dawhead

Apple might have done OK, but they killed a technical specification that was already present in thousands (millions) of users' devices, and that hundreds of other companies had invested in as the best way forward (technically it remains superior to USB).

In the interest of truth-in-comment-threads, it looks as if 5.1 will be a bug fix release, without the Push 2 support. That will land in 5.2, probably. The majority of the work is done, but I want it more polished before releasing it.

all of the above.

That's actually not true. The "big boys" use tons of plugin synths. Hans Zimmer comes to mind (the entire soundtrack to Nolan's Batman series was done with U-he's Zebra2, which is an amazing synth).

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.

Ardour session files are just text files. Scripts used within the session are saved as part of the session file, so that the session can be used on any Ardour installationg, without having to 'get the scripts'.

I know of a few Ardour users who are using git to collaborate on sessions. Once you figure out how best to deal with the audio data, it seems quite promising.

The purely technical aspects of audio on Linux have always been better than Windows and OS X. Linux had lower latency than them more than a decade ago.

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.

I interact regularly with GTK+ developers, and have been a regular contributor to GTK+ on OS X. They don't want our patches - they are very specialized and intended to deal with cases in Ardour that are not really a part of ordinary desktop apps. GTK+2 is now in maintainance mode anyway.

The most common reason is that we ship our own version of the clearlooks theme engine to ensure that we control the appearance of GTK+ widgets, and we load our own GTK2 RC file to define colors etc. for those widgets.

This leads to 2 errors, one irritating, one that prevents the program from functioning.

Irritating: GTK+ loads the system GTK theme during a call to gtk_init(). If this theme is based on clearlooks but contains declarations unknown to our (older) version of Clearlooks, you get errors.

Blocking: GTK+ loads the system GTK theme during a call to gtk_init(). If the theme file defines a "color theme", then when Ardour defines its own, GTK will block for ever, because of a bug in GTK+2. This doesn't happen if the system GTK theme has no color theme definition.

Those are the two main issues. They cannot be worked around without rebuilding the GTK+ stack so that it cannot or will not load the system GTK theme.

Do you seriously want me to list all the features that Ardour had for 10 years before they showed up in ProTools?

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.

That's all fair and correct.

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.

There is no price "up front" because you get to define the price (the model is taken from Radiohead's release of "In Rainbows", actually). What non-sketchy model do you have for a demo version? We used to make one that simply didn't save your plugin settings, but then realized that users could accidentally destroy an existing session like this. So we switched to "silence after 10 mins; ask for more time; silence after 5 mins; ask for more; silence after 2 mins; ask for more; silence after 1 min; ad infinitum". If you've got a better for how to create a demo copy that has some incentive for the user to change to the full one, I'm all ears.

And as you note, you don't know what the "something that was more sustainable is", whereas I've been doing this for 16 years, and have been through almost every "how to make money with open source" idea that there is. The vast majority don't apply to niche software, even on the odd occasion that they work for some other things.

I've made a living (of some kind) from working on Ardour for nearly 8 years now, and worked on it without need of income for 8 years before that. I think i'm

Pianoteq ? U-he ? Distrho? Harrison Consoles ? These are all proprietary plugins for Linux, all of them excellent.

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.

Ardour has builtin support for many hardware controllers. Our support for Mackie Control is as good as anything in the proprietary world, ditto for things like the FaderPort. Generic MIDI controllers can have MIDI maps, and we have at least a dozen predefined ones already.

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.

Every day, there are NEW DAW users who have no plugins.

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.

Thanks for digging up that link. I had forgotten I wrote that. Things have been better since it was written, but the project could still really use at least another 1/2 full time developer (it could use 50 more, but hey ...) let alone someone to do web stuff rather than me.

Note that because distros build Ardour using their stock GTK+ stack, there are a few issues with their builds that are not present in the bundles from ardour.org.

We (ardour.org) do not (and cannot) support distro-built versions of Ardour.

@s_kilk: in random order:

Roadmaps: http://tracker.ardour.org/roadmap_page.php http://ardour.org/development/post3.0

MIDI: those Atari apps you're thinking of didn't do audio.

General utility: perhaps you need to talk to various people who do, in fact, use Ardour instead of ProTools. As for the comparison with Reaper - Reaper is a very impressive project, but if you try it for pro- usage rather than home-style recording, you will very rapidly discover quite a lot of basic issues that they have not addressed, but were being done correctly by Ardour 8 years ago. I look to Reaper for good ideas and impressive development speed, but they really are focused on the needs of a different type of market segment than I really pay the most attention to.

It is true that there is no single DAW that is to everyone's taste, and Ardour is probably a more "acquired" taste than many others. At this time, I would say that more or less no DAW can easily "replace" any of the others. You can't really replace ProTools with Nuendo either.

jsprinkles: we distribute binary copies of Ardour from ardour.org that run on any Linux distribution (just about - we discovered a wrinkle that interferes with this on a few platforms, and the next release(s) will correct this).

disclaimer: I am the lead author of Ardour.