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Ardour Digital Audio Workstation Now in Beta
croddy writes "The first beta of the Ardour digital audio workstation has been released. A tarball is available at the Ardour project page on Sourceforge. Packagers are currently preparing binary releases for several major Linux distributions. Ardour is a professional-grade, low-latency, multi-track digital hard disk recording and mixing application designed to replace dedicated HDR systems, and software systems such as ProTools and Samplitude. It supports audio processing plugins via LADSPA. Although it is still a beta, the years of work and dedication by the Ardour development team are very much visible in this release."
ardour depends upon JACK to handle audio I/O. to run it on OSX would require JACK being ported to OSX, or Ardour being ported to use another I/O kit.
it depends upon a few other things as well, such as libsamplerate, libsndfile, and GTK which would be very easy to port to OSX, if they've not been already.
It looks like noone's done it (and reported it) but you could prolly pull it off, since it uses an abstract layer (JACK) between the software and the hardware and since JACK supports OS X, and OS X could most likely compile it, you could get lucky
I almost spewed apple juice out my nose when I saw Ardour referred to as "professional-grade" and compared to Pro-Tools. Sorry, it's a nice free package and useful for light hobbyist work, but that's about it. I've been trying to migrate my studio off Windows for awhile now and nothing on Linux comes close, so I just bought Macs instead. Just getting Ardour to install was a daunting task, let alone getting it to see the soundcards I had. Yes it's still beta, but it doesn't even fair well against simple cheap tools that were available in 1997.
I like Ardour (when I actually managed to get it compiled) I have found that it will never replace my Mackie MDR 24, or my Mackie 8-bus console. I'm a knob/fader/pot turner and I like the feel of "real" equipment (I also like the way it looks, all shiney, with the lights and LED's sparkling).
I use Ardour mostly for low-level editing of tracks I record on the MDR. I can ftp into the MDR and pull the tracks out of project (they are just WAV files) and import them into Ardour. The best part about Ardour for editing is its non-destructive-ness... especially for the Mackie were if you had destructive editing... well your synch wouldn't be... um, in synch.
Now, maybe, with binary distributions coming online, we can see VST plugin capability?
sad robot making broken music
ardour : audacity :: photoshop : MS paint
Ardour is to Audacity as Quark Xpress is to Notepad.
That's an exaggeration, but only a small one. If you like Cool Edit, and it does what you need, then Ardour is gonna be overkill.
The de facto standard for this kind of work is ProTools. Despite any grass-roots campaigns against it, it is the most commonly used DAW application out there.
OSS packages, while great and useful, are not going to be able to compete with ProTools in the near future. ProTools (not LE, not FE, the real version) comes with custom external DSP hardware. The external DSPs and related hardware are used for to process software plugins as well as simple tasks like ADC/DAC of signals. Until the OSS community can provide both equivalent hardware and software support for it, there will be no competition between packages like this one and ProTools, as they are in entirely different classes.
All that being said, I'm really happy someone is working on it, and that I'll probably use this or similiar package, but not for the same things I'd use ProTools for.
--
lds
From the Features Page:
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
They're like night and day. Audacity is designed for editing sound clips. Its interface was designed in the style of CoolEdit or the windows Sound Recorder.
Ardour, on the other hand, is designed as a suite. It's layout is designed so you can easily edit multiple tracks at the same time. You can have the volume or panning change as your progress, timewise, through each track. You can apply certain effects to just one track on the fly, rather than having to pre-process it and mix it, and then listen to the result.
The difference between Audacity and Ardour is kind of like the difference between MS Paint and The Gimp. Think layers. It's just a more robust program.
Give us a little credit. Audacity has multitrack working quite nicely in our unstable branch, which will be 1.2 before long. We have a built-in envelope editor which gives the same effect as volume automation. We have time tracks that let you continuously vary the speed/pitch of the entire project (I'm pretty sure no other audio editor has this; chalk one up for innovation in the open source community). We have mute/solo/volume/pan controls for each track.
Yes, it's a completely different program than Ardour with different goals, but I don't think it's a simple matter of toy vs. tool. Audacity has a lot of features that Ardour doesn't because of Ardour's more narrow intended use.
Speaking as an author of Audacity, my opinion is that Ardour is a more powerful program, but with a much narrower appeal. Ardour is designed for use with pro-level, multichannel cards in a studio setting. If you're in a room surrounded by expensive audio gear, Ardour is probably for you. Otherwise, Audacity is probably a better choice, and the Ardour community would probably approve of me saying that because fewer people will approach them with questions like "how do I open an mp3?" :)
More specifically: Audacity supports more formats including lossy formats like mp3 and Vorbis. Audacity runs on more platforms. Audacity is much easier to use. Audacity has a more diverse set of features in general, such as the ability to extend it with the lisp-like language Nyquist and "time tracks" that allow you to continuously vary the speed/pitch of the project.
Ardour has much more evolved multichannel capabilities (that is, sending or capturing more than stereo from the soundcard itself, Audacity can mix multiple tracks to stereo output just fine). Ardour has support for MMC and real-time effects.
How does Ardour compare to Audacity, another free digital audio editing program? I want to know my options before switching from proprietary Cool Edit.
I agree with many of the responses, that Ardour and Audacity are as different as night and day. But I don't think some of the comparisons were quite fair, though, comparing Ardour to Quark Express and Audacity to NotePad! Maybe I'm just biased, though, as the lead developer of Audacity.
First of all, I don't think that Ardour and Audacity are directly competing. There's some feature overlap, but the user interfaces are so different (on purpose) that we're both capturing different markets, and addressing different needs.
Anyway, here are some of the major differences I can think of off the top of my head:
1. Ardour only runs on Linux. Audacity runs (completely natively) on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Ardour requires Jack. Audacity only requires OSS on Linux (supported everywhere) with support for ALSA and Jack in alpha testing now (email the devel list if you want info on how to enable one of these).
2. Ardour supports true multi-track recording and playback. Audacity only records more than 2 tracks on some systems, and always mixes down to 2 output channels (stereo).
3. Both Audacity and Ardour are quite powerful, but in different ways. Ardour supports MIDI control, powerful muting/soloing, and realtime effects. Audacity has only non-realtime effects, but some of these are quite powerful in a different way, like our Noise Removal. Audacity supports plug-in effects in Ladspa (Linux), VST (Win/Mac), and Nyquist (a high-level interpreted language for audio processing).
Lots of features in common, too: both Audacity and Ardour support floating-point samples, high sample rates, resampling, LADSPA plug-ins, unlimited undo, internationalization, etc.
One last thing to dispel the myth that Audacity is "simple" compared to Ardour: I just did a quick wc, and Audacity is 70k+, Ardour is 100k+ lines of code (someone else can feel free to do a sloccount if you want). In both cases, not counting other libraries that aren't directly part of the project. No matter how you look at it, they're within a factor of 2 in terms of size and complexity, just in different areas.
We're nearing a feature freeze for Audacity 1.2.0. If you're comfortable compiling software, please check out our latest code from CVS and help us get the last few bugs out. I'd strongly encourage you to try out both Ardour and Audacity - hopefully you'll find that you use them to complement each other.
- Dominic
Paul Davis wrote 99% of the Ardour code, he even recently claimed this on the Ardour website. I'm sorry, I've worked on many teams, this does not constitute a team. Ardour is a wonderful piece of philanthropy, but as an example of the open source development model is it a failure.
Audacity 1.0 was released about one year ago. I probably wrote 90% of the code. Since then, dozens of developers have joined the team and contributed huge amounts of code - I'm responsible for maybe only 50% of the code now. That doesn't even count the contributions of the translators, documentation writers, packagers, etc. that have helped make Audacity so successful.
The point is, a stable 1.0 release is a necessary first step before many new developers will join a project and help move it forward. Look at Mozilla for another example - since 1.0 was released, the developer base has grown dramatically.
Also, keep in mind that while Paul Davis did write (almost) all of the Ardour code, and even Jack, Ardour depends on a number of other open-source libraries (libsndfile, libsamplerate, soundtouch, and GTK come to mind), so in that sense it is a success of the open-source model. Paul Davis was able to produce a monumental program in 4 years almost entirely by himself because he was able to build on top of other open-source software.