A sampler for ardour would be awesome!

#61

I was intrigued by your pull request to add a sampler. I started to review it and the realized that any of the comments, pointing out obvious flaws, would not be useful at all.

For the case of Ardour development, LLMs are best used as fancy Rubber Ducks to riff off ideas.

The ironic aspect is that for greenfield projects, the approach that many audio devs over here take is: either it works, or you throw it away. Manual corrections are deemed a waste of time.

This obviously does not work for ā€œbrownfieldā€ projects like Ardour.

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#62

Well i apologize for any time i may have wasted for you guys. Feel free to close all my prs. I didnt expect anyone to merge the sampler as is, it was more or a less a way to show you my idea, and bring it to life. I enjoy using it on my machine And figured, if you wanted you could have used the code or reference it. Same with the other prs. So again, my apologies. I sincerely thought i was helping. Esp with the bug reports and prs for those.

#63

ā€œJust A Sampleā€ is so cute iā€™ll just have to use it now. Hope itā€™s not buggy.
(ā€¦Damn, why did he remind me of samplers alsoā€¦i donā€™t have 13 lives to wasteā€¦ :slight_smile: now i remebered step filtersā€¦and slicers tooā€¦damn it)

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#64

As an active user, not a developer, I think a built-in sampler could be useful for some, but personally I donā€™t need one since plugins already cover most needs. From my perspective, development should prioritize stability, performance, and core features rather than adding new built-in tools.

That said, some workflows might benefit greatly from an integrated sampler, offering tighter session handling and smoother DAW interaction. Maybe a better approach would be a dedicated plugin developed by an Ardour-focused community, giving users the functionality they want without adding complexity to the core DAW. To my knowledge, there isnā€™t an official Ardour-oriented plugin community like this yet?? But it could be a useful initiative.

In my experience, Ardour isnā€™t particularly buggy and Iā€™ve used it alongside Mixbus for years on Linux. Occasional issues arise, but they are usually resolved.

Note: this text is partially machine-translated from my native languageā€¦

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#65

Being a developer Iā€™m strictly against the use of code generated by LLM without a strict code review and rewrite. Generated by LLM code may act as a hint but not as a complete solution of some problem. The problem is more dramatic when LLM is used to generate patches to the code base of the projects by contributors who donā€™t understand the projectā€™s architecture or, even more, never wrote code at all. In this case the whole work over the control of the LLM-generated code is delegated to developers and maintainers of the project who already have a lot of job to do. Submitting not verified patches (in terms of QA control) doenā€™t do good job for them. In other words, often itā€™s a garbage job which requires consumption of time with almost null output. We already observe the results of such behavior model in a CURL project where the lead of the project has closed bounty program for finding bugs and vulnerabilities.

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#66

Thanks for your response. I understand your point of view. I donā€™t think Ardour needs to have the best step sequencer or the best FX plugins. Some people might say that Stepic is too complex and would prefer a sleek and comfortable step sequencer in Ardour for experimentation and enjoyment.

Just my Opinion - The same applies to a native sampler. You could do a lot of sound design with a built-in sampler, such as tape-stop-like effects, slowdowns, or resampling recordings out of the box in Ardour.

You as the lead developer I do understand that, you aim for the best possible solutions for Ardour. However, I can imagine that, following the Pareto principle, you could make many new users happy with just 20% of the effort.
I also understand that development time is limited and that there are other priorities. And maintaining Ardour plugins and Mixbus plugins seperatly could be time-consuming and complex.

i love the clipluncher in Ardour. adding a Sampler and some other DJ like fx (chorus) seems the right next step to me. I often use the ACE Compressor, ACE Reverb, and ACE Delay, for example :smiley:
There are many good alternatives out there, but with third-party plugins it feels like there is less connection to Ardour. Itā€™s almost as if the DAW doesnā€™t matter, you could use any DAW with your set of third-party plugins. I know you could get exact the same results with every DAW. but there is a reason why there are so many DAWs out there. For me Ardour feels like Freedome. Reaper feels like a rebellion. Bitwig feels like part of the proprietary elite.

Itā€™s not your responsibility to develop built-in plugins for Ardour. But I hope that Ardour will gain more recognition and that more open-source developers might contribute or share some built-in plugins on GitHub.

I just find it a bit unfortunate when a user presents a concept and it leads to such a heated discussion.

1 Like
#67

first of all, buggy doesnā€™t mean un-usable. not to mention, different workflows are going to run into different sets of bugs. i also think there is a bit of a survivorship bias going on here. because some workflows dont encounter bugs vs other workflows. what will end up happening is that the people who have a workflow that doesnt end up being as buggy, will stay, where as the people who do end up running into a lot of bugs, leave. which means that everyone ( who still use ) ardour all seem to say it works well for them. thatā€™s just survivorship bias at play. for instance, i seen a video of someone on odysee editing drums with ardour and dealing with a 2 second delay when pressing the space bar. that never happened to be, but ive never been in the scenario. Or a bug with the timeline markers name fields not working. again, never happened to me because i dont use them. however, if i was that person, it would be very frustrating to use. just another thing to work around. call yourself lucky if you dont run into bugs in ardour at the rate of others when using ardour, but thats not everyoneā€™s experience. certainly not mine. for the people who do use ardour and dont run into bugs, thats awesome, but it ignores the set of people who dont use ardour anymore because their workflow presented to them too many bugs to work around. its easy to surround yourself with people who also have a good experience in forums like this ( because they happen to have a workflow that didnt present that many bugs , so they stuck around), and ignore the people who arent here ( because they left after having a bad experience with bugs ), telling you that their experience was bad, which leaves you thinking that ardour is less buggy than you think. i think the truth is more nuanced. you should look into survivorship bias. thats exactly whats going on here. for instance, if i left, and stopped voicing my opinons about the bugs, you would have one less voice here telling you how buggy their experience has been. reinforcing this bubble you live in. giving you a false sense that hey, i donā€™t hear many people telling me its buggy, so it must not be!

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#68

yeah i agree, i just wish they decided, hey lets spend the next year or so, knocking out as many bugs reports as possible. i just feel as if many of my reports went un heard ( as with a lot of them i see on mantis ). what is a person supposed to do then? where do they go? idk.

#69

I actually agree with this, which is why it is vitally important that people who care about Ardour take the care and time to talk to us about their workflows and issues. We cannot fix bugs that we donā€™t know about, and we canā€™t fix bugs that we donā€™t have recipes for. The workflows that work best in Ardour are the ones that have had the most input from users, often from one user. If people who work entirely different encounter problems and just give up, the situation will not change - we cannot anticipate all possible workflows, which is why user input is so incredibly important.

Balancing the available developer resources between bug fixing and feature development is always challenging. Iā€™m not sure I even want to claim that I do a particularly good job of it, but at the same time weā€™re not blind to the tradeoffs.

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#70

all of this from me started because i felt as if my bug reports didnā€™t even get a glance, no response in 1 + 2 years. so i went and figured, perhaps i could use AI to fork the project and fix the bugs for me, and i did, and got immediate results. ( even if they are technically garbage code ). i figured, i would at least send in some prā€™s so the code could get reviewed, or perhaps they cold hint at what the issue was, and my bug reports would get some eyes on it. even if my ā€œhelpā€ was misguided, which i realized now. it all stems from the fact that no one seemed to have said anything to my reports on mantis, not even a ā€œwe are aware, and looking into itā€. if that was the case i would have felt like i did my due diligence and would have continued writing more bug reports. but because thatā€™s not what happened, i just stopped using ardour for a while and went to a different hobby like 3d printing. after a while i came back to see none of my reports have been addressed. i understand you guys donā€™t have much man power, i really do. again, my misguided attempt to help with AI was more to hopefully see some progress on those reports. I thought i was helping, and i see now that i wasnt, but i wasnt expected to become vilified by doing this, since i spent my own time and money to test the patches and buy the LLM usage all because i wanted ardour to be better, in a vien attempt to help, bring eyes on my reports and perhaps hint at my workflow issues that i deal with. at least one of the issues i had brought up got fixed by all this ( the region duplication issue i had selection: fix move_time() so duplicate shortcut advances the range by pyrotek45 Ā· Pull Request #1076 Ā· Ardour/ardour Ā· GitHub ). so imho, my efforts had some positive effect. If you want user input, you have to find a way to make their voices feel heard, otherwise no one will want to create bug reports if they feel like no one looks at them.

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#71

I disagree. I think a sampler is a core tool for most electronic producers.

Iā€™m not an electronic music producer, I play real instruments and record themā€¦ I donā€™t make music that requires a sampler. I like to chose my instruments from the plethora of choices I have: Way back when I was using other DAWā€™s the extra bloat made the menus too long out of the box because they crammed all kinds of stuff into it many people (Myself included) donā€™t need or want, and for whatever they do want they have all sorts of instrument plugins to choose from: to each their own. Once they started packing them full of stuff it created a huge problem with everybody asking for ways to uninstall the bloat so we didnā€™t have to have all this stuff in our DAWS we had no use for, then developers made uninstaller/menu cleanersā€¦ and that in and of itself just added more work and more bloat, and all because a few people want instant gratification and a one size fits all solution out of the box and the DAW makers tried to satisfy everyone, which is irrational and impossible since itā€™s all subjective!

Sorry, but it is totally just your opinion. To me Ardour is a DAW, which is first and foremost like a huge soundboard and hard drives instead of a reel to reelā€¦ Musicians bring their instruments and I record them. Musicians have their preferred tools, and I let them use them and I use the ones I prefer, and use the instrumentation I want in my music, not yoursā€¦ and Iā€™m sure so do you, only difference is you are projecting your preferences on everyone else.

The Ardour developers main job/passion is making Ardour itself great and versatile enough you can mold it to your very needs, not serving the EDM community (or any other) specifically! BTW many in your own community may very well not agree with you either, and know that for EDM there are much better options more specifically for what you do, like Ableton and similar.

I remember a time when we didnā€™t have samplers, but we did have DAWā€™s and they were made for recording musicians playing instruments first and foremost, which Ardour does, and I believe was first and foremost made for to begin with. All of the other stuff came to DAWs later, and there has always been this silly argument of what all should be included, and then once included the arguments were if itā€™s any good, and what replacement works betterā€¦ then the big issue became how to get rid of all of the stuff one doesnā€™t want taking up menu space and all that, and no DAW had a facility to uninstall its bloat, nor seamed to care to make and include, and so others made those too and it just caused even more trouble with compatibility both waysā€¦ needing 3 uninstallers to de-bloat Cubaseā€¦

Modularity isnā€™t a bug, itā€™s a feature, and a pretty dangā€™ good one too!

Thereā€™s no such thing as one size fits all, and you use the distro you believe suits you best, but others will tell you you should install Ubuntu Studio or similar, and get a huge pile of instruments and all sorts with it, and then you can spend a bunch of time uninstalling all the crap you donā€™t want and installing the stuff you do, Iā€™d rather skip the first step and shave hours off setting up my working, but you may like it: You do you, but donā€™t tell me I have to do you for reasons you choose!

Whatā€™s worse: You are trying to push your (AIā€™s) sampler you made to suit your own needs, Ardour and all of us users: If the Ardour team agrees to include a sampler, then what makes you think it must be the one you (AI) made? Where is your commitment to maintain it, deal with suggestions and bug fixes, keeping it up to date and all that?

How about making it a plugin like everyone else, and letting the community decide whether they like it or not, and install and use it as they see fit, or do you want to put maintaining it on them instead so you donā€™t have to? If anything you should have just presented it and asked for us to try it first and see what we think, not just tell us what you think we should think and try to convince the Ardour developers to just include it because you say so.

It doesnā€™t work that way! Nothing works that way, and all you have done is make me less likely to try it, because thereā€™s already enough drama in open source because of some developers attitudes which effects their work and itā€™s staying power, and you are off to a bad start in more than one way.

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#72

Letā€™s take a deep breath and relaxā€¦

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#73

Please spare me these horrible responses :sob:. I made it for myself and thought it would be cool to show others and to the devs if they wanted to use it or not. No one is forcing them to do anything. I made it in a way so it wouldnā€™t be forced to go find one, and as a plug that people could use if they wanted.

My argument for having a sampler wasnt just based on the fact that there should be one, but mainly on a sampler thats well integrated into ardour. Which is a point everyone here seems to avoid (see my pics in the pr for more info ). Yeah i get there are other ones, thats awesome. But theyre not as integrated imho, or simple. Yes i get an built in sampler might not be to everyones taste, but thats true for all the features already in ardour! Your own counterpoint can also be used against whats in ardour right now!

Not to mention questions like this dont seem to stop other daws from including samplers either. Somehow they figured out how to clme up with basic features that work as a great default. I think the ardour devs could solve these highly difficult questions too :thinking:. /s

Its a bad point and it shows nobody is actually reading what im saying with the intent on interpreing what im saying in a good light. Its very obvious people here are trying to take everything i say in the worst possible light or worse, pretend im malicious. For anyone else, please stop responding to me about how stupid i am for having an opinion about ardour. God forbid i thinn ardour would be better with a sampler distributed with it. Cheers.

Ive already pulled my prs. Its all good. Now all i ask is to be left alone.

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#74

What you say relies on how you say it, and if you are vague interpretation is all one has, but in your case the way you wrote the OP and subsequent replies it sounds like you are pushing it rather than just suggesting it, and that before you let anyone try it and build an opinion, which is how most open source gets off the ground or not.

We did read everything you said, but obviously we donā€™t all agree, and you are even pushing what we should agree to and trying to nullify others opinions instead of taking them to heart, which is cognitive bias and you being disingenuous, and now you are pulling the ā€œI will punish you for itā€ card by pulling it instead of just agreeing to, and taking the very same rout everyone else follows when introducing new software as I suggested, and let everyone decide for themselves which is all I am asking, and as others most likely agree too.

AFAICT everyone is responding as to how YOU put it, not as falsely interpreted! If you chose the wrong words to get your message across, then you are the only one who can make correction and clarification: Mind reading isnā€™t a thing!

Sorry, but you still show no will to take anything anyone said to heart and just as you came off in the first place (Selfish) you tried to bat every reply down, and now are retreating with the very same selfishness!

No one said your sampler is bad or unwanted, that hasnā€™t even been established yet, and now you just reinforced that you just want to sidestep all that and arenā€™t going to budge, and let people try it as is customary. Thanks for confirming my suspicion! So again, you are not helping yourself nor making a valid case, but just making it all worse, and making yourself look worse by the minute for instead of realizing that no one put your sampler down, they just are not at all familiar with it, and thatā€™ has to come first, and cannot happen if we canā€™t try it! Instead now you are yanking it and asking to be left alone:

Grow up.

1 Like
#75

Ive literally apologized so if anyone should grow up its you. Once agian showing you havent read anything ive said. Ill once agian ask politely to please me alone. If the rest of the ardour community is as rude as you i dont want anything to do with it.

Can someone close this thread? Its not productive at this point.

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#76

I will agree it isnā€™t productive. Closed.

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#77