Ardour and Reaper lead devs have a chat

In early January 2022, Paul Davis of the Ardour DAW project and Justin Frankel of the Reaper DAW project sat down to talk about their years working on audio software, and many related topics.

(Paul notes: this is the first time I’ve tried this, and I hope to get better as an interviewer as we go along. Thanks to Justin for putting up with my somewhat clunky style on this initial attempt.)

You can listen here:

http://adc.equalarea.com/2022/02/07/adc1/

The conversation was recorded in Reaper (using Ninjam Voice Chat mode) and edited in Ardour 7.

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Listening now, haven’t lost me yet… Paul you are doing a tremendous job of interviewing and loving the insights!

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Absolutely priceless conversation. Thanks Paul!

Thrilled to see this! (Will listen on the commute home from work)

Edit:

  • Ahem - any chance that you could make this a podcast @paul ? Would make it easier to spread around to interested friends, and make sure they’d listen.

Thanks Paul, you had a brilliant idea…
I’m halfway into the conversation, really interesting, especially the point of view involving open source development.

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I just finished listen to it, and it was very interesting! This nerdy types of conversations are cool. :slight_smile:

There is a download link at the player’s menu at the right.

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Cheers!
I missed that the first time, but found it now :slight_smile:
Only halfway in, and by no means a programmet - but still very interesting conversation to listen to.

Thanks for this interview! It was very interesting. I love hearing behind the scenes stories and have especially been wanting to hear more about both Ardour and Reaper devs for a long time.

One suggestion: the voice levels were quite different, requiring my hand on the volume knob while listening during my commute. Balancing the levels a bit more would be great.

Nevertheless, looking forward to future interviews.

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Halfway through it so far. Very interesting. You might have a new career as Podcaster ahead of you :wink:
Talking about getting the little finger and eating the arm…Can we place interview requests? (*cough Ton Roosendaal, Brian Crabtree, Andrew Belt, Stéphane Letz, Miller Puquette, James McCartney…*cough)

Please Paul, could you consider the idea to transcript, or include subtitles with your interview?

I’m part of many, many people who don’t speak natively the same language as yours and have great difficulties to understand spoken English (very different problem than written English, for that it exists a lot of facilities and translation tools).

I perfectly understand the fact that you live in a English-centric country, but just think one second about all those who don’t have this chance…

When you born and grow in a foreign country where nobody speaks English around you, you cannot get accustomed to the “music” of a language, with the immense variety of accents and pronunciations which can render some words or phrases totally incomprehensible.

There is some software that can auto convert speech to text - this is built in to Kdenlive, might be nice if it could be added to Ardour :wink:

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Uh, are there some projects together coming up?

Is it possible to create a SSL certificate for this page? Many warnings …

As you’ve mentioned in your talk, the VCV Rack guy would be a nice guest for an interview. I actually experienced the very same thing in VCV, lowering usage of cores made it work well.

VCV Rack is really good to have, it’s basically like PureData’s audio processing for stupid people like me.

I don’t find the audio of your talk overly well-balanced, I’m afraid. Just before you mentioned VCV Rack, this recording made me think of an auto mic mixer implementation in VCV and plug it into Ardour via Jack. (For those curious, the algorithm isn’t that complex… I found a description on Yamaha’s website https://jp.yamaha.com/files/download/other_assets/7/329527/Automixer_WhitePaper_en.pdf)

I think this conversation is very interesting for audio programming nerds.

I’m wondering what a counterpart for “normal“ users could look/sound like. It might be a good marketing thing to do something like that, but also a lot more work.

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