lmao, your solution to use generic controls doesnt even work with some plugs. zynaddsubfx looks like this whe i try to do that. how is anyone supposed to work with just this?? it doesnt even show me all the parameters…like i said, these plugs can be buggy, and not well integrated. i think you helped me sell my point even more!
this is not something you should expect users to use when their plugs visuals arent working. these are borderline unusable.
You’re missing the fact that I am a user 
And I absolutely understand the idea that it would be nice to have “bells and whistles included”, as it were, without having to find other pieces of software. The problem, as I (and many others) laid out, is that this ties plugin release cycles to Ardour release cycles. What should Ardour do if bundled plugins get updated? Should they do a point release where the only new thing is that plugins are updated?
This now means that the Ardour devs (really 1.5 devs 
) have to spend time not only developing Ardour but monitoring some (curated?) set of plugins for updates. That seems like a bad use of time and resources for a limited dev team. You already have frustration that bugs you have found are not being addressed — do you really want to put more on devs’ plate?
Ardour already includes a few basic plugins:
I think you’re asking for them to include more, but which ones? Who decides what makes the cut? Sure, x42 would be a good candidate for inclusion, but what about LSP? What about SWH? On Debian, I have the following available:
$ aptitude search ~Plv2-plugin
i abgate - LV2 noise gate plugin
i A ardour-lv2-plugins - digital audio workstation - lv2 plugins set
p avldrums.lv2 - Drum Sample Player Plugin
p blop-lv2 - Bandlimited LADSPA Oscillator Plugins ported to LV2
i calf-plugins - Calf Studio Gear - audio effects and sound generators
i dpf-plugins-lv2 - Audio plugin collection from DISTRHO (LV2 plugins)
p dragonfly-reverb - Reverb effect plugins - metapackage
i dragonfly-reverb-lv2 - Reverb effect plugins - LV2 plugins
p drumgizmo - Audio sampler plugin and stand-alone app that simulates a real drum kit
p drumkv1-lv2 - old-school drum-kit sampler - lv2-plugin
i eq10q - LV2 plugins bundle
p fomp - collection of LV2 audio plugins
p guitarix-lv2 - Guitarix - LV2 plugins
p ir.lv2 - LV2 IR reverb
i lsp-plugins-lv2 - LSP (Linux Studio Plugins) audio-plugins (LV2 plugins)
p lv2-examples - LV2 audio plugin specification (example plugins)
p lv2vocoder - LV2 vocoder plugin
p mda-lv2 - Paul Kellett's MDA plugins ported to LV2
p padthv1-lv2 - old-school polyphonic additive synthesizer - LV2 plugin
p samplv1-lv2 - polyphonic sampler synthesizer - LV2 plugin
p setbfree - DSP tonewheel organ
p so-synth-lv2 - Set of synthesizers for the LV2 plugin format
i swh-lv2 - Steve Harris's SWH plugins ported to LV2
p synthv1-lv2 - old-school polyphonic synthesizer - LV2 plugin
i zam-plugins - Collection of LV2, CLAP, VST3, LADSPA, LINUX-VST and JACK plugins
p zynaddsubfx-lv2 - lv2 plugin of zynaddsubfx
Now, tell me which of those should be included by default (and therefore semi-“blessed” by the Ardour devs). Should they go and test all of them? On which systems?
Do you think things will magically improve if Ardour bundles zynaddsubfx? Like, I don’t understand your point here. You are saying (I think) that they should curate a set of plugins that works well. But…works well for whom? In what contexts? On which systems? Who gets to decide this?
That is available. See Bundled plugins section of the manual.
That is a strange assertion. The entire point of plugin standards was to allow 3rd parties to add effects to existing programs. There are literally thousands of 3rd party plugins to choose from.
Calf plugins were known to have problems for the last 10 years. You can find many threads on this forum where experienced users suggested that calf plugins not be used because of problems in the DSP code and inappropriate GUI toolkit usage. It is a shame that the calf project has neither fixed their code problems, nor added warnings to the project web page that they should not be used.
you mis understand me, im not asking them to include more ( if you read my earlier post you would have understood that ). im simply making a point that having these tools is a good idea. see the issue is that, if the devs were to just say, hey we dont wanna work on these things, theres not enough of us. thats completely fine. but my problem is the reason why they say this. because they want to be adding stuff like this is shovelware, or they dont want to force users to use a plug ( even though they also say that users can go out and find their own lmao, which one is it? ) . i think these reasons arent very good.
if they dont wanna work on em, thats fine! i get it. im not telling them to. im arguing that it would make ardour better, not that they should stop what theyre doing right now and work on adding them. the disagreement is on whether or not extra bells and whistles like you say, would benefit ardour and its users. i think it would, they seem to think it would not. this is the core disagreement.
are you trying to be obtuse on purpose? im simply pointing out that your solution isnt very good. BTW, im trying to talk about plugs in the context of effects ( like calf ) , i generally would have used them in the past but dont anymore because they were a pain to use and buggy. kinda like how plugins are a pain to use now and buggy now. weird that is huh.
Ardour is cross-platform; however, the discussion shifted to the inclusion of more built-in plugins on all platforms.
I would hope that most non-programmer music producers would stick to a working set of plugins and DAW versions and only try out new combinations in between clients.
And also keep a backup of Ardour and plugin version if your important client want to revisit the mix 5 years down the line.
while at the same time saying
and (in another thread)
So which is it?
You’re not asking them to include more plugins but want them to include your AI sampler, phaser , chorus, distortions, etc…
The included ACE plugins are good enough for a newbie and more advanced users would probably want to use their own favorite ones anyway.
Youre trying to take what ive said out of context here. Let me clear it up for you. I think ardour should come with extra stuff. Esp samplers and effects would be awesome. In the same token, im asking them to be convinced by what im saying,not to just do what i say because i said it. Thats the clear thing you are missing.
I’ve been respectful thus far, please extend the same courtesy to me
Those are very valid questions given that you are (in this thread and others) asking for more built-in plugins, more effects, etc. Plugins being buggy is a result of code rot and lack of maintenance (or just bad coding in general), which would not be improved by bundling them with Ardour. As has been pointed out elsewhere, Calf is a bad set of plugins to use nowadays — the standard seems to be LSP and X42 (on Linux, at least). There would be no benefit to bundling them with Ardour other than easier discoverability (if it’s hard to package for NixOS, then someone — either Ardour devs or NixOS maintainers — would have to do the work of making it easier) and the clear downside (as we keep saying repeatedly) is that it would tie plugin updates to DAW updates. That is a bad system, period.
Think of it this way. On most GNU/Linux systems (including NixOS, I believe), we have shared library packages. That is, we don’t bundle 10 copies of the ALSA libraries — rather, we install a separate package that handles the library itself and tell other packages to depend upon that one. Plugins function more like these shared library packages than like full-blown applications — they should be shared between different DAWs and we shouldn’t have 3 copies of them lying around, one per DAW. Not only is that a recipe for bugs, it means that Ardour devs would have to track plugin updates and include them. This would have to be replicated across every DAW that did this. You have therefore created more work for the devs just so that you don’t have to do a bit of research to figure out the best plugins for your usecase. Not only that, you might still have to do that research because the included ones don’t fit your usecase.
So now, not only have you created more work for the devs, but you might not actually have saved yourself any time/effort at all.
For someone who claims to not be asking the Ardour developers to include more plugins you surely are making it abundantly clear that you really, really think they should…
Yeah, a lot of this is coming from the fact that apparently NixOS doesn’t make it easy to install very common plugins. That’s a NixOS problem, not an Ardour problem.
@pyrotek45 I would really, really consider using a different distro for music production if installing and dealing with plugins is that hard on NixOS. That is what I would do if I were in your place. What you keep suggesting (seemingly without actually considering the downsides we keep pointing out) is not only out of scope, but also a bad idea. It’s one of the things that makes Windows a nightmare to deal with (no real concept of shared libraries between applications, meaning that each program independently has to track dependency updates). We have a good (sorry, great) system in Linux to handle components that should be shared (like plugins!), and we should keep using it.
I would point out that including LSP plugins would probably be a very bad idea for Ardour. Not only is development still occurring fairly rapidly on the plugins, I would consider them as plugins for expert users. They offer a lot of flexibility, but expose that flexibility and expect the user to know what to do with all the options exposed. I would not suggest those for a beginning user, and presumably plugins bundled with Ardour are expected to be both useful and not overwhelming to a beginning user.
Okay, at least looking at the package list, there are a bunch of LV2 plugin pacakges available in NixOS. So then the question becomes: which one(s) should I use? And like…try them out! Experiment! Figure out what works for your usecase!
This whole thread makes no sense now. I’m sure it’s hard to get plugins not packaged for NixOS working within NixOS, but that’s on NixOS to figure out. A lot of the common ones are packaged within NixOS, meaning the original thing I thought was true actually…isn’t. LSP and X42 are both available within NixOS. If those are broken, you should submit bugs to the package maintainers.
@pyrotek45 Asking for these to be included by default is not going to happen for a number of reasons that we have all laid out. On top of that, a ton of plugins are packaged for NixOS, meaning you have a bunch of plugins to play around with that should "Just Work"™. If they don’t, submit bugs to the package maintainers.
Many people here are arguing with a ghost. My whole opinion is that i think ardour would be better if it shipped with some basic suite of effects. This isnt the same thing as me telling the devs what to do. I gdt it, theyre a skeleton crew essentially. I doubt they have time to design and add a bunch of effects. But that doesnt change my mind. Regardless of whether the devs can do it or not, i still hold the belief that having more built in tools, simple ones albeit, is overall a good thing.
The whole nixos is not even the main point of my argument, and it never was. Thats a small point you latched onto and made bigger. Ive already made it clear that ive been able to get many plugs working on nixos. But ig you ignore everything i say. The issues with 3rd party plugs aren’t just about what distro a person is using.but how buggy they can be. Plus i just dont like many of them. There are many cons to pnly having 3rd party plugs imho. Portability is one of them.
Agian, me asking the devs to recosider their stance on bundled tools is not the same as telling them to do whatever i say. Btw the sampler, in the other thread was made for my personal biuld. If you had read my words carefully, you would have realized that. I simply wanted to say that i think a sampler bundled with ardour would be really cool and if they wanted to use the code from my biuld they could. Not that they have to. This isnt a contradicting position btw. Agian, you guys are so focued on trying to win a debate or something, without reading what i say carefully. Im pretty bad at getting my point across but come on.
It is. It’s called the ACE plugins…
On your sampler thread you complain that you can’t run Ardour for more than 5 minutes without finding a bug, so why do you think more bundled plugins would be bug free?
Also, if you don’t like many of the 3rd party plugins how do you know you’d like the extra ones Ardour would presumably ship if you got your wishes granted?
Hand on heart; in how many of your current projects are you using ACE plugins exclusively, where there is one available?
you really dont read do you. my opinion is that more tools like effects and yes, a sampler, would be better overall. disagree. oh well. thats how i feel. do i think that should happen right now or at all, no. not really. has it ever occured to you people can have a nuanced position like that? i can want more bells and whistles and still be aware that its unlikely to happen, and even understanding that there isnt enough manpower to make it happen. you get that right?? idk im starting to doubt that you read everything i say. and yeah, im pretty sure all of my tracks that ive used ardour has a few x42 plugs. every track uses the digital peak limiter. i like that one a lot. again, stop pretending like i have these wishes lmao. yeah i think ardour would be cool with some more built in effects, but yeah i get thats not likely due to the nature of the project. lmao, thats not a contradiction! i can want my president to not be stupid but doesnt mean i cant do anything about it or think anythings going to change soon.
but, if im just spit balling here, i would personally like to see just a hand full of effects. like ive already mentioned before btw, ig you didnt read that part either, but ill say it again. stuff like phasers, delays, reverbs, choruses, distortions would suite my fancy. but again, be spit balling isnt the same as me demanding lmao.
The x42-plugins are 3rd party!
I was asking about which and how many of the bundled ACE plugins you use on a regular basis.
ACE Delay and ACE Reverb are bundled; how often do you use them?
Or the ACE Compressor? Or the ACE EQ?
im done, you can leave me alone now.
I’ll leave this here for now, this is a topic that believe it or not has been discussed to death several times over the years, either here or in IRC (I think more often in IRC).
There are several issues with including a ‘basic set of plugins’.
First and foremost is developer time. The majority of development of Ardour comes from two very specific people. Those people have focused on developing Ardour itself, in part because third party plugins exist, and can fill the hole and need.
The fact or not of it being difficult to install the third party plugins is really outside the scope of Ardour, as it depends on the platform, the packaging and the distribution of the plugins themselves. Ie. On Mac and Windows you have some plugins that are easy to install, because they package themselves in nice installers that take care of all the work for you, but you also have some plugins that users struggle to install because you need to manually place them in the correct locations, and for instance many newcomers especially have no idea that /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins exists on Mac (Going off memory for the location, may not be correct). The same is true on Linux really, the difference is on Linux plugin developers depend on the package distribution system of the platform to distribute the plugins rather than package it themselves, for lots of reasons outside the scope of this comment, but they could package it themselves as well and in fact there are a few (Particularly commercial) that do.
Second thing is developer skill set. Despite what I said above, Ardour is NOT developed by JUST two developers. Even so, there is a large difference between developers that can submit code to Ardour, and those that can write and maintain proper DSP code. So amongst the tiny fraction of people that use Ardour, is an even tinier fraction of people that can write code and help with it’s development, and amongst that is an even tinier fraction of people that can code audio DSP correctly.
Third thing is maintenance. Even if Ardour was to include a set of plugins in its distribution, first who picks what plugins are acceptable for inclusion? This could be a large list of potential plugins, each person has a different ‘need’ and ‘idea’ of what should be included. Should a chorus be included? Maybe, but what about Flanger or Phaser? What about more specialized, dynamic EQs, noise reduction, etc.? And maybe multiple EQs, compressors, etc. The answer will vary depending on who you ask. So are all of them included? Even if that were possible, the list would grow long and become overwhelming for the first time user to find something that does what they truly want. So who picks this?
Even beyond who picks the list, who maintains it? For instance years back, there were people commenting that the Calf plugins should just be included in Ardour (This is 10+ years ago at least). I was even one of them (Again remember this was a LONG time ago and Calf was being actively maintained), as I teach introductory audio mixing at a local uni, and want to make sure my students have a good set of tools to begin mixing with and explore the basics. Ok… so what happens when we hit a situation like we have in the past decade or so, Calf is no longer maintained, and even due to how it is programmed is just flat out not working. Now we are back to our developer time issue above.
Part of the reason ACE plugins exist right now is because a specific person has agreed to maintain them (Not one of the two primary developers by the way). That person still has limited time available, but has maintained the plugin suite specifically for Ardour to avoid the issues before, and had a proven track record of maintaining plugins like this long before they agreed to do it for Ardour. This isn’t something that someone can jump out of the woodwork to agree to do because the last thing anyone would want is ‘This plugin included with Ardour crashes my session’ and if someone tries to maintain them that doesn’t have the skill set, or the commitment, that all falls back on the developers of Ardour again.
Now I will not disagree, it is nice to have the ace plugins installed by default. But considering I teach introductory mixing, this is a problem I run into a lot, and honestly I collect a collection of plugins and tell my students to download and install them instead. This solves the issue in the way it was intended, by allowing third parties to come in and fill the hole, it also teaches my students about plugin management and installation, so that they can find additional plugins on their own and install them as well. And believe it or not, this seems to work well enough,
Do I think the ACE plugin suite COULD be expanded? Yes. Do I have the time, knowledge and skill set to do so myself? Nope not at all, I can code but I cannot write DSP and in fact really don’t understand the math behind it much as I never took calculus and most modern DSP seems to depend on calculus (It can be done without calculus, but that seems to be the rarity). Which means I am grateful to the people that do develop plugins, particularly open source plugins, for the time and energy they put into it. I have considered using some toolkits that make it easier to build a basic set of tools (HISE for instance) but I have not had time to develop that. So again, grateful to those plugin developers that choose to do so, and particularly to those that release the code for the plugin to the world for others to use and help maintain as well, though as we have already seen with Calf, this is not a guarantee that the plugin will in fact be maintained.
And lol this doesn’t even touch on the quality of the DSP code in Calf for the record which is why even then I gave up on packaging it because it was obvious that wouldn’t be improved. 
Seablade
EDIT: Important Spelling (See comments below)