12 ms·
Ardour 8.0
- 8bitsrule 3y ago> If you try to automate the task of adjusting the tempo to follow a human performance (e.g. by tracking transients/onsets), you invariably end up with a mess... With Ardour 8.0 ... switch to the Grid tool (shortcut: "y") and simply drag the grid (lines) to fit the measure and beat onsets that you feel while listening.... The resulting grid accommodates the way people actually perform, rather than how software sometimes thinks they ought to. < Wow. THIS is something that's been needed for > 20 years. A lot of music has gotten poorer because of the mechanality of grids. Human tempos vary naturally (slightly at least) all over the board. (If you doubt that, drop a golden oldie into a DAW and just try to adjust the grid.) Neither "Quantize" and "Humanize" helped. Tempo changes like ritardando, accelerando, rubato are essential for the musicality of real performances. Not that the grid/click-track HAS to have any effect on any one part, but it very much complicates, e.g., automated/samples parts. Human performances vary tempos according to feelings. This feature may be manual, but it sounds like progress. [QUOTE follows] "A nice sort of music would result from such playing. Something like the singing of a good vocalist accompanied by a poor blockhead who hammers away in strict time without yielding to the singer who, in sheer despair, must renounce all artistic expression." - Constantin von Sternberg (1852–1924) (c. 1920). "Tempo rubato, and other essays".
- diggan 3y agoLooks to be a extensive update with lots of new and useful features, thanks as always PaulDavisThe1st :) Especially Arrangement and Quick Groups will be good time savers for me! > For several years, people downloading Ardour for macOS have had to deal with various kinds of messages (from Apple) saying things like "This program comes from an untrusted source" to "The file is damaged". As of Ardour 8, macOS users downloading Ardour won't see this stuff any more, because we have given up and paid $100 to join Apple's pay-to-play scheme. Our builds are all notarized now, and so people on macOS should have the same smooth experience they get from other macOS software downloads. Hope macOS users live up to the commonly referenced "Apple users are more likely to pay for software" and donate either time or money to Ardour if they use it, as it seems making applications available to them cost developers actual money now.
- auggierose 3y agoI don't think macOS users have any more or less responsibility paying for this software than Linux users. $100 compared to the development resources that went into this is nothing, and the developers realised that, too.
- sschueller 3y ago100 USD a year (more in Switzerland because Apple doesn't even pay for the taxes) is not nothing. Why should I pay to place apps that I spend my free time to develop and offer for free? Apple should at least not charge a recurring fee if all apps posted are open source and free. At least over at Google it is a one time fee.
- auggierose 3y agoI'd also prefer if there was no $100 to pay. But it is a fair price, and I find the attitude of programmers that everything should be free quite damaging. If you want to donate your free time, that's really up to you. Don't construe constraints for other people or companies from that.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoI don't want it to be free. I want Apple to not lie that "This application is damaged" when I don't pay them.
- auggierose 3y agoI don't recall the exact message, but I don't think they say it is damaged. They will probably say something like it may be damaged. Which is perfectly true, as they have no means of verifying its integrity.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agohttps://ardour.org/images/thanksapple.png https://ardour.org/images/thanksapple.png
- JodieBenitez 3y agoThe screenshot features the excellent Surge synth. Check it out if you don't know it, it's an excellent sounding synth with a gorgeous oscillators section.
- throwaway290 3y agoIt's three times the size of the DAW itself, and unlike the DAW it requires using an installer during which it asks for admin password. Wow. Wonder what happened to "just drop this file into that dir" README.txt...
- radiowave 3y agoPutting a file into "that dir" also requires elevated permissions. (e.g. C:\Program Files\VSTPlugins )
- throwaway290 3y agoOf course but the point is I do that myself. Installer just asks for permissions and does who knows what.
- prmoustache 3y agoThen the binary does who knows what so in any case you are kind of bound to your trust in the vendor.
- throwaway290 3y agoPlugins themselves never require admin access to run, the installer does.
- prmoustache 3y agoUnless you are running your plugins in a sandbox or have different profiles for different usages, this doesn't make any difference as what is more important, your personal data is accessible from your main user. Anyone producing music from qubesOS?
- wiz21c 3y agoFrom the what's new page: "Some people will no doubt laugh at a few of these "new features", given that they've been in some other DAWs for 20 years or more. That's OK — we laugh too when we see other DAWs finally adding things that Ardour could do in 2005." this made me laugh :-)
- washadjeffmad 3y agoI started using Ardour in 2007 and quickly transitioned our studio to it in a big move to Linux for audio production. I'll be excited to reacquaint myself with it later this year on the first analog restoration I've accepted in almost a decade. The extent of its wonders escapes me now, but I recall with jack+ardour, the new lowlatency/preempt kernel, and some tcp/ip stack fun, we were able to get 40ms network audio latency on commodity hardware, vastly expanding our field processing workflows. Sort of how you can walk out of any venue today and immediately purchase an SD card of the event, we could produce MP3, CDs, and live webcasts of events, ready within minutes of closing with nothing more than a laptop, usb sound card, mics, and the internet. I also had a little trick for transcription; shorthand with macros! Eventually, I could type them all one handed. Today, you can just pipe through whisper and have subs in every format and language. What an incredible time to be alive. My lessons learned have been that free, open source software is amazing, and if you don't know something is supposed to be "hard", it can't stop you. Don't let greed or pride make you withhold from yourself.
- davexunit 3y agoI've just recently started using Ardour after wanting to do so for years. Once you learn the basics like tracks vs. busses and how to use EQ/compressor/limiter plugins it stops feeling daunting. Unfa's tutorials on YouTube were a lot of help.
- codedokode 3y agoArdour's UI is complicated compared to, for example, Ableton Live. For example, I have added a MIDI track and it is unclear how to add notes to it. Right clicking on a track doesn't give an option to do that. Also on Linux it supports only rarely used plugin formats (LV2, Linux VST), for which there are little plugins.
- weavie 3y agoIf it supports VST, I imagine yabridge would work fine to allow you to use Windows VST. https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge
- codedokode 3y agoLooks like a pain to install (doesn't support Fedora 37, isn't included in standard Fedora repositories, requires to use non-standard Wine version).
- runiq 3y agoNone of that is Ardour's fault, but the 'fault' of plugin developers not providing Linux binaries in the first place.
- codedokode 3y agoIf nobody provides Linux binaries then maybe it is better to support Windows binaries out of the box?
- rednab 3y agoArdour is GPLv2 open-source, but they still do somewhat pointedly attempt to dissuade you from building from source ¹). Now, I fully understand why. And I think charging for pre-built binaries is a totally valid way to attempt to finance an open-source project. The amount they're asking certainly is a pittance compared to the commercial offerings. But LMMS just feels friendlier to me. ¹) https://ardour.org/building_linux.html https://ardour.org/building_linux.html
- jacquesm 3y agoLMMS is a great little program too but in much the same way that a professional mix table is less 'friendly' than a four track recorder. Both have their uses. What bugs me about LMMS is that it is hard to use its output in any other way than just to send it to your devices, interop with other software isn't all that good unless it is on the plugin side. And neither Ardour nor LMMS come close to midieditor for the editing of raw midi files, and that's a shame because midieditor isn't very well supported and a bit fragile (it crashes with alarming regularity).
- kuon 3y agoI love ardour, I wish only for native Wayland support.
- heftig 3y agoI believe most plugins expose their GUI only as an X window that needs to be nested in an application window, so any change here would require reimplementing the GUI of a lot of plugins. But even if we do want to take this hurdle, is it even possible yet? What interfaces are available to do this on Wayland and embed a plugin-drawn GUI in a GTK 3, GTK 4, Qt 5 and/or Qt 6 application? My guess is we still need a new spec that would probably revolve around OpenGL/EGL or Vulkan/WSI, but I'm not sure, and there's also the question of how input events are delivered.
- jabl 3y agoAFAIU Ardour itself is still using GTK 2, which has no Wayland support. You can search around on the Ardour discourse, occasionally somebody asks about the porting effort to a newer GUI toolkit, but IIRC the Ardour devs think it's too much work for little gain.
- kuon 3y agoYes, it is a complicated work, but it will have to be done eventually.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoWhen do you believe that X Window API-using applications will cease to function?
- kuon 3y agoFor large x64 machine we use for music, maybe not very soon. But I work on embedded devices for medical application (basically fancy iPads with other hardware) and it's already wayland only down to the drivers. I think XWayland will be the way to go for a long time. For ardour itself, native Wayland is desirable for tooltips and other minor (but very annoying) UI things that break under XWayland, but for plugins, XWayland can be the glue.
- enbugger 3y agoI really like the UI in the sound production software. It's neat, has good colors and keep being eye candy even given the number of controls and information it provides. Is it some sort of standardized style guide for this kind of UI or everyone just takes inspiration by some industry leader products?
- prokoudine 3y ago> Is it some sort of standardized style guide for this kind of UI Anything goes in this industry really :)
- klaussilveira 3y agohttps://juce.com https://juce.com Maybe that's what you want?
- enbugger 3y agopretty much. are there open source alternatives to its UI module?
- prokoudine 3y agoDPF is relatively popular
- pilaf 3y agoI'm not a musician, but I've been happily using Ardour to edit a podcast for many years now (paying for a subscription the whole time too) and I really like the workflow I arrived at with it. One particular feature I like is the ability to edit while playing the audio at 2x speed, which I use to do a quick first pass where I remove obvious things like dead air, coughs, uhms, etc., before doing a second pass at 1x looking for finer details to fix. However, I've found that this feature has been worsened a bit since v6, so I've been stuck at v5 this whole time despite the many new releases. Every time a new version comes out I try it out immediately, but so far v5 has been the superior one for my particular workflow. I'm not complaining though, for as long as Ardour 5 still runs on my computer I'll be a happy user, and I'm very grateful for Ardour's existence, but I wonder if anyone else uses it the way I do and if they've had the same issue with newer versions.
- prokoudine 3y ago> However, I've found that this feature has been worsened a bit since v6 How exactly?
- pilaf 3y agoIn Ardour 5 I am able to simply slide the playback speed slider ("shuttle speed control") to start playing at >1x speed, and after releasing the mouse button it keeps on playing at that speed. In v6+ the sliding part still works, but upon releasing it the slider springs immediately back to 1x, so I can't easily select a playback speed and keep it going. As a workaround there's the varispeed option, but for me it's not as intuitive (it uses semitones instead of "Xs" as its unit), and feels much less flexible. I could probably live with it if I was forced into it, but I much prefer v5's behavior.
- prokoudine 3y agoThat is a really good point, thanks!
- pilaf 3y ago
- nirui 3y agoMaybe it's a bit off topic, but I think there is something on the website we can all take a note of: that is, on the download page, it says download "Ready-To-Run Program". Yep, not download "Binary", "Executable", "Package" or any of that non-sense (from user's perspective), just "Ready-To-Run Program", simple and clear, exactly what user wants when they open that page.
- dist-epoch 3y agoHave you tried clicking it? It takes you to a 2nd page where you select the OS. Then for me (Windows) to yet a 3rd page where I can chose the paid/free version. Clicking here on "Demo Version" takes you to the 4th page where you can finally download the setup binary. Which is an installer, the opposite of "Ready-To-Run"!!!
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoThe opposite of Ready-to-run is source code.
- croes 3y agoBut to get "Just download and run Ardour on your Linux, macOS or Windows computer." I have to click Ready-to-Run Program -> Download Ardour 8.0 for Windows 64 bit -> Download Demo -> Download Ardour 8.0 for Windows 64 bit (Demo) Each on a separate page, a little bit misleading because the first button already suggests a download
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoWhen we put it all on one page, too many people failed to understand the process. We can please some of the people all the time, but we can't please all the people all the time.
- croes 3y agoMy point is that three of four download buttons are links not download buttons.
- _fat_santa 3y agoHow does Ardour compare to something like Logic Pro or Ableton?
- javier123454321 3y agoIt honestly does most things that these do, but I do find ableton to be a bit more intuitive. The workflow is a bit different, sessions are given more importance in ableton while the timeline feels like the __main__ way of working in ardour. The piano roll is integrated in the timeline which is a nitpick thing that I don't love about ardour. All in all, you can do basically the same things, but for some reason I do feel like it takes just a bit more work in ardour. But I'm an amateur hobbyist, so I prefer the OSS version.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoAs usual, the lead developer (c'est moi) is happy to answer any questions.
- junon 3y agoI've used Cubase historically, but started and now have transitioned back to FL Studio since I can get my thoughts and ideas out quicker than in Cubase. I've seen Ardour for a long, long time but haven't ever tried it. What, if anything, would I be missing by switching? I primarily do composition, so lots of VSTs etc.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoFL Studio is a very, very different sort of DAW than, well, just about every other DAW (including Ardour). If you were moving from Cubase, Logic, Studio One, ProTools, Digital Performer etc., then I'd say you would miss very little by switching to Ardour other than some of the builtin plugins for those DAWs. But if you have become used to the FL Studio workflow, Ardour (and the list of DAWs above) are likely to feel clunky and unproductive.
- junon 3y agoGood to know, I didn't mind Cubase's workflow per se, it's just that Cubase was 1) super buggy and unstable, and 2) ridiculously expensive, and updates cost a lot. That also factored into leaving. I'll give Ardour a try, thanks for the response and congrats on the release!
- iainctduncan 3y agoFWIW, I would absolutely recommend learning a regular linear DAW in addition to FL Studio. I'm not an FL user, I'm a heavy Ableton Live user (entirely because of Max for Live), and it is also "non-standard". There are a lot of things that are much, much faster in DAWs from the pro-tools oriented lineage and it is well worth the few seconds it takes to copy audio from one to the other at times.
- ta8645 3y agoThe What's New page says they support the "Novation Launchpad Pro", but the picture beside that paragraph actually is the much more expensive "Novation Launchpad Pro [MK3]". (Ambiguous product names like this are mildly infuriating) Does anyone know if both the cheaper and more expensive devices are compatible with Ardour 8? https://novationmusic.com/products/launchpad-pro https://novationmusic.com/products/launchpad-pro https://novationmusic.com/products/launchpad-pro-mk3 https://novationmusic.com/products/launchpad-pro-mk3
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoYour first link is to an older version of the Launchpad Pro that Novation no longer sells or makes. The Mk3 is the current version of the Launchpad Pro. As our release notes indicate, we hope/plan to announce support for the cheaper Launchpad X and Mini during the 8.x development process.
- 6581 3y ago> Your first link is to an older version of the Launchpad Pro that Novation no longer sells or makes. Novation still makes and sells it - see the first link.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoIf you click on the "Add to basket" you will find that it is sold out, and if you dig deeper you will find you can only get refurbished units.
- 6581 3y agoNot for me. I guess the website forwards you to a different region's shop.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoI would not be surprised if the existing LP Pro support in Ardour 8 works with an older version, but they are fundamentally different devices. I can check on it whenever I get started on the mini and X versions.
- klaussilveira 3y agoI miss the "Beat Maker" interface from FL Studio. It is like Bread and Butter.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoFL Studio is a very, very different DAW from most others. If you get used to it, then most other DAWs are going to feel as if they are lacking something (though they will typically have something that FL Studio doesn't have, too).
- klaussilveira 3y agoYes, it is. It is why I still run FL Studio 10 via Wine. Never managed to replace it with anything else, and 12 just does not feel right.
- iainctduncan 3y agoCongratulations Paul. For those who don't know, the creator of Ardour is active here and was (historically) very active and helpful on Linux audio lists. I learnt a lot from dicussions on there on the intracies of audio programming. While my work has shifted from Linux audio to Max/MSP these days (I wrote Scheme for Max), in the mid 2000s linux audio hacking was my gateway to the world of programming, eventually leading to a very productive career in tech. Ardour was always a huge "hacker inspiration" to me, it's a truly shining example of how much one smart and dedicated programmer can do. I'm very glad to see it still going strong.
- jmgrosen 3y agoThank you for the self-promotion, Scheme for Max looks like something I’ve been wishing for for a long time!
- iainctduncan 3y agothanks! prob the best place to get a sense of it is the youtube videos. http://youtube.com/c/musicwithlisp http://youtube.com/c/musicwithlisp
- tofflos 3y agoThank you for the Arrangement view and the Launchpad support! I don't run Ardour but the Arrangement view in particular makes me want to try it out.