there is no universal native yet, but links for the separate Intel & PPC builds can be found on our OS-X focused IRC channel. you can get there with an IRC client (such as Colloquy or XChat) or you can use your web browser via: Mibbit

The PPC build is lagging a bit behind; it will be updated over the weekend.

We do not post the URLs on any websites for a variety of reasons, most of all that we want people to know precisely where and how to get help.

a quick update for you .. the ardour svn code repository now contains the option to do it either the Logic way or the Ardour. I also added "favorites" to plugin management, since anyone using free plugins (e.g. LADSPA) will probably have a lot installed and use only a few. it will be in the 2.5 release.

Cool Thanks a lot, I'll look out for the new version

First of all mad props to dawhead for authoring Ardour. I am a longtime user of Linux preferring Slackware and compiling from source and, in fact, I first installed Ardour years ago when there was absolutely no help understandably I think due to the author's desire to not be slammed with help requests. I've been struggling to build an all linux dedicated recording box which theoretically should be the finest possible machine for such service. It is painfully obvious, at least to me, how restrictive both windows and macs are due to their proprietary nature combined with their need and design standard to basically do everything for everybody. This screams compromise while the alternative of Linux combines the (theoretical) total freedom of hardware choice (other than some sound cards) with the software ability to not only design and/or modify the software to do a very specific job optimally (including kernel modding at the most fundamental and effective level) and eliminare altogether all the unneeded kruft so that the machine can become a finely tuned highly focused device absolutely suitable for a wide variety of types of audio recording/editing. Aside from the perception that "Linux is too geeky" it seems to me that the customizabilty, extreme low latancy, and low or no cost begs to be implemented/exploited by anyone who has more brains than money and/or desires the most finely tuned equipment possible. If one calculates the cost difference vs/ the time investment required it should be obvious it would be worth the effort to learn Linux, or hire someone that does, especially considering that distros are now available that are way less geeky than in the past and even "test runnable" via LiveCDs. Admittedly I have not tried Ardour on a Mac which despite it's other (and considerable) restrictions, has a reputation for being user friendly, even intuitive. Unless this has somehow changed Ardour, I have to say that regrettably and despite my willingness to work at software, I found Ardour a bit daunting, not to install but rather to use. Maybe it's that I respond well to tutorials available in other DAWs to get the jump start to start working right away to fuel my desire to keep exploring, or maybe it's that I got turned off somewhat by such an early version. It's not that I am unaware or not thankful for what appears to be such an outright GIFT as polished and powerful as Ardour seems to be,and for free no less, and I respect and prefer labours of love over merely money motivated endeavors, but does it have to be so difficult to just get started? Or am I missing some stash of tutorials or user-specific help forums somewhere? Or has it been newly improved in this regard? Thanks Jimmy

Linebreaks.... USE THEM.

Sorry but the linebreaks did not "take". I even tried to repost with near ridiculous linebreaks and it still ended up in a block. I'll try later from another box.

I use ardour to demo everything - but for studio recordings i use nuendo3 on pc.

Its not comparab;e though some demos turn out sounding so good using the same hardware(dual boot with xp sp3) that i will just import into nuendo.

Midi is **** on linux - you need rosegarden and ardour and jack all working together - not to mention hydrogen for midi drums.

They are working hard on it. But its not yet there.

I have some experience with Ardour on Gentoo and Ubuntu/Ubuntustudio 32 and 64Bit.

On Linux, Reaper with Wine is a better solution then Ardour for most tasks. With a special version of Winasio it works on a 64Bit Linux too with most (not dongled) VST plugins (effects and synth).
VST doesn't work without rebuilding Ardour and then its unstable as hell. Midi support is elsewhere in the repository for the future...

For composing, mixing and mastering there are better solutions. Without doubt, Ardour has some features, so that some people say "cheap Pro Tools" or "PT for Linux". But its IMHO not ready to play in the same ballpark.
Lets see when midi support is coming and if there is in the future another solution to have VST-support without the needs of recompiling.

I agree with Frank IF by "most tasks" you mean pop music production.

The (current) lack of MIDI and commercial plugins such as AutoTune keep Ardour from being the best choice for pop music production.

Like other open-source software, Ardour is used by professionals who need more control over their tools than a commercial product. Think of it like a lawn mower: you'll notice that professional guys don't use the top-of-the-line consumer mower from Lowe's Depot. Instead they've got a big metal mower. Ardour doesn't have racing stripes or a plastic cowling, but it has a great big engine and a sturdy frame so you can weld on whatever you need.

There's a whole world of people out there who use an audio workstation but don't make pop records. Classical recording, live band multitracking, audio-for-video, audio forensics, art music, etc.

-Ben Loftis

For those who are new to linux you may want to check out: Ubuntu Studio

You can download an iso image which has both ubuntu and ardour on it
(along with a number of other audio and graphic apps). It's somewhat
easy to install.

Yes, its all good except that apparently the Ubuntu and/or UbuntuStudio people have messed up their build and/or environment so that the "Import Audio" dialog is completely useless. Users who built their own version from our source code release saw the problem go away. I wish there was something we (ardour developers) could do about this, but until they fix it, its quite a nasty problem with their packaged version.

Just thought people should know. Feel free to as them to fix it

Your newest ardour version fixed this import bug- it was weird to update ubuntu, reinstall ardour, and have the import feature broken. But it is working now, so that's good!
If you don't mind, I have not found documentation explaining one thing, and it is something I am not liking too much unless I am doing it wrong. What is the best way to create sends to a reverb or other effect? It seems like every send is treated as a separate thing, instead of like aux 1, aux 2, etc on a mixer, where the send is the same on each channel (did that make sense?). From what I have managed to do so far, if I create a bus and put a reverb on it, then I have to click in each channel, make a send (which is then called send 1, send 2, etc.) for each track I need to send there, I can't name them the same or it says jack ran out of ports, then set the ins and outs of each send (or do it in the jack connections panel maybe?). Hopefully I am missing something and there is an easier way to do that. Other than that, I am enjoying learning ardour so far and working on making linux audio work for me.

Hi dawhead,

Thanks for letting me know. I've remember trying Ardour a few years ago and couldn't get the drivers to work. I recently installed ardour on a debian computer and had problems compiling the drivers etc... I really wanted to see/hear how the current version was working. I then ran across the ubuntustudio site. It did install and worked right from the start It worked on the two computers I installed it on: one had an RME Multiface and another using Soundblaster live. I also like that you have access to your windows hard drives with no problem.

Thanks again for all the info!

Are you saying ubuntustudio can read and write ntfs? I had not heard this, but that would be a good thing if I wanted to put it on my rackmount PC.

EDIT:
The Perfect Desktop - Ubuntu Studio 7.10 - Page 5 | HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials
hmmm...I missed this I guess. If I have to share anything I have been using fat32.

I just tried ubuntustudio 8.10, and after 2 hours trying to get the OS to admit that my computer has a soundcard (as exotic as a M-Audio AP 2496), I gave up. This is just a waste of time.

Yes I searched the ubuntu forums.
No I am not a Linux noob. I use it in my daytime job every day.

If I want to make music, I need to resort to a real OS, it seems.

I haven't tried writing to the NTFS drives but did copy a complete song to the linux partition and it works just fine. They've really improved on it waltermusik - I understand I went through a similar thing. The M-Audio 2496 is on the Soundcard List for Midiman/MAudio: http://www.alsa-project.org/main/ind...:Vendor-MAudio

that's too bad. i know at least 500 people for certain, and perhaps as many as 1000, using UbuntuStudio 8.X with ardour and enjoying it. perhaps instead of struggling alone you could have used the resources shown on Support for Ardour | ardour to get help. These would have included IRC, where we could probably have fixed your issues in realtime, and had you up and running before i ever saw this response here on gearslutz.

maybe you did show up and we missed you, and if so i apologize. otherwise, good luck on your quest for a real OS - there aren't too many of those around.

mrufino from this forum did show up on IRC to ask some questions. unfortunately, a lot of ardour expertise is located in europe and on the east coast of the US, and so the channel @ about 06:00 CET tends to be a little quiet. i myself am located in berlin for several months, so you missed me.

regarding sends, yes, ardour2 does not do what most mixing consoles do in terms of providing an automatic send from every track to every bus. there are several reasons for this, all of which provide some justification for the decision (first and foremost, there is no limit on the number of busses, which makes this kind of static design rather difficult to implement, and potentially rather confusing for the user).

however, we have seen the light and in ardour3 all tracks will have automatic sends to every bus designated by the user as a non-live bus. in addition, we will the copy the design of a couple of nice mixing consoles and make the main fader able to control send levels (with a nice visual indicator of which send (or main gain) you are operating on). don't ask when ardour3 will be out - ardour releases are driven by functionality, not marketing deadlines. we release stuff when we think its ready, and ardour3 is not ready yet (some people do build it and test it already - we don't develop stuff in secret chambers; we just don't announce releases of that sort of thing).

although we certainly want to provide all the functionality offered by proprietary DAWs, please keep in mind that for every person who tests ardour and finds the current "workflow-related" design decisions a problem for them, and can't understand why ardour works this way, i hear from another user doing a different kind of audio work who loves the flexibility and the way it speeds up their job compared to being forced to use protools/nuendo/sonar. as we move forward, i am looking for design solutions that help contemporary pop/rock/jazz production while not impacting the classical/electro-acoustic/sound-design/post-production users of Ardour.

i'll look forward to seeing you on IRC again - i am generally active from around 08:00 CET till about 23:00 CET.

thanks for your interest in ardour.

waltermusik I wanted to add to this and say that I have Ubuntu 8.1 (and i can help you with studio) working with my maudio mobiblePre USB and cooperating happily with ardour (both from apt, and the latest compiled 2.7 version) I am on #ardour as well under the same name (narcoclepsy) or you can reply here. Hope to hear back- take care-

Folks,

after such empathic response by the Ardour people, please let me apologize for the rude tone in my previous post. Up to now, I have not even tried to launch Ardour, since Ubuntu studio still insists that my computer has no soundcard.

But thanks for pointing me to the Ardour website. I was not aware of IRC. I will check it out.

Thanks!

Thomas

That all sounds great- thanks for noticing me on there! I have never used IRC before, hopefully I can figure out how to get there again. I am in NJ, USA, what does 8:00CET til 23:00 CET translate to here (I am by NYC).

So I am not necessarily looking for fixed sends, just the ability to drag one I already created to another track and have the routing still set up, that's all. To take an example from reaper, I can drag my mouse from the spot where the send would be to the destination I am sending to and it is automatically routed and named as to the destination. However, that routing is not fixed. But the way you are describing would work for me too- I mix very simply. I am going to see if I can figure out how to try ardour 3 (and my first question was "When will it be out?" haha!) and see if it works. I have gotten away from doing recording as a money making venture so there is less pressure on me now (I was doing live recordings, no retakes!) and I can test things. I do have a live recording for a friend next month, so I may stick with my windows-reaper setup for that one (no windows for anything else anymore in my life!), but I am committed to learn open source music (or should I be committed for that?!). Thanks for the input, this is why I am loving open source!

CET is 6 hours ahead of US Eastern.

we support drag-n-drop of plugins, inserts & sends. I will check on the behaviour of a dropped send because differing track configuration issues make it potentially tricky to honor the old setup. i agree that it should work as you describe it.

this is a nice idea. and since reaper has borrowed a few ideas from us, i feel free to borrow back. the one problem in ardour is that because we don't have a fixed set of send slots, defining where to drag-and-drop from/to is not immediately obvious.


you absolutely should not do this. ardour3 is still very much a work in progress right now and is not a suitable platform for even experienced users to start playing with. one example? trying to change i/o routing now will crash every time. once the noise of the 2.7.X release(s) has settled down, i believe i will back working on ardour3 fairly intensively.

getting direct lines of communications between developers and users is one of the great things about open source, and i very much value everyone's input, positive or negative. cash helps too, but ideas are
critical

btw, we will have a 2.7.1 release out in the next 12 hours or so that addresses some key issues with 2.7.

this will now be in 2.7.1, because you asked for it.

Cool, and I am compiling 2.7 right now (I feel like such a nerd saying that- and that's good!!!), but forgot to apply the patch for my request, so I guess I'm doing it again. Things are starting to make a little sense though.

you should probably just wait. if you use that patch with 2.7, ardour will crash shortly after a few drag-n-drop operations. 2.7.1 is out today (nov 26th).

Hi dawhead and other Linux Sound Literates,

I fiddled a bit with my ubuntustudio 8.10 and ended up compiling OSS 4 (instead of using ALSA that came with ubuntu). My next problem is the "lack of Jack", I suppose:

I can listen with audacios (that litle, freeamp like mp3 player) and get flawless audio playback over M-Audio Audiophile (PCI) SPDIF. Ardour, though, will complain that no audio interface is present, and Firefox Flash plugin will simply not playback audio with no error messages.

Please point me to some place where JACK is described, especially
- how to install and launch?
- what is its place in the architecture? (it must be some layer on top of OSS and below the actual audio application but why don't the apps connect to OSS directly, as they do with ASIO in Windows?)

Not really an Ardour specific question but I guess this thread is read by some who can quickly give me some "useful links"

Thanks! Thomas

Well, that was the truth, but I am happy it works at least and compiling it last night was merely an academic exercise so I would know how to do it when 2.7.1 came out. I was told it took you about 5 hours to implement this, I appreciate it.

this is bad news. i have never heard of anyone who has gone down this path. JACK can run on top of the OSS APIs, but you'll get very little support for this. the OSS API was deprecated within Linux years ago, and i don't know more than 2 people in the linux audio/music world who use that stuff. whatever your problems are with ALSA could be solved (unless its a device that is only supported by OSS4), but a forum is not the place to do it. IRC would be much better (realtime, group chat). This was, I regret to say, a really unfortunate decision on your part. But we can probably fix that.

Flash only uses the ALSA API. You cannot get audio out of it if you use OSS4. Ardour is in a similar position, though if you had started JACK already (using its OSS backend), Ardour could care less - it would just use the running JACK. As it is, Ardour is looking for potential devices to hand to a JACK instance that Ardour itself will start, and I haven't bothered to add support for device discovery via the old OSS API. Its not likely to happen either, for reasons described above.

Note: installing applications on Linux systems is not application-specific. Your distribution maintains 1 or more "repositories" of software, and a tool to manage installed software (there are different tools in different distributions of Linux).

So, Install qjackctl (which is *not* JACK, but a GUI control app for it - JACK itself is designed to run GUI-less.) Your distro should install that plus all its requirements (like JACK itself). If you are on a non-media-centric distro, then there are some more steps to make things work really well, but on most distros that will get you 96.5% of the way there. Run qjackctl . If you have problems understanding it, get back to us, but IRC will be very very much faster. See Support for Ardour | ardour for details.

The simplest way to think about JACK is that its like Rewire, except that just about every music & pro-audio app on Linux is written to use it (and as an aside, just about every app on OS X and Windows can use it because of the way it emulates a CoreAudio/ASIO device on those platforms). It provides a uniform API to inter-application audio and device sharing, and a number of other subtle but important features. Read more at JACK | ardour

I started in Protools then went to Logic Pro and now to Ardour.

Sure, there are some things Ardour can't do especially MIDI but that is coming. If you need MIDI you can run SEQ24 with Ardour.

Since I've moved back to more hardware for audio generation and processing rather than plugins then Ardour is ideal. FL Studio runs great in Wine if you need any plugins etc for certain tasks.

My prime reason for moving to Linux and Ardour is performance. My PC totally outperforms my Mac now. There is simply no comparison. I am using an Echo Audio Layla sound interface.

I've just subscribed to pay the Ardour developer. Well worth doing.

Logic and OSX are pure bloat now and as for Digidesign - I had an old 001 here which I needed to sort out for sale. The process of simply getting hold of the last free Protools 001 update for a Mac running LE ( I was running Protools on Windows) is nigh on impossible at the Digidesign site due to registration nightmares that I won't even get into. There is no way in hell that I'd ever pay Digidesign again. I'd rather the money went to the Ardour developer.

I was so impressed when I was able to run Ardour on Raspberry pi. I think I thou chef the future in that very moment. A computer of £5 with free software all open specs I could colder on the board to make it to my own needs and I was able to modify the software to my needs. Incredible.

We are talking of £5 investment here to overrun a pro tools rig? Yes and no.

I wouldn't produce a paid album with it. But I would create my own music? Yes indeed!
Given time ardour will be a serious contender for everyone else.
I love pro tools. It's nearly perfect if not perfect.
But damn, Ardour is 90% and 0% of the cost...
And the free plugins lv2 there is a series which looks and sounds awesome!!!

Big up for ardour!!