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I've looked at Ardour in the past but GTK put me off from investing serious time into it. Now that there is REAPER, I have to ask, what does Ardour do better an

I've looked at Ardour in the past but GTK put me off from investing serious time into it. Now that there is REAPER, I have to ask, what does Ardour do better and why would one pick Ardour over REAPER?

adamnemecek 4y ago
It’s open source.
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
Reaper is a fine DAW, and there are many fine DAWs. For the most part, which DAW is better for a given user depends a great deal on their prior experience, specific expectations and likely workflow. Neither Ardour nor REAPER are "better" than the other - they are different, and some people will love one and hate the other. More typically, some people will find a particular workflow that they use cumbersome in one of the DAWs and easier in another. If you'd like, you can listen to myself (lead dev of Ardour) spend 2.5hrs chatting with Justin Frankel (lead dev of Reaper). It won't do much to answer your specific question, but might reveal that the similarities in our development processes and history and goals are much broader than you might expect: http://adc.equalarea.com/2022/02/07/adc1/ http://adc.equalarea.com/2022/02/07/adc1/ If you're a user of Ardour, why would our choice of GUI toolkit have much impact on your use of the program?
- armitron 4y ago
  I appreciate the time you took in crafting this response, I will listen to the conversation that you linked. Regarding GTK, I could never stomach the specific "feel" that it has, and it's also been incredibly buggy for me on platforms other than Linux, and I use macOS and Windows a lot too. I haven't found a single GTK app that I can tolerate using on Windows or macOS so far. I find QT a lot better in that regard. I was a heavy user of Inkscape (GTK) back when there were no free alternatives, but when Krita (QT) matured I switched to it and never looked back.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    Not much of Ardour uses GTK (the editor and mixer all use our own stuff). You will find GTK in text entry, treeviews, menus and the filebrowser. In the long term we'd like to drop back to just GDK (window and event primitives), but those 4 "widgets" are major things to implement correctly, and that's not likely to happen any time in foreseeable future.
- spacechild1 4y ago
  This interview is a gem, thanks a lot for sharing!
frankzander 4y ago
What's your problem with GTK? I mean I like good UIs and this is what attracts me. So Ardour has a good looking UI (IMHO). How does the window toolkit impact you?
- SeanLuke 4y ago
  > I mean I like good UIs and this is what attracts me. Hard disagree. DAWs like Logic, Ableton, and Bitwig have consistent, straightforward, and (given the amount of data) relatively uncluttered UIs. The open source or cheaper DAWs, like Ardour and Reaper, are a veritable explosion of inconsistent and different sized widgets, fonts, and styles. Reaper also apparently likes massive walls of random text for its menu system too. This is only too typical of open source software: there's no UI designer who can rein in the chaos.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    You don't know that we (Ardour) have no UI designer, you just don't like the result of whatever design process we use. You also don't seem to have considered that there are lots of Reaper users who actually love it's user interface, including those massive walls of text in its menus. It's fine to say "I don't like (Ardour|Reaper)'s GUI, but I do like Logic, Ableton and Bitwig". There's not much point trying to go beyond that. I get email from about 1 person a week, with about a 50/50 chance of either "I used Logic/other-DAW for years, but Ardour is so much better looking and easier to use" or "Ardour is a piece of shit and ugly as hell, nobody can use this crap". Which is pretty great hint that large swathes of DAW UI/UX design remains extremely subjective and path dependent.
    - SeanLuke 4y ago
      > You don't know that we (Ardour) have no UI designer, you just don't like the result of whatever design process we use. So do you have a professional UI designer or not, and who is he? I think UI design is all about being consistent across modes, being tolerant, making common things easy to do and easy to discover while still making the less common things possible. I think it's a pretty well understood field at this point. I do not think it's about prettiness or visual consistency, but visual consistency is certainly a signal that tells us that the other elements in the UI design may be lacking a designer's touch. So let's look at that. Let's take this image for example: https://ardour.org/images/retina_no_plugs2.png https://ardour.org/images/retina_no_plugs2.png I count no less than eight different fonts and font sizes on this screen. Use of whitespace throughout is terrible: for example, look at the placement of the red light snugged up right next to the "Lock" button rather than the Iso button. Speaking which, I presume Iso means "Isolate" while "Grp" means, well, let's assume it doesn't refer to the Grp A4 Synthesizer. Why do you shorten in some ways by removing vowels, and in others by brute truncation? You also have literally dozens of different button heights. Consider just your faders. Put aside the giant red button. The R/L pans are 32 pixels tall. The In button is 38 pixels tall. The Lock button is 36 pixels tall. The Solo button is 42 pixels tall. The buttons at the bottom are 32 pixels tall. For no reason at all it seems. You also seem to have tons of different widget widths. Let's consider the VU meters. The Meterbridge meters are 28 pixels wide: the Mixer meters are 24 pixels wide, and its stereo channels are 14 pixels wide (and with completely different dB markings as well) The per-instrument meters at the far left are 16 pixels wide The stereo meters above them are for some reason 10 pixels wide, and together they're 22 pixels wide and so don't line up with the mono meters below them. And finally the global stereo meters up top are 28 pixels wide. What?... Text styling, justification and clipping is just kooky. Look above the second fader. Vocal, 2, and 0 (which looks like the null set, not a zero, due to weird width) are all centered. Then Fader and AuDynamicsPro are left-justified (And AuDynamicsPro is cut off because it's not getting resized). THEN all the parameters underneath (compression threshold -- again cut off in an ugly way, headroom, expansion ratio, etc.) are all centered again. And they are for no good reason lower-case only. So you have both capitalized case, lower-case-only, and upper-case-only strewn throughout your layout. To the left of the fader you have "Strips" and "Show". The Show checkboxes are almost invisible thanks to the dark-charcoal-on-black color scheme. Also thanks to your nearly invisible charcoal-on-charcoal scrollbar, you can't read the strips. What's "Claps F"? Why is the "+" so gigantic,and why is it gradiated when no other icons are? I presume the divider can be expanded, but again it's nearly impossible to tell due the charcoal-on-charcoal. Why are your In, Out, Solo, Audition, and Feedback buttons different colors from the other ones? Why are some of your icons antialised, but others (like the thing to the left of the scissors, or the thing to the left of "No Grid") not? Why are the console buttons (play/record/etc.) smashed together horizontally into thin strips, rather than giving them the standard width afforded to buttons of this importance? At least you could make them square to match their icons. Why is your Tempo and Meter in an incomprehensibly small font? Why do you have two different green colors for fonts? I am not a big fan of Ableton (say). But its interface is more consistent, much less busy, and much more approachable than Ardour. This is the hallmark of open source software: it tends to lack a hegemon who will sit down and (1) remove features to simplify the interface and (2) force a consistency in design and modality on the software. I will say that what I don't like about Ableton is that it tends to have a lot of mystery-meat interface widgets which don't explain their purpose. But at least they're consistent. :-) Now Ardour is FAR better than the interface nightmare that is Reaper, a veritable explosion of every single interface style, coupled with a seeming lack of understanding regarding how menus work best. Reaper's interface is objectively bad, full stop. Now there might be people who love it, but I'd wager that's primarily because those people have ego investiture in the product, and ego investiture comes with blinkers. We get heavily involved or invested in a product and it becomes our identity. This should never be an excuse for making a poor product. And compared to practically everyone else out there, Reaper's interface is really, really bad.

adamnemecek 4y ago

It’s open source.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago

Reaper is a fine DAW, and there are many fine DAWs. For the most part, which DAW is better for a given user depends a great deal on their prior experience, specific expectations and likely workflow. Neither Ardour nor REAPER are "better" than the other - they are different, and some people will love one and hate the other. More typically, some people will find a particular workflow that they use cumbersome in one of the DAWs and easier in another. If you'd like, you can listen to myself (lead dev of Ardour) spend 2.5hrs chatting with Justin Frankel (lead dev of Reaper). It won't do much to answer your specific question, but might reveal that the similarities in our development processes and history and goals are much broader than you might expect: http://adc.equalarea.com/2022/02/07/adc1/ http://adc.equalarea.com/2022/02/07/adc1/ If you're a user of Ardour, why would our choice of GUI toolkit have much impact on your use of the program?

armitron 4y ago
I appreciate the time you took in crafting this response, I will listen to the conversation that you linked. Regarding GTK, I could never stomach the specific "feel" that it has, and it's also been incredibly buggy for me on platforms other than Linux, and I use macOS and Windows a lot too. I haven't found a single GTK app that I can tolerate using on Windows or macOS so far. I find QT a lot better in that regard. I was a heavy user of Inkscape (GTK) back when there were no free alternatives, but when Krita (QT) matured I switched to it and never looked back.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  Not much of Ardour uses GTK (the editor and mixer all use our own stuff). You will find GTK in text entry, treeviews, menus and the filebrowser. In the long term we'd like to drop back to just GDK (window and event primitives), but those 4 "widgets" are major things to implement correctly, and that's not likely to happen any time in foreseeable future.
spacechild1 4y ago
This interview is a gem, thanks a lot for sharing!

frankzander 4y ago

What's your problem with GTK? I mean I like good UIs and this is what attracts me. So Ardour has a good looking UI (IMHO). How does the window toolkit impact you?

SeanLuke 4y ago
> I mean I like good UIs and this is what attracts me. Hard disagree. DAWs like Logic, Ableton, and Bitwig have consistent, straightforward, and (given the amount of data) relatively uncluttered UIs. The open source or cheaper DAWs, like Ardour and Reaper, are a veritable explosion of inconsistent and different sized widgets, fonts, and styles. Reaper also apparently likes massive walls of random text for its menu system too. This is only too typical of open source software: there's no UI designer who can rein in the chaos.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  You don't know that we (Ardour) have no UI designer, you just don't like the result of whatever design process we use. You also don't seem to have considered that there are lots of Reaper users who actually love it's user interface, including those massive walls of text in its menus. It's fine to say "I don't like (Ardour|Reaper)'s GUI, but I do like Logic, Ableton and Bitwig". There's not much point trying to go beyond that. I get email from about 1 person a week, with about a 50/50 chance of either "I used Logic/other-DAW for years, but Ardour is so much better looking and easier to use" or "Ardour is a piece of shit and ugly as hell, nobody can use this crap". Which is pretty great hint that large swathes of DAW UI/UX design remains extremely subjective and path dependent.
  - SeanLuke 4y ago
    > You don't know that we (Ardour) have no UI designer, you just don't like the result of whatever design process we use. So do you have a professional UI designer or not, and who is he? I think UI design is all about being consistent across modes, being tolerant, making common things easy to do and easy to discover while still making the less common things possible. I think it's a pretty well understood field at this point. I do not think it's about prettiness or visual consistency, but visual consistency is certainly a signal that tells us that the other elements in the UI design may be lacking a designer's touch. So let's look at that. Let's take this image for example: https://ardour.org/images/retina_no_plugs2.png https://ardour.org/images/retina_no_plugs2.png I count no less than eight different fonts and font sizes on this screen. Use of whitespace throughout is terrible: for example, look at the placement of the red light snugged up right next to the "Lock" button rather than the Iso button. Speaking which, I presume Iso means "Isolate" while "Grp" means, well, let's assume it doesn't refer to the Grp A4 Synthesizer. Why do you shorten in some ways by removing vowels, and in others by brute truncation? You also have literally dozens of different button heights. Consider just your faders. Put aside the giant red button. The R/L pans are 32 pixels tall. The In button is 38 pixels tall. The Lock button is 36 pixels tall. The Solo button is 42 pixels tall. The buttons at the bottom are 32 pixels tall. For no reason at all it seems. You also seem to have tons of different widget widths. Let's consider the VU meters. The Meterbridge meters are 28 pixels wide: the Mixer meters are 24 pixels wide, and its stereo channels are 14 pixels wide (and with completely different dB markings as well) The per-instrument meters at the far left are 16 pixels wide The stereo meters above them are for some reason 10 pixels wide, and together they're 22 pixels wide and so don't line up with the mono meters below them. And finally the global stereo meters up top are 28 pixels wide. What?... Text styling, justification and clipping is just kooky. Look above the second fader. Vocal, 2, and 0 (which looks like the null set, not a zero, due to weird width) are all centered. Then Fader and AuDynamicsPro are left-justified (And AuDynamicsPro is cut off because it's not getting resized). THEN all the parameters underneath (compression threshold -- again cut off in an ugly way, headroom, expansion ratio, etc.) are all centered again. And they are for no good reason lower-case only. So you have both capitalized case, lower-case-only, and upper-case-only strewn throughout your layout. To the left of the fader you have "Strips" and "Show". The Show checkboxes are almost invisible thanks to the dark-charcoal-on-black color scheme. Also thanks to your nearly invisible charcoal-on-charcoal scrollbar, you can't read the strips. What's "Claps F"? Why is the "+" so gigantic,and why is it gradiated when no other icons are? I presume the divider can be expanded, but again it's nearly impossible to tell due the charcoal-on-charcoal. Why are your In, Out, Solo, Audition, and Feedback buttons different colors from the other ones? Why are some of your icons antialised, but others (like the thing to the left of the scissors, or the thing to the left of "No Grid") not? Why are the console buttons (play/record/etc.) smashed together horizontally into thin strips, rather than giving them the standard width afforded to buttons of this importance? At least you could make them square to match their icons. Why is your Tempo and Meter in an incomprehensibly small font? Why do you have two different green colors for fonts? I am not a big fan of Ableton (say). But its interface is more consistent, much less busy, and much more approachable than Ardour. This is the hallmark of open source software: it tends to lack a hegemon who will sit down and (1) remove features to simplify the interface and (2) force a consistency in design and modality on the software. I will say that what I don't like about Ableton is that it tends to have a lot of mystery-meat interface widgets which don't explain their purpose. But at least they're consistent. :-) Now Ardour is FAR better than the interface nightmare that is Reaper, a veritable explosion of every single interface style, coupled with a seeming lack of understanding regarding how menus work best. Reaper's interface is objectively bad, full stop. Now there might be people who love it, but I'd wager that's primarily because those people have ego investiture in the product, and ego investiture comes with blinkers. We get heavily involved or invested in a product and it becomes our identity. This should never be an excuse for making a poor product. And compared to practically everyone else out there, Reaper's interface is really, really bad.