Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Ardour Digital Audio Workstation Now in Beta

Posted by michael on from the love-of-music dept.

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."

3 of 306 comments (clear)

  1. As much as by blinder · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  2. Re:Ardour vs. Audacity by realmolo · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Ardour vs. Audacity by Forkenhoppen · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.