simpler to most people.

For recording a DAW is IMO a better option, since it's battle tested in critical environments where super-low latency and rock solid stability is non negotiable.

On the other hand, modern audio editors like Audacity already have lots of complex features: complete multitrack recording, plugins, automation, so it's not as if the complexity difference is that big. Honestly, someone used to edit Audio on a DAW would also have a hard time picking up Audacity too, since it's complex on its own as well.

If it were SoundForge vs ProTools 15 or 20 years ago I'd definitely agree that one is not an alternative to the other, but Audacity vs any DAW today? Yeah you can replace it without much difficulty.

What are you thoughts on Ardour? Is it a good tool? Have been wanted to dabble in music making for a while.

Not OP, but I like it! The piano roll interface is it's biggest weakness, but everything else is great IMO. My favorite feature is the mixer panel and effects stack interface. The mixer panel is a happy medium between powerful ("I want to experiment with some ridiculous side-chaining setup") and the simple / immediate ("I just want to soften up the sound with some reverb"), and can do both well in my opinion.

If you're thinking of using it on Linux, I'd recommend using something like KXStudio. (Sadly the distro version of that is no longer maintained, otherwise I'd recommend that.)

I like it!

I find that editing has some things that to me are more intuitive than my own DAW of choice (Logic Pro X).

The routing is also more powerful than lots of pricy DAWs, which lets you create some interesting effects. It's powerful but also easy to use (honestly, it's easier than some popular DAWs, purely because you don't have to fight the software to route).

I'm saddened that it's necessary to bother posting this, but Ardour also has a similar privacy policy, which you should read if you intend to use their services: https://ardour.org/privacy.html

Ardour also has a compile time optional "phone home" feature which checks for update announcements, so you should disable that when building if you care about this sort of thing: https://github.com/Ardour/ardour/blob/13f5fb3dee640f0bfb1d66...

Personal note: I do not consider these things to be issues with Ardour, or with Audacity. I commend PaulDavisThe1st and x42 and the rest of the Ardour contributors, as well as the Audacity developers, for their respective work on these two excellent projects.

I just read the entire privacy policy and not only is the entirety completely reasonable and barely worth mentioning, the “phone home” section is just this: “ If you download and use a ready-to-run version of Ardour from ardour.org, the program will attempt to contact ardour.org at startup to determine if you should be notified about a new release of the software. If the computer where you use Ardour is connected to the internet, this process will store the computer's internet address and an identifier for its operating system.” So it’s barely an http access log for whatever endpoint that is. The privacy policy hysteria has gone wayyyyyy too far.

The thing is at least from what I can gather, the Audacity issue is literally on the same level of this. The only added difference is optional bug reporting.

Optional, opt-in error reporting and telemetry, yes. This entire issue is a bunch of people freaking out over nothing and making baseless assertions about things that aren't happening.

> the program will attempt to contact ardour.org at startup to determine if you should be notified about a new release of the software

I remember one developer who actually used a DNS TXT record to store the latest version, which I always thought was an interesting idea.

Store update information in place that is unencrypted and unauthenticated most of the time? What could go wrong?

The worst that could happen is that someone isn't informed about a newer version, or the software attempts to download a newer version and receives a 404 instead. They're storing numbers, not URLs.

It's possible to authenticate TXT records, you just have to do it yourself.

I think the difference here is that it’s a pre-existing condition that is explained. There is no license change to adapt to. What Audacity is doing may be perfectly reasonable, but they are presenting it in the worst possible way.

And, while not all software requires submission of personal information, those that do are usually required to hand over information when required by law enforcement. It’s just a fact of life. If you don’t like that, then don’t use or register that software.

Ardour is an alternative to Audacity like Xcode is an alternative to TextEdit.

A closer alternative is 'ocenaudio'.

https://www.ocenaudio.com/en/

It's not even open source.

I've been using SoX [0] to edit my ringtones and other simple audio files. CLI FTW! Not only can you start, stop, and splice at precisely the right time, but you can adjust tempo, compress and expand dynamic range, all sorts of other things that don't create audio but make it sound better.

[0] http://sox.sourceforge.net/

Sounds like that really blew your sox off.

imo ardour is a bit heavy as an audacity replacement, and I am a huge fan of ardour. I have been using ocenaudio with very good success and do think that it is a much closer "replacement"... with that said ardor is the best linux DAW!

AudioMass is very similar to Audacity, is open source[1] and browser based. Check out the online version[2].

[1] https://github.com/pkalogiros/audiomass [2] https://audiomass.co/

This looks very cool, I'll be able to consider using it more if it when a free software license is selected for it - https://github.com/pkalogiros/AudioMass/issues/1

Looks like they released 6.8 a couple of days ago[1] with some significant fixes[2]!

I wouldn't really call it an audacity alternative, though - you'd be dealing with a bunch of additional complexity to simply accomplish what most folks use audacity for I think.

1: https://discourse.ardour.org/t/ardour-6-8-released/106136

2: https://ardour.org/whatsnew.html

This is useful. Not technically multitrack or an exact replacement for Audacity. It gives great info on the audio, records, and its interface is super slick.

https://www.ocenaudio.com/download

I wish there was a similar alternative to virtualdub.

Avidemux?

Not restricted to .avi and multiplatform (Linux/Win/Mac/BSD)

http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/

Does anyone use Ardour for their audio work? Always heard great things about it.

Stay safe, stay free.

Alas, Audacity is free.

Why would anyone replace Audacity? Just because they are trying to get some data? Audacity is fine

I contribute to open source software but I don't use it to spy on people. I don't want software to spy on me either.

This article explains the missing context of this post: https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/07/04/open-source-audac...

Even if it's fine now, using telemetry to make decisions is a pretty strong way to say "no power users or people with unique problems wanted."

Fedora uses telemetry. audacity sounds bad, but not all telemetry is

> Fedora uses telemetry

Any chance you have details? All I can find after a few minutes of searching is [0] which was a proposal for counting installs.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18913955

> Fedora uses telemetry

Which is why I don't use Fedora and am moving away from Ubuntu: telemetry is fine as long as there is 100% transparency about every single byte of data transmitted from my PC to a remote server, and I have full control to review all information sent and when it is sent without having to go through hoops to research arcane commands and read fine print.

We don't need to. We can fork it, remove the spyware parts, and fix the license compliance issues (the newer terms of use are incompatible with the license).

Try realtime mixing and recording of 32 tracks with added software effects and MIDI sync. Ardour is industrial studio console software. Nothing to do with Audacity.

Ardour isn't free. You need to pay for it, unless you build it yourself, or you only want a demo version

It's Free Software. You can download builds from anybody else if you don't want to pay the project for theirs.

Or just use a system which provides packages for it, like FreeBSD.

I would count that as "download somebody elses build". Although I'm sure some Gentoo user is going to correct me on that.

Yes, it's available!

I’d argue there’s quite a difference between official packages and “somebody else’s build”, even if it is technically true - same way the cloud is technically somebody else’s computer.

Excuse me? You want those music producers to move from their whole OS (Windows or Mac) to something even less familiar than Linux? I don't think that is going to happen, and it's highly unlikely.

I think they'll won't care to move and continue with Audacity or just pay for the Ardour binary for either Windows or Mac and that's that.

To Downvoters: Why the quick downvotes? No need to deny the fact of the matter and reality here.

If you go here [0] to see the list of the best DAW software of 2021, out of all of the listed software only ONE 'stable' DAW software is available for Linux and NONE for FreeBSD. (Excluding Reaper since it is experimental and not stable for production use or recommendation)

Everything else listed there is for Windows or Mac or only both [0]

Source: [0]

[0] https://www.musicianonamission.com/best-daw-2016/

Ardour is Free (source code available under GPL).

Also, to get an executable version most users will just do: "apt install ardour" (or equivalent) which is pretty much beer-type free, in practice.