Ardour and Money, early 2018 edition

Hi Paul
Reading what you wrote is indeed humbling, and clear.
Your definitely one of the Good Guys.
Well done Paul, I sincerely hope you get the reward
you deserve.

Blessings to you and yours, john

Very happy to see Ardour so successful. I truly wish I were able to maintain my subscription, but being on SSDI only and now having to pay a ridiculous amount for Part B means I have to be super-frugal. Rest assured I will continue to buy individual Ardour updates, though, for as much as I can afford at the time. :slight_smile:

Thank you very much! The Ardour itself is a fantastic professional level tool. Iā€™m very inspired for a long time by your experience making such a great open-source software and also the Ardourā€™s finance itself. I really hope that the time will come when the people will be able to work like they WANT on the projects they LOVE with the great contribution that will be avaliable to the whole humanity. Ardour is one of the first projects making this possible and building the path. My regards and best wishes!

There is no need for any kind of justification for earning money with your work. Ardour is very great. It makes things possible for me, that otherwise would be much more expensive and probably less comfortable. Thank you so much. Please keep it on and donā€™t ever think of retiring. :wink: If I should ever manage to make a living (mostly) by what I really love to do, Ardour will help making it possible. Also, being an Ardour user for about 12 years now, I can say that it has undergone an astounding development!

@paul

In relation to if any obviously great ideas part of the article. I think it may help Ardour and community to have a smaller more regular, (even monthley) report. Possibly not even authored by Paul, but someone involved in development.

I think there is strong evidence that letting users know what is happening, (even if its boring, or just ā€˜more of the sameā€™) it really helps to keep interest alive, and lets us see how things are developing. Iā€™m not talking about spamming the blog, but just once a month would not risk that, and I can only see benefits.

Even if its a change-log style report like: ā€œwhat happened in Ardour development this monthā€. And if nothing happened (which I doubt) then Iā€™m sure there were other projects, or events that were happening within the Ardour team (conferences, personal research etc). It also allows subscribers and donors to see what is happening, and possibly choose to donate more.

Alex - thanks for volunteering to write this. Iā€™ll look forward to see the first article. Let me know if you have any questions.

Question: is the new architecture development on origin/master, or is that the stuff happening on nutempo or some other branch? Maybe all the various nu* branches have different features in progress?
If the new architecture work is on branches, what kind of changes are going into origin/master right now? Some looks like the typical automation fixup from Len Ovens, or new lua scripts, or changes to included plugins. Presumably stuff that wonā€™t depend on any of the re-architected features.

Is that kind of stuff worth rolling up as a news article, or is everyone just wondering how the new 6.0 work is going?

Most current development (certainly the new stuff) is all on branches. The stuff going into master doesnā€™t require the new architectural stuff, although master has already absorbed the splitting up of disk read+write.

I wrote up a recent summary of what is going on with 6.0 right here on community.ardour.org;.Writing down how I personally am getting on stumbling about in the nutempo branch fairly close to pointless. When nutempo lands in master, maybe thereā€™s something to write about there, though I am not sure who is going to do that except me, and if it is me, I wonder if that is really worth my time.

Hey @paul. Iā€™m sorry that you took my suggestion the wrong way. I didnā€™t want to add to your workload. And my suggestion was for short (one paragraph) monthly updates - instead of larger reports.

i donā€™t do a very good job of indicating humor (albeit very mildy sarcastic), so sorry about that. I think the idea is theoretically a good one ā€¦ but in reality there are sometimes period (weā€™re in one now) where even on monthly basis, the report is ā€œworked hard trying to make stuff that used to work work againā€. Not the greatest news ā€¦

Having a look at other hugely successful Free/OSS projects, (Blender, Gnome etc) it looked like small and regular developer updates do translate to better community engagement. Obviously there are Git commits, however not every user reads the Git log, and some may not be able to understand it anyway.

Quite frankly I feel strongly that Free/OSS projects deserve the same level of support as proprietary software, if not more. I feel that one aspect of Free/OSS that is not obvious, is that when buying proprietary software, (which I also do to get jobs done) one does not ā€˜ownā€™ anything that one is paying for, apart from limited access. While Free/OSS a user ā€˜ownsā€™ the software, as they are able to (if they can, or pay another developer) to study, archive, modify, share, or sell.

I canā€™t help think what Ardour could achieve even with a fraction of the funding of other large software companies. This should be possible with the communities support. Imagine what would happen if there were just 5 full time developers?

Ardour already is a professional quality DAW, having professional quality ITB tools especially would extend Ardour into music creation areas.

Yes ITB is currently possible in Ardour, but as the software stands now itā€™s more designed towards multi-track recording.

Having an Ardour that one could easily create movie scores, advanced MIDI sequencing, live-performance etc. would cement its roll in production for years to come. As it stands now, Ardour is an amazing powerhouse of possibilities, which we (users) if we can, support and contribute to.

I know that some areaā€™s of production are not planned for Ardour, (such as live-performance) however such functionality could be added, so an interested user/developer would be able to contribute. Itā€™s up to all of us to take this opportunity to support individuals that are passionate about audio tools, collaborate development, and empower them to do what they are passionate about.

Short and long term it will only improve the software ecosystem.