Other software development projects make this distinction routinely; I think Ardour probably should too.
Many other projects, software and otherwise, do not however, and as a consumer, and as someone in charge of timelines for other projects, I have to keep this in mind when I make my own plans. Thus my advice above, which has to do with far more than just Ardour. I won’t argue whether the goals can be communicated better, or whether they should be, that isn’t why I said what I did above. If Ardour had the money for a public relations person, or marketing department, or anything resembling what many large projects have that never announce a release date until they hit gold master, then I would probably be far more worried about it. In the meantime you are hearing from a single programmer working on a relatively large software project primarily by himself, that would likely rather actually work on programming the software than trying to figure out the best possible marketing strategy.
@eskild: thanks for your support, and I am sorry that OS X development has not been able to be the focus of my work over the last year. The OS X version is important to both myself and others, and you can be sure that it will emerge.
eight months later and I’m still looking forward to Ardour 3. Either there will be a Version for OS X in some years, or in some years I’ll need a new computer anyways, which then I can choose to be Linux. And I’m even more excited how Ardour looks by then
Work is still progressing, but there is a major rewrite happening in the backend that needs to be completed before it can proceed and some major bugs addressed that will obviously benefit all platforms.
I’be been a subscriber for the past year because I wanted to support Ardour in general, and because I wanted it to replace my old Logic Express on my Mac.
I’ve now let that subscription time out, because from an end-user perspective I still have nothing day-to-day usable (not necessarily perfect, just usable).
It saddens me. I’ve followed Ardour for more than 7 years now; I’ve donated money at least twice apart from the one year of monthly donations. But I’m sorry: It doesn’t make sense for me to continue when something that’s been promised for a long time doesn’t materialize.
But best of luck! I’ll keep following and, if the OS X version ever becomes usable, I may donate again.
Still in development, some testing and improvements have happened, but the main focus is on some backend things that will affect all OSes right now, and hopefully address some of the issues on OS X specifically.
Not being a mac user myself, this doesn’t impact me directly (aside from a brief stint with an old powerbook g4 about 4 years ago)… However, I imagine the Ardour income stream could significantly be helped along by a V3 on Mac. If it is in a state where it can be used (i.e. the outstanding bugs aren’t critical)… then it would seem a good idea to make a release, if there are some known issues just make them public. The commercial software houses definitely release new versions that are far from stable.
Short version is that I wouldn’t consider it ready for release based off what I have heard at this point, however more testers are needed, and I just don’t have time right now to do any testing myself sadly. Hopefully in a few months I will be able to help out, but not right now.
You have to direct your questions to paul on that (IRC as usual is probably the best way to ask), sorry. I haven’t had time to do much of anything lately and haven’t been testing anything lately myself.
I’ll keep following and, if the OS X version ever becomes usable, I may donate again.