I’ll be honest, I can say with some pride that I was using Ardour since the very early days. Thankfully I primarily worked with either recording my own sounds or using pre-recorded sounds, didn’t ever do much MIDI composition (Only rarely when I had to).
It has been a pleasure to work with it, watch it grow, and support it. I still think of 2.0 as the first ‘big’ release of Ardour, but that took literally years to develop after even the 0.9 releases, and I remember thinking it took such a long time. And then I look back and go, where did the time go, and dang the changes since then have been enormous.
To Paul, Robin, Taybin, and the many others over the years, thank you. The choice and the open source and music ecosystems is much better for it, and I look forward to what the next 20 years will bring.
Bonne fête Ardour, and thanks for the story time . As Loretta and Fatboy say, “We/you’ve come a long way, baby”. Especially, it’s been a long time since I looked at the finance status, and it’s pleasing to see donations at a sustainable level; happier than ever to donate. Thanks for all the work!
Happy Anniversary to Ardour! The story behind its development, that I already know from the interview of Paul with Darwin Grosse (https://artmusictech.libsyn.com/podcast-214-paul-davis-ardour) is really inspiring. Thanks for the continuous effort put into this wonderful piece of software.
I hope to see, sooner or later, the Freesound capability back in the program, it was one of the best things Ardour did in the recent past which is no more available.
Sadly, the issue with Freesound is entirely on their side - they changed the requirements and nature of their authentication/login system in a way that makes it hard for us to conform to.
This was great to read. Ardour has been an incredible blessing to me as someone who always wanted to be able to make music in my own home. For years I was envious of my friends who had Macs with Garageband and Logic Pro in setups I could never dream of affording, so it’s kinda funny that the higher cost of Macs and audio software back then was partly responsible for you starting work on Ardour in the first place.
Nowadays with an audio interface, a USB MIDI-controlled synth and Ardour, I’m finally making stuff I never could’ve dreamed of. The updated handling of MIDI data in the nightly builds has been a total game-changer and made me excited to sit down at my computer to try and make music every day. Congrats on 20 years of stellar work and incredible progress! Here’s to many more!
I was at the age of 19, somewhen late 90ties and I decided to ban Windows from my computer. KDE 1 Beta 4 was just out and it was already quite as good as Windows 95 in terms of usability. I was already trying to make music back then, and I had used something like Cakewalk (probably) as a sequencer for my dad’s Juno 106 synthesizer on Windows 95, but I lost track on all of that, until it slowly came back later and someday I found myself buying an RME Digi card, which was running out of stock and thus affordable, and a Behringer DDX3216, which was also a special offer. After some fruitless early attempts with Broadcast2000 (that was about to become Cinelerra), there was one major game changer to all of this: It was called Ardour. This was in 2006 I think, when I first used it.
Earlier this year I started a full-time career as an audio engineer and video guy. I wouldn’t say I got a reliable income yet. But what I’ve got and what made all of this possible still is Ardour. And still the same old RME driver, as that soundcard is running for 13 years now without any issues. (nowadays with a Yamaha 01V96i attached, the DDX3216 wasn’t that great in the end.)
Even though, live mixing is what I do mostly, Ardour is often times on board. Either as a recorder on my laptop, connected to a digital console via USB, or in editing/mixing live recordings afterwards, after stem-exporting them from a client’s Logic, or scraping the files from some sort of USB storage the console has recorded to.
It is hard to imagine how my story would have gone without your work, Paul! And of course, not to forget, the work of these many contributors. Ardour has undergone an incredible development. And just think of how many recordings it has made possible. All I can say is: Thank you!
My sincere gratitude for Paul and ARDOUR! I’m keeping my band/project working just cause ARDOUR makes me “feel free” to record/edit/mix… “Um feliz aniversário” from Brazil and long live to the project!
Thanks again and again…
Happy 20th and New Year. A great read and I’m glad that you started this and have found other people that share your passion. I have been using Ardour since version 4.7.
Can’t wait to see what the next 20 yrs will be like!
It’s been such a pleasure to watch the project grow and improve! It’s been an absolute pleasure to use (and promote) this fine work for much of that 20 years although all of it is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the herculean amount of work invested by Paul, Robin and those many others. Again a very sincere thanks and happy birthday!
PS,
I had to laugh at the irony of Paul wanting to be a farmer and in a much smaller sense myself as a farmer wanting to be a Linux developer (we both fell short!.. ). @paul many of us are very grateful your considerable gifts stayed in a field of a different type!