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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."
If it really replaces the commercial tools it says it does, it would be worth dual-booting to Linux just for this one app alone.
What does it take to get an app like this to run on OSX? A recompile, or something more sinsiter, like Fink or a complete port?
If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
Great now I can record music in my home, and publish it on the internet, and get sued by the RIAA for not paying them for the privilege of making music.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
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.
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
Now the killer question, is this cool tool a good replacement for Windows based products such as CoolEdit or Cakewalk's Sonar? I've been a long time user of the later since the DOS days, but have become increasingly annoyed by latency issues as a result of the operating system.
I'm not only encouraged to make the switch by tools such as Ardour, but the increasing support for MIDI & Sound cards AND if need be, tweak my Linux Kernel for real-time music, MIDI & sound performance.
Now I just need to find an equivalent to Dave Phillips' "Sound & Midi Software for Linux" page for Video editing & DVD production.
--- have you healed your church website?
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.
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 :-)
Now I just need to get my sound card working under Linux!
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. :)
What do you mean "lack of good music recording/processing software on Linux" ? It's built in the OS for crying out loud :
/dev/dsp > my_music.raw /dev/dsp
Recording : cat
Processing : dd if=my_music.wav of=my_shorter_music.raw bs=1k count=10
Playing : cat my_shorter_music.raw >
Just try to do that on Windows!
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
It would seem the biggest problem here is lack of driver support for a wide range of pro-audio sound cards and interfaces. Looking at the ALSA supported hardware page (which this workstation utilizes), most of the pro hardware hasn't been verified to work well.
I think the other major downside is the lack of VST plug-in support. Most every major digital audio software workstation like ProTools and Nuendo take advantage of the large array of VST plug-ins available for things like effects processing. I don't think you'll see a lot of pro audio guys contemplate switching over until VST support is added (in Ardour's defense, VST support is tricky because a lot of them are platform-specific due to bad design).
However, I salute them for their work and hope that Ardour matures into a great package.
Imagine when high-quality digital recording facilities are available at low cost to those that want to use them. The RIAA will have lost its hammerlock on both side of the music supply chain. Suddenly the arguments that say the RIAA are screwing the artists start to have a lot more validity: the artists will be able to create works and distribute them easily in return for a fair price.
Even if some other proprietary system is the standard, I hope artists sieze this opportunity. (If only so I can see the RIAA swallow their collective tongue.)
--
bachiatari na torisetsu o yome!
Mod down and Flame away, but I'll be brave...
I've been doing audio production work for a couple years using Windows 2000, Nuendo, Amplitube, This incredible $139 gadget, using only this inexpensive audio card. I don't get blue screens of death, my hardware is fully supported, etc. I run a second HD with Red Hat 9 (and incidentally, the awesome Ximian Desktop), and I can't even get my sound card to work. I love Linux, but no serious musician will be using the penguin for audio production for at least a few more years.
But he said INTERFACE
A theme is just like applying makeup to an ugly mug.
If the interface is bad, no amount of skinning is going to change the interface.
GPL Deconstructed
Are you insane? That's like saying GIMP will replace Photoshop. Neither of them are even close to being in the same leage.
It's hyperbole like that that HURTS Open Source.
Try telling a real professional that this thing is near to replacing ProTools and you will be laughed off the planet.
Get a grip. It (like gimp) might make a nice cheap alternative for the garage band or bedroom recording artist, but it's got about a decade more work to go to approach what ProTools does TODAY.
Advertise it for what it is, don't make completely uninformed comments like this will be a free replacement for ProTools. My ghod.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
It has always amazed me that it was ever possible to record music that anybody could stand back in the days of 44.1kHz, 16 bit recorders. Or (gasp!) even analog.
Seriously, the "my recorder has more kHz than your recorder" argument is like comparing computers strictly by clock speed. Great music is great music whether recorded using my hand held microcassette or the latest/greatest SSL 192kHz behemoth. And crappy music is still crappy, even at 192k. Its just more highly refined crap.
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.