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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."
How does Ardour compare to Audacity, another free digital audio editing program? I want to know my options before switching from proprietary Cool Edit.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It's getting to the point where I absolutely cannot wait for this to finally arrive.
My musician husband has been lusting after the ability to record music for years, and the big trouble has been that the right software has been proprietary, often requiring expensive hardware to make it work, and EXPENSIVE on its own.
To wit: Vegas from Sonic Foundry costs $700. Samplitude is about that much. ProTools? If you have to ask, you can't afford it. Sonar by Cakewalk only costs $500. (ONLY)
Unfortunately it's not production quality yet. But from the looks of the site, it looks like they are getting close to it now.
Give it a year or so and I will be able to finally wipe Windows off of the family audio computer and do it the right way...with Free as in FREEDOM software.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
ardour will interface with any multi-channel pro-grade interface you throw at it (assuming it is ALSA supported).
it was written with this interface (among others) in mind:
RME Hammerfall DSP
which is cheaper than a digidesign 888. compare the specs :-)
After about three years of testing Ardour it's great to see the beta release. I own a small commercial recording studio and am really looking forward to running Ardour and other linux applications fulltime. There's still work to be done but it's getting very close.
Ardour is a jackd client. Jackd enables hardware and software port routing. So, application_a:output_N can be routed to application_b:input_N and on and on to the extent of your computing capabilities.
In addition to routing, jackd also has transport syncronization functionality. The transport api is in beta but it's being actively developed. Earlier this morning I tested DM-24(digital mixer) MMC play instructions to Ardour(jack transport master) to Alsaplayer(jack transport slave) and Ardour-mtc:out to DM-24 for sync between Ardour and the mixing consol.
In the middle of that chain I've got JAMin which is a jack client audio mastering application
So, I hit play(dm-24) Ardour engages transport, Alsaplayer engages transport and sends its output to JAMin which in turn sends its output to Ardour where the mastered product is recorded. This is incredible stuff.
My hat is off to the linux audio developer and user community.
Next on the agenda, call my protools pals and invite them over for beer. :)