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

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: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: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!

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.

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!