Slashdot Mirror
The Fix Is In: Ardour Set For Summer Release
uprightcitizen writes "Good news for the open source audio recording world! Ardour creator Paul Davis has announced a feature-freeze and has set a binary release date for the now-famous
GPL multitrack audio recording application. Ardour has recently been featured
in Sound on Sound and has been mentioned
on Slashdot many times (here(1), here(2),
etc..). The feature freeze is effective as of May 4 and the binary release date
is set for sometime in July or August. Good Job Paul!"
However, it's still not ready for prime time. A couple more years and it could be.
The DSP framework needs a complete rewrite to fix some limitations, and the phase vocoder is 2nd generation, when most commercial tools use 4th or 5th generation.
A potential Linux user that doesn't have the luxury of a hand-holding-Linux-guru friend to help them install their desired software would view an easy to install binary application as a "big plus".
I'll second that. A musician buddy of mine is really interested in trying Linux, but until there's a replacement for Cool Edit Pro there's no point in him switching. Atfer all, what's the use of an OS that doesn't have the apps that caused you to get a computer in the first place?
The great advantage of having a reputation for being stupid: People are less suspicious of you.
His primary issues were with the sound driver/card he was using. It's best to go with linux friendly hardware to begin with.
I'm not exactly the type you requested comment from -- I have yet to use Ardour -- but I have used Audacity (and looked at Ardour heavily). In my eyes, having used several audio programs, the intent seems different. Each one is produced for a "target audience", if you will.
Now Audacity is a decent multi-tracking program for beginners. However, there are many limitations to the control users innately have. For instance, the compressor in the latest release has absolutely no settings -- it just compresses according to presets written into the program. So, while your audio won't be clipping like an uncompressed signal would, but you also get zero control of the particularities of the sound that is produced. From my perspective, having mixed several multi-tracks in my day (most including vocals, drums, guitars, bass, and more), the more control I have the better.... and that's where Audacity falls short.... at least until you start downloading additional plug-ins.
Ardour, on the other hand, looks to be a much more robust design out of the box. It seems intended for more professional usage. From what I've seen, it's got excellent control of just about every processor you could normally want in a studio recording app, and an interface that provides fast and comprehensive control to them all. It's almost like sitting at a real studio mixing board -- the same layout. However, its main drawback looks to be in its learning curve. Most people who just dabble with sound now and again will probably be lost in the complexity that the program offers. However, for my money (or lack thereof), it looks to be much closer to my needs than Audacity.
So in essence, it's all about what you want to do with it and the complexity that you're willing to endure.
How does this software compare to Audacity?
It doesn't. Or hardly doesn't, at least. Ardour is a full featured professional recording application, designed to tackle any audio recording task you can throw at it. Have two studio quality sound cards, giving you a total of 20 cannels in/out, at 96Khz/24bit? Want to record a rock show, with live drums, backing vocals, and enough microphone cables to make AOL's server room look tidy? Ardour can handle it, and then some.
Want to take that 20 track show, and overdub the guitars in the studio, while the whole mess is mixed in real time? It can do that, too.
Ardour is the open source equivalent of Pro Tools (mentioned on slashodot a few days ago). Audacity isn't.
Now, if you're not interested in any of these things, Ardour is probably overkill for you.
And if anyone deserves the marketing here, it's Paul. Ardour is a massive piece of code, that took years of uncompensated full time work to get to its current state. It's well designed and well coded. No corners were cut in the making of this piece of software. Go get it, and pay for it.
Ardour supports MTC sync. From the FAQ at :
http://ardour.sourceforge.net/ardour_faq.txt
* functioning as a MIDI Timecode master (it generates MTC)
* functioning as a MIDI Timecode slave (experimental; send reports!)
From browsing the mailing list archives, i gather that ardour does not directly support true SMPTE (which is timecode encoded as an audio signal); but if you have a hardware MTCSMPTE box you might be able to use SMPTE.
University of Maryland researchers were able to grow a checkers playing program out of nothing (it knew legal moves, that's it). Once they thought it had "cooked" enough, they turned it loose on yahoo games where it quickly reached an expert ranking.
To claim that white noise guided solutions can't give rise to more complex systems is to say that the premise of annealing processees are false. Yet molten rock sometimes forms diamonds, so there must be something to it!
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
Ardour is a bit overkill for my needs, and Audacity is too slow for my taste, so I wrote GNUsound. You might want to give it a try.
honestly the best reason I can find to use the 888 is that it supports pro-tools.
This is all true. But don't forget the other side of the coin: want to open two mp3s, glue them end-to-end with a crossfade, and export to mp3? Ardour doesn't do mp3, and the rest of the process is going to take twice as much work. And you'll have to read the manual and become familiar with concepts like "diskstream," "route," "playlist," and "region." And you'll have to tweak JACK until it runs under your kernel and soundcard without xruns.
Ardour does what it's designed to do: studio recording in professional situations. But so does Audacity: soundfile editing and simple multitrack recording, all out-of-the-box and with minimal effort.
honestly it's not all that hard to compile from CVS if you're familiar enough with GNU/automake-type source packages. I think the total number of external dependencies I had to compile was 7? give it a shot. if you're willing to pay digidesign $?,000 for a full-fledged protools rig then the time out of your day to donate a little testing to ardour is a drop in the bucket.
and WTF, GIMP does CMYK just fine. *yes* the interface is a bit obfuscated, but it is there.
Kudos are definitely in order for Paul and the others working on Ardour. However, I'm not sure where people are getting the idea that ProTools is an unreachably expensive system. ProTools comes in multiple versions which have different levels of hardware acceleration. The more hardware acceleration, the more expensive the version.
... many professional albums are made on it. It competes directly with the likes of MOTU Performer, Emagic Logic, Steinberg Cubase, and Cakewalk Sonar.
ProTools Free runs purely in software, using off-the-rack, home sound cards, and is free (beer, not speech). Nobody uses it for real work, but it makes for an okay functional demo.
ProTools LE is targetted at home and small studios, and uses generic pro-level audio adapters. The software and hardware together come out in the $500 to $1000 range.
ProTools TDM is what the big studios use. It requires proprietary hardware with extensive use of onboard DSP and dedicated control surfaces. This is the one for which the hardware and software together fall in the $10000 to $15000 range.
The mid-level LE version is not a toy
But my grandest creation, as history will tell,
Was Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell.