9 ms·

Ardour 5 released

157 points by ashitlerferad 10y ago

ronjouch 10y ago
Ardour and JACK are fantastic pieces of software, and the love children of core developer Paul Davis, and many contributors. Paul is trying to make a full-time living with it, but funding is still far away from even modest objectives (he blogged about it, see [1]). The donation sidebar currently says: - August goal: US$6200 (US$74.4k/yr) - Total till now: US$2923.52 If you're into Linux/OSX audio (and now Windows, with Ardour 5!) and can afford it, I encourage you to donate :) . See the "Ardour Finance" sidebar of the linked post. [1] https://community.ardour.org/node/8288 https://community.ardour.org/node/8288
- K_REY_C 10y ago
  I've purchased in the past just to support (and to keep going the illusion that I'll create some audio for /me/ in the future).
- spriggan3 10y ago
  That's not that much money, they need grants from OSS foundations, OSS like that need to get better at funding. How many millions the Mozilla foundation gave away this year ? and to only what, 8 projects ? The Gnome foundation could also help , instead of the financing dubious programs I won't name. But I guess it's better to waste money on hype rather than supporting well established projects.
  - ronjouch 10y ago
    Agreed, qualifying 75 k$/yr in the US as "not much money" is hyperbole for a developer with 20 years experience of multithreaded multiplatform C++. As to funding from big OSS players, the problem is that Ardour is niche software, far away from the interests of those big OSS players. Regarding your examples, - Mozilla has interest and invests into web/infrastructure tech (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11956234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11956234 ), Ardour doesn't fit in here. - GNOME... can you name these dubious programs you are referring to? To my eyes, GNOME just tries to survive with limited funding.
    - ashitlerferad 10y ago
      The GNOME program aims at getting more people involved in OSS projects: https://www.gnome.org/outreachy/ https://www.gnome.org/outreachy/ Personally, I think it is awesome and appreciate the great contributors I've seen come in through the program.
      - wtbob 10y ago
        > Currently, internships are open internationally to women (cis and trans), trans men, and genderqueer people. Additionally, they are open to residents and nationals of the United States of any gender who are Black/African American, Hispanic/Latin@, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander. It's have been quicker to write, 'internships are open to everyone but white, heterosexual men,' but that would have been too honest. How utterly despicable. Perhaps Paul Davis could apply, and claim to be Pauline Davis for internship purposes.
        ronjouch 10y ago
        > "It's have been quicker to write, 'internships are open to everyone but white, heterosexual men,' but that would have been too honest." Agreed. But I don't think it's despicable. Our field needs diversity, and in a dominated ecosystem you don't get diversity by just letting natural forces do their job, because the ecosystem is already dominated/biased. So to my eyes we need biased, opposed initiatives like this one, or PyLadies. Does it remove available funding for Paul? (In other words, are the total available OSS funds the result of a zero-sum game)? I don't think so: some support the goals of Outreachy and contribute to it, some like Mozilla just contribute to what's in their field. These programs are about OSS fundings but I wouldn't categorize them as part of the same set.
        ashark 10y ago
        > But I don't think it's despicable. Our field needs diversity, and in a dominated ecosystem you don't get diversity by just letting natural forces do their job, because the ecosystem is already dominated/biased. Serious question: was this kind of stuff necessary for the huge increases over the decades in the percentage of lawyers and doctors who are women? If not, then it seems it's possible (if not necessarily desirable) to let "natural" forces do their work for achieving gender balance, and least for careers requiring well-educated individuals that provide high compensation and confer high status (those are both higher status than developers in most circles, by far). But maybe there were lots of women-only medical conferences or something at some point. Maybe there still are, I really don't know. (I did a quick DDG search for this issue in law and medicine, but turned up nothing relevant aside from graphs demonstrating the shift)
- pjmlp 10y ago
  That is the biggest problem with FOSS for desktop use, you cannot hide it behind paywalls or consulting gigs, which makes very hard to make a living out of it. I always try to donate to the projects I use frequently, as if I just had bought a software package.
roel_v 10y ago
Is there anyone on here who uses DAW's seriously, and has tried Ardour? Can it compete with the big boys?
- spriggan3 10y ago
  > Is there anyone on here who uses DAW's seriously, and has tried Ardour? Can it compete with the big boys? Can it compete? Yes, a DAW hardly decides what the final result sounds like. The problem is integration. Often controllers come with presets for Pro-tools,Logic, Cubase, Live so integration is seamless, there is virtually no need for configuration. Now Is Ardour popular ? right now not that much. But it's a great project non-less and perfectly capable.
  - dawhead 10y ago
    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.
    - nomanisanisland 10y ago
      >Ardour 5.1 will also see support for the Ableton Push 2 device. that's goddamn great. Keep up the awesome work, this program is a masterpiece
      - dawhead 10y ago
        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.
laveur 10y ago
It disappoints me that that they charge for pre-built binaries... Yes I can go and build it from source but it just doesn't feel right to have an open source project distributed like this. Shame on them for flaunting what I think is the spirit of Open Source.
- ashitlerferad 10y ago
  I think it is a great way to fund development. In any case various Linux distros will have gratis packages available at some point.
  - archimedespi 10y ago
    That's already happening: KXStudio, a Linux distro for audio work, has pre-packaged Ardour binaries.
    - ronjouch 10y ago
      Not just specialized distros like KX, Ardour is at your fingertips in vanilla Debian and Ubuntu - http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?searchon=names&suite=all&section=all&keywords=ardour http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?searchon=names&suite=all&s... - https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=ardour https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=ardour
      - dawhead 10y ago
        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.
        archimedespi 10y ago
        Why would stock GTK+ cause problems?
tunesmith 10y ago
The Lua scripting is interesting, I wonder if it's possible to basically mix an album with a text file you can check into Git. I've already made that transition with my music notation projects using Lilypond, I actually have a (very short) full orchestra film score written in Lilypond - full text, nice diffs, revision history, committed to github.
- em3rgent0rdr 10y ago
  Scripting with version control sounds very useful to me, since I typically use a very similar recording setup, but may do slight modifications.
- dawhead 10y ago
  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.
em3rgent0rdr 10y ago
Definitely like the new feature for tempo ramps...great for dealing with decel/accelerandos.
wiradikusuma 10y ago
For anyone who's doing personal podcasting, is this the software you'd use, or is there any (simpler) free/affordable software good for typical podcasting (I occasionally want to interview people over Skype and stuff)?

157 points by ashitlerferad 10y ago

Ardour and JACK are fantastic pieces of software, and the love children of core developer Paul Davis, and many contributors. Paul is trying to make a full-time living with it, but funding is still far away from even modest objectives (he blogged about it, see [1]). The donation sidebar currently says: - August goal: US$6200 (US$74.4k/yr) - Total till now: US$2923.52 If you're into Linux/OSX audio (and now Windows, with Ardour 5!) and can afford it, I encourage you to donate :) . See the "Ardour Finance" sidebar of the linked post. [1] https://community.ardour.org/node/8288 https://community.ardour.org/node/8288

K_REY_C 10y ago
I've purchased in the past just to support (and to keep going the illusion that I'll create some audio for /me/ in the future).
spriggan3 10y ago
That's not that much money, they need grants from OSS foundations, OSS like that need to get better at funding. How many millions the Mozilla foundation gave away this year ? and to only what, 8 projects ? The Gnome foundation could also help , instead of the financing dubious programs I won't name. But I guess it's better to waste money on hype rather than supporting well established projects.
- ronjouch 10y ago
  Agreed, qualifying 75 k$/yr in the US as "not much money" is hyperbole for a developer with 20 years experience of multithreaded multiplatform C++. As to funding from big OSS players, the problem is that Ardour is niche software, far away from the interests of those big OSS players. Regarding your examples, - Mozilla has interest and invests into web/infrastructure tech (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11956234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11956234 ), Ardour doesn't fit in here. - GNOME... can you name these dubious programs you are referring to? To my eyes, GNOME just tries to survive with limited funding.
  - ashitlerferad 10y ago
    The GNOME program aims at getting more people involved in OSS projects: https://www.gnome.org/outreachy/ https://www.gnome.org/outreachy/ Personally, I think it is awesome and appreciate the great contributors I've seen come in through the program.
    - wtbob 10y ago
      > Currently, internships are open internationally to women (cis and trans), trans men, and genderqueer people. Additionally, they are open to residents and nationals of the United States of any gender who are Black/African American, Hispanic/Latin@, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander. It's have been quicker to write, 'internships are open to everyone but white, heterosexual men,' but that would have been too honest. How utterly despicable. Perhaps Paul Davis could apply, and claim to be Pauline Davis for internship purposes.
      - ronjouch 10y ago
        > "It's have been quicker to write, 'internships are open to everyone but white, heterosexual men,' but that would have been too honest." Agreed. But I don't think it's despicable. Our field needs diversity, and in a dominated ecosystem you don't get diversity by just letting natural forces do their job, because the ecosystem is already dominated/biased. So to my eyes we need biased, opposed initiatives like this one, or PyLadies. Does it remove available funding for Paul? (In other words, are the total available OSS funds the result of a zero-sum game)? I don't think so: some support the goals of Outreachy and contribute to it, some like Mozilla just contribute to what's in their field. These programs are about OSS fundings but I wouldn't categorize them as part of the same set.
        ashark 10y ago
        > But I don't think it's despicable. Our field needs diversity, and in a dominated ecosystem you don't get diversity by just letting natural forces do their job, because the ecosystem is already dominated/biased. Serious question: was this kind of stuff necessary for the huge increases over the decades in the percentage of lawyers and doctors who are women? If not, then it seems it's possible (if not necessarily desirable) to let "natural" forces do their work for achieving gender balance, and least for careers requiring well-educated individuals that provide high compensation and confer high status (those are both higher status than developers in most circles, by far). But maybe there were lots of women-only medical conferences or something at some point. Maybe there still are, I really don't know. (I did a quick DDG search for this issue in law and medicine, but turned up nothing relevant aside from graphs demonstrating the shift)
pjmlp 10y ago
That is the biggest problem with FOSS for desktop use, you cannot hide it behind paywalls or consulting gigs, which makes very hard to make a living out of it. I always try to donate to the projects I use frequently, as if I just had bought a software package.

roel_v 10y ago

Is there anyone on here who uses DAW's seriously, and has tried Ardour? Can it compete with the big boys?

spriggan3 10y ago
> Is there anyone on here who uses DAW's seriously, and has tried Ardour? Can it compete with the big boys? Can it compete? Yes, a DAW hardly decides what the final result sounds like. The problem is integration. Often controllers come with presets for Pro-tools,Logic, Cubase, Live so integration is seamless, there is virtually no need for configuration. Now Is Ardour popular ? right now not that much. But it's a great project non-less and perfectly capable.
- dawhead 10y ago
  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.
  - nomanisanisland 10y ago
    >Ardour 5.1 will also see support for the Ableton Push 2 device. that's goddamn great. Keep up the awesome work, this program is a masterpiece
    - dawhead 10y ago
      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.

laveur 10y ago

It disappoints me that that they charge for pre-built binaries... Yes I can go and build it from source but it just doesn't feel right to have an open source project distributed like this. Shame on them for flaunting what I think is the spirit of Open Source.

ashitlerferad 10y ago
I think it is a great way to fund development. In any case various Linux distros will have gratis packages available at some point.
- archimedespi 10y ago
  That's already happening: KXStudio, a Linux distro for audio work, has pre-packaged Ardour binaries.
  - ronjouch 10y ago
    Not just specialized distros like KX, Ardour is at your fingertips in vanilla Debian and Ubuntu - http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?searchon=names&suite=all&section=all&keywords=ardour http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?searchon=names&suite=all&s... - https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=ardour https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=ardour
    - dawhead 10y ago
      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.
      - archimedespi 10y ago
        Why would stock GTK+ cause problems?

tunesmith 10y ago

The Lua scripting is interesting, I wonder if it's possible to basically mix an album with a text file you can check into Git. I've already made that transition with my music notation projects using Lilypond, I actually have a (very short) full orchestra film score written in Lilypond - full text, nice diffs, revision history, committed to github.

em3rgent0rdr 10y ago
Scripting with version control sounds very useful to me, since I typically use a very similar recording setup, but may do slight modifications.
dawhead 10y ago
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.

em3rgent0rdr 10y ago

Definitely like the new feature for tempo ramps...great for dealing with decel/accelerandos.

wiradikusuma 10y ago

For anyone who's doing personal podcasting, is this the software you'd use, or is there any (simpler) free/affordable software good for typical podcasting (I occasionally want to interview people over Skype and stuff)?