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

by roel_v 10y ago

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.
ronjouch 10y ago
I'm not qualified to comment as a "serious" user (as would be, say, someone doing mix/production for a living), but as a hobbyist it has been a joy and powerhouse to use and produce two little homebrew albums. Another popular alternative for that kind of audiences is http://reaper.fm/ http://reaper.fm/ , from Cockos from Justin Frankel & co from Nullsoft who made WinAMP.
- diminish 10y ago
  As a serious hobbyist, ardour is on the way to compete with pro tools. I decided to use ardour, musescore and ableton live for different purposes 3 years ago and I m happy. Reaper, logic pro, garage band etc don't give anything extra to Ardour after 6 months of trials I can say that.
jdietrich 10y ago
I'd say that it's competitive with older versions of the major DAWs. It's reasonably stable and has a reasonably complete feature set. The problem for Ardour on Linux is the plugin ecosystem. Any serious DAW user has invested thousands of dollars in plugins, none of which will run on Linux. For Linux to be a serious platform for audio work, it needs much more than just a DAW; it needs samplers, synths, reverbs, dynamics and EQ processors, pitch correction, restoration and mastering tools, etc etc. Ardour is a noble effort, but I can't help feeling that it's a little bit futile. The sheer scale of the audio software ecosystem seems insurmountable for free software.
- dawhead 10y ago
  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.
  - jdietrich 10y ago
    >Several commercial developers now produce plugins for Linux, and there are some open source ones for many tasks that are actually outstanding. I've demoed a large number of open source or Linux-compatible plugins; with the exception of Pure Data and the Calf Studio plugins, they were uniformly awful. Pure Data is still substantially inferior to Reaktor. Last time I checked, the Calf Studio plugins weren't cross-platform and had considerable shortcomings compared to their proprietary equivalents. A huge proportion of my bread-and-butter plugins have no Linux equivalent that is even remotely comparable: Kontakt, Vienna Symphonic Library, Omnisphere, Melodyne, Izotope Rx and Ozone, Bias FX, the UAD and Arturia emulations etc. Producing music on Linux would be an exercise in frustration. The plugins available on Linux compare very badly to the bundled plugins that come with Logic or Cubase, let alone the whole market. The very best open source plugins are mediocre at best. In many absolutely crucial categories, they are laughably bad - compare Freeverb3 with Vienna MIR or Altiverb, for example.
s_kilk 10y ago
Eh, it's pretty good, but as another commentor noted, Ardour has tended to lag behind other DAWs. For example: Ardour didn't get full Midi support until 2013, approximately twenty years after Pro Tools 1.0 launched with MIDI support from the start.
- dawhead 10y ago
  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-the-top-20-ideascale-ideas-is-your-priority 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.
SwellJoe 10y ago
I've been trying to use it off and on from the very beginning of its development. And, I've been a subscribing contributor off and on for a long time, too. I say "trying to use it" not so much because Ardour is inferior to other DAWs; it isn't. It's pretty solid, pretty capable, and pretty fast, compared to all the big ones (and I've used many of them in a professional and hobbyist context). It is a great piece of software, honestly. But, I keep ending up doing my actual work in Reaper; not because Ardour is inferior, but because audio on Linux is inferior. At least, it historically has been. It's always been a bastard step child. To run Ardour, say, five years ago required a custom kernel, a non-standard audio server that was incompatible with any of the Gnome/KDE audio servers (there were compatibility layers, but they never worked, so switching back and forth was the only way to do anything...meaning your normal desktop lost sound when Ardour was in use, I wrote a script to switch them), running VSTs was possible but challenging and limited to those that would run under WINE (often with very buggy results), the surrounding ecosystem was just a mess, in general. If you had the ability to build a perfect system, and never touch it, it might have been OK, but I never could keep the whole stack working for more than a couple of weeks; a kernel update or something else would break it, and I'd be in for another day or two of fucking around with kernels and ALSA drivers and WINE and whatever else. It just wasn't a usable system, even though it has always been a very powerful DAW. Many things have improved in the intervening years. Enough of the RT work has been integrated into the mainline kernel that you don't need to patch your kernel anymore (though I think there are still some folks who apply some additional low latency patches, that's probably not necessary; Linux is now, I think, competitive with macOS and Windows when it comes to audio latency). WINE has gotten better, though running VSTs with Ardour is still a rough afternoon of effort, in my most recent experience. It's been a couple of years since I last tried to use Ardour for recording; the last time I gave up (again) and went back to Reaper, so I could get some recording done without spending two days making my system work for audio. The sad thing is that Linux has been my primary desktop for over 20 years now; I never need to reboot into Windows anymore for anything, except audio...even games are fine, for me, on Linux now that Steam offers so many great titles for Linux. I never thought I'd be saying "games are fine" before I was able to say "audio is fine", and I've been trying to use Linux for audio all those years...I was working in recording studios and attending college for audio recording when I first started using Linux, even, so it was a thing I spent a ton of time tinkering with. So, in short: I don't know where it stands today. But, I've been disappointed pretty much every time I've tried to use Ardour for anything serious; it's not Paul's fault. Ardour is great. But, it's historically just really tough to do audio work on Linux. I'd be surprised if it's gotten as good as Windows or macOS in the past two years; it's surely gotten better. But, I'd give good odds that it's still an afternoon, or even multi-day, project rather than a "install it and press the record button" process.

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

by 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?

> 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.

ronjouch 10y ago

I'm not qualified to comment as a "serious" user (as would be, say, someone doing mix/production for a living), but as a hobbyist it has been a joy and powerhouse to use and produce two little homebrew albums. Another popular alternative for that kind of audiences is http://reaper.fm/ http://reaper.fm/ , from Cockos from Justin Frankel & co from Nullsoft who made WinAMP.

diminish 10y ago
As a serious hobbyist, ardour is on the way to compete with pro tools. I decided to use ardour, musescore and ableton live for different purposes 3 years ago and I m happy. Reaper, logic pro, garage band etc don't give anything extra to Ardour after 6 months of trials I can say that.

jdietrich 10y ago

I'd say that it's competitive with older versions of the major DAWs. It's reasonably stable and has a reasonably complete feature set. The problem for Ardour on Linux is the plugin ecosystem. Any serious DAW user has invested thousands of dollars in plugins, none of which will run on Linux. For Linux to be a serious platform for audio work, it needs much more than just a DAW; it needs samplers, synths, reverbs, dynamics and EQ processors, pitch correction, restoration and mastering tools, etc etc. Ardour is a noble effort, but I can't help feeling that it's a little bit futile. The sheer scale of the audio software ecosystem seems insurmountable for free software.

dawhead 10y ago
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.
- jdietrich 10y ago
  >Several commercial developers now produce plugins for Linux, and there are some open source ones for many tasks that are actually outstanding. I've demoed a large number of open source or Linux-compatible plugins; with the exception of Pure Data and the Calf Studio plugins, they were uniformly awful. Pure Data is still substantially inferior to Reaktor. Last time I checked, the Calf Studio plugins weren't cross-platform and had considerable shortcomings compared to their proprietary equivalents. A huge proportion of my bread-and-butter plugins have no Linux equivalent that is even remotely comparable: Kontakt, Vienna Symphonic Library, Omnisphere, Melodyne, Izotope Rx and Ozone, Bias FX, the UAD and Arturia emulations etc. Producing music on Linux would be an exercise in frustration. The plugins available on Linux compare very badly to the bundled plugins that come with Logic or Cubase, let alone the whole market. The very best open source plugins are mediocre at best. In many absolutely crucial categories, they are laughably bad - compare Freeverb3 with Vienna MIR or Altiverb, for example.

s_kilk 10y ago

Eh, it's pretty good, but as another commentor noted, Ardour has tended to lag behind other DAWs. For example: Ardour didn't get full Midi support until 2013, approximately twenty years after Pro Tools 1.0 launched with MIDI support from the start.

dawhead 10y ago
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-the-top-20-ideascale-ideas-is-your-priority 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.

SwellJoe 10y ago

I've been trying to use it off and on from the very beginning of its development. And, I've been a subscribing contributor off and on for a long time, too. I say "trying to use it" not so much because Ardour is inferior to other DAWs; it isn't. It's pretty solid, pretty capable, and pretty fast, compared to all the big ones (and I've used many of them in a professional and hobbyist context). It is a great piece of software, honestly. But, I keep ending up doing my actual work in Reaper; not because Ardour is inferior, but because audio on Linux is inferior. At least, it historically has been. It's always been a bastard step child. To run Ardour, say, five years ago required a custom kernel, a non-standard audio server that was incompatible with any of the Gnome/KDE audio servers (there were compatibility layers, but they never worked, so switching back and forth was the only way to do anything...meaning your normal desktop lost sound when Ardour was in use, I wrote a script to switch them), running VSTs was possible but challenging and limited to those that would run under WINE (often with very buggy results), the surrounding ecosystem was just a mess, in general. If you had the ability to build a perfect system, and never touch it, it might have been OK, but I never could keep the whole stack working for more than a couple of weeks; a kernel update or something else would break it, and I'd be in for another day or two of fucking around with kernels and ALSA drivers and WINE and whatever else. It just wasn't a usable system, even though it has always been a very powerful DAW. Many things have improved in the intervening years. Enough of the RT work has been integrated into the mainline kernel that you don't need to patch your kernel anymore (though I think there are still some folks who apply some additional low latency patches, that's probably not necessary; Linux is now, I think, competitive with macOS and Windows when it comes to audio latency). WINE has gotten better, though running VSTs with Ardour is still a rough afternoon of effort, in my most recent experience. It's been a couple of years since I last tried to use Ardour for recording; the last time I gave up (again) and went back to Reaper, so I could get some recording done without spending two days making my system work for audio. The sad thing is that Linux has been my primary desktop for over 20 years now; I never need to reboot into Windows anymore for anything, except audio...even games are fine, for me, on Linux now that Steam offers so many great titles for Linux. I never thought I'd be saying "games are fine" before I was able to say "audio is fine", and I've been trying to use Linux for audio all those years...I was working in recording studios and attending college for audio recording when I first started using Linux, even, so it was a thing I spent a ton of time tinkering with. So, in short: I don't know where it stands today. But, I've been disappointed pretty much every time I've tried to use Ardour for anything serious; it's not Paul's fault. Ardour is great. But, it's historically just really tough to do audio work on Linux. I'd be surprised if it's gotten as good as Windows or macOS in the past two years; it's surely gotten better. But, I'd give good odds that it's still an afternoon, or even multi-day, project rather than a "install it and press the record button" process.