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."

Comments

Ardour vs. Audacity

[yerricde]

How does Ardour compare to Audacity, another free digital audio editing program? I want to know my options before switching from proprietary Cool Edit.

Re:Ardour vs. Audacity

[realmolo]

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.

Re:Ardour vs. Audacity

[Forkenhoppen]

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.

Re:Ardour vs. Audacity

[naelurec]

Think Shrek.

Ardour is like Shrek .. it has layers.
Audacity is like Doneky .. it doesn't have layers.

Re:Ardour vs. Audacity

[CoughDropAddict]

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.

Re:Ardour vs. Audacity

[CoughDropAddict]

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.

Re:Ardour vs. Audacity

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

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

Mmmmm...Free DAW = FREEDOM.

[MsGeek]

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.

Re:OSX

[croddy]

well it would certainly have to be recompiled for OSX as it's only available as source right now :-)

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.

As much as

[blinder]

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?

Re:Ugh

[iapetus]

From the Features Page:

Fully "skinnable"/"themeable" GUI
If you don't like Ardour's appearance, and have some to waste with computer graphics, you can completely change the colors, fonts and images.

Re:replace protools ?

[croddy]

this comes up every time.

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 :-)

Awesome!

[Luveno]

Now I just need to get my sound card working under Linux!

it's an hdr/daw and jackd client

[rtp405]

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. :)

Re:My final reasons for staying on Windows are gon

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

What do you mean "lack of good music recording/processing software on Linux" ? It's built in the OS for crying out loud :

Recording : cat /dev/dsp > my_music.raw
Processing : dd if=my_music.wav of=my_shorter_music.raw bs=1k count=10
Playing : cat my_shorter_music.raw > /dev/dsp

Just try to do that on Windows!

To Be Fair

[blackmonday]

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.

Re:Ugh

[2nd Post!]

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.