@ThePrep: if you’re new to the command line, there’s really no point in getting into building Ardour. If you really want to, information is available at http://ardour.org/building_ardour3 but I release a new alpha/beta of Ardour 3 at appropriate points (i.e. where things are reasonable stable and/or significant new functionality has appeared). You can just download and try that.
@ThePrep: as I’ve stated on numerous occasions (even further up in this thread), I am not personally interested in Linux “native” VST (I think its a mistake for developers on Linux to be supporting the VST “standard” in this way), so I’m not going to put work into supporting it. I have put a significant amount of work into support Windows/x86 VST on Linux (along with some other brilliant people), but the result is a program that is almost impossible to debug and whose usability depends on the state of Wine which we have no control over. It also tends to lead to unrealistic expectations - “I have all these plugins that I got for Windows, I should just be able to run them on Linux” - which in turn ends up causing frustration and headaches for users.
That said, as Xperienced noted, you can use JACK to route audio and MIDI to/from other JACK clients that do support these things (including FST as a standalone Windows/x86 VST instrument host), and thus keep the mess out of Ardour.
@ThePrep: After reading your posts, I suggest you check out LMMS.
Personally, I don’t like it very much (wine is one of its dependencies), but I think it might just be your cup of tea.
There’s always something for everyone out there. 
And if you miss some functionality you can certainly run it in pair with Ardour…
There are probably tons of more options out there.
Google linux audio, and see what comes up.
Also you can check your distro’s repos for easy installations.
You can browse different categories in your package manager’s GUI (synaptic, software center, PackageKit, Yumex, etc).
Or you could search from command line, to quicken up things (apt-cache search daw for debian-based and yum search daw for fedora-based).
Another option is to do a fresh install of Ubuntu studio or Fedora with the CCRMA repos (or the likes of them)
That way you will have loads of stuff pre-installed, so that you can try things out and make your picks.
Well, got carried away.
Just start by installing LMMS (which is probably in your repos) and see if it fits your needs.
Hi people, been a while since I had time to experiment with Ardour, but I tried the 3.0 branch long ago, when there was just a proof of concept MIDI implementation.
To night I curiously downloaded this snapshot, and got really impressed.
I laid down two very loose tracks in the sofa with a nylon string guitar via my internal laptop mic, and proceeded to fool around with the new gui.
I added a CMT highpass on the rhythm track, and went hmm what does that “Plugin Analysis” thingy do? When i saw the waveform being manipulated in real time I just sat there with a big grin on my face. Thank you all so much for your hard work!
I’ve been using Ardour2 now and then for some years,and will use it a lot more when i get my new sapphire pro 24 to behave properly, and don’t just refuse to start randomly.
Next step will definitely be to upgrade to Ardour 3. But first ill have to play some music!
Developers! don’t forget to have fun some times, you really deserve it.
Until now i wasnt interested enough to worry about this next question but as i was talking to a friend of mine i was sure i could “mix a low cost movie in dolby” with ardour or mixbus but as i come back to the software and the forum i can’t seem to find documentation that indicates how can it be done and how well woud the result be…
so… Paul … my question is quite short and quite annoying i supose: will A3 allow us to mix in dolby or export to a format that could be easily transported to dolby? see… in my country it seems there are no dolby mixing studios, so movie makers here end up sending their projects to Argentina or somewhere else to be mixed and brought back arising a lot the cost for movie making, but could all that be done in Linux? could I do it? what would i need? (aside from the room - monitors etc) - pardon my bad english and thanks in advance for your patience!
@fernesto: dolby is a proprietary format and it is not possible to provide an open source implementation of it. it will not be provided in a3 or in any future version of ardour. there are ways to use an external dolby encoder on a mix created in ardour (or some other app), but the devices that do this are fairly expensive.
@fernesto: also, possibly you meant something more generic like “5.1” or “7.1” or “10.2”. if so, it is possible or likely that some future version of ardour will provide panning for this “format”, but again, we cannot encode it as a dolby-encoded signal.
@paul: thanks a lot for your answer, that actually answers a lot, as you say, future versions of Ardour or Mixbus with multichannel panning support (sort of a XY axis) would be great, after all, even when you would finally have to end with a propietary software on Mac or Win, being able to mix in Ardour or Mixbus would be always appreciated by already users of Ardour/Mixbus interested in this matter. thanks a lot a gain man, great work with ardour.
How can I run the standalone VST’s and VST’s, have Ardour trigger the MIDI notes?
There is a program called “vsthost” you can install that will allow this. It builds on Wine as far as I know, and integrates with JACK - and thus with Ardour. Like anything Wine it is a bit hit-or-miss. I have had a few VST synths freeze up, but most of them work fine.
So far I Alpha 10 is my favorite. I use Ardour + Bristol + Hydrogen and this is the only version that doesnt click when playing Bristol.
The other versions ( 2.12 alpha9, Mixbus 2.03) would make a clicking sound when playing a Synth chord progression.
After I updated Ardour to alpha 10 the sound was gone. Thank you Paul et al. I think the whole interface is easier to use than 2.12.
Really excellent! I’m looking forward to the stable version. But it’s still much fun fun playiing with the alpha. Just one question. How can I create a loop or punch range? In Ardour2 I used to draw the range with the right mouse button.
@the C.L.A.: Thank you.
Im really looking forward to test it on my PPC. … When is the beta to be expected?
@LaKing: if you mean OS X on PPC: i do not plan to release Ardour 3.X for OS X on PPC at all during the beta cycle. Its simply too much work to build and test each beta on another (slow) system. Once we do an official release, I’ll bring out a PPC build as well.
@the prep
you may appreciate A2jmidid -e …
Just tested this version of Ardour. I was using Ardour 2 on a Debian PIV 3.0 GHz system. I intend to use Ardour mainly for audio tracking so few plugs. Nearly all my processing is external analog hardware. Problem is that Ardour 2 works fine on a PIV but Ardour 3 uses several times the amount of DSP. The UI is very jumpy. I do have a quad core i7 system. It has a QuadroFX graphics card. This system is for graphics i.e. I don’t care if it’s noisy. The PIV is totally silent. I want to stick with that for simple audio tracking. Is this not powerful enough for Ardour 3? If so I’m sticking with Ardour 2. I do MIDI in Rosegarden anyway.
@efflux: please join us on IRC to discuss this issue. See http://ardour.org/support for information on how to do that if you do not already know.
OK. I will do so. It’s just I spend so much time on this kind of thing - fixing things reporting bugs etc for other software as well. I end up totally losing patience. I’m actually ready to do some serious music making now and I just want things working.
Just to add here, it turns out my problem is not the PIV, it’s my graphics card. I’ve installed an old Quadro FX 3000 from another old PIV used for graphics. No sluggishness in Ardour 3 UI at all. All desktop stuff flies. I may add a new cooler to the Quadro to silence it although if I can install an Nvidia driver, it will step the fan down.
So Ardour 3 is fine on PIV as long as your graphics card is reasonable. Radeon 9200 doesn’t cut it.
A couple of comments, first and foremost it likely isn’t your graphics card, but rather the driver for it.
Second, if you are in need of a stable platform to do music making on, using alpha or beta software, both of which mean it hasn’t been released yet, is not a good idea. The point of alpha and beta testing is specifically to find the bugs to make it stable, and if you aren’t willing to spend time doing that and reporting them, then chances are you probably shouldn’t be using it yet as it is doubtful it is going to be the stability and quality needed until it is released that most people need out of a DAW.
Seablade