Coming up soon

Given the enhanced level of financial support this month, I wanted to give people some insight into what’s coming in the near future. Although development efforts have shifted to 3.0, there will be a new release soon in the 2.X series. This will include two significant features: track templates and better, fully open source VST support. Track templates allow you to save the setup of a track or bus and then re-use it again when creating tracks in the same or other sessions. Improvements in VST support come from the work done by Torben Hohn on FST. Many plugins that used to not work or work unreliably will now function correctly. Most significantly, perhaps, Ardour will be able to use the clean-room reverse engineered “Vestige” header that replaces the need for the VST SDK. This will allow binary releases of Ardour with VST support. Work on wrapping the new release up will be delayed a bit by my return to the USA from Berlin, but I hope to get this out within the next 2 weeks.

Good News!

I continue to talk about this great tool around me:
at work, at town, at home :wink:

I’m proud to subscribe

Fanch
48°24’N & 04°29’W

I’m curious to know whether/how VSTs will work in OSX. FST seems to be Wine-dependant, so if Vestige were included in OSX builds, would it only (hah!) support Windows VSTs, or could it support native VSTs without Wine?

Either way, great work :smiley:

We have no plans to support VSTs on OSX. This is a strategic choice based on my observation that the vast majority of the better plugins available in VST format on OS X are also available in AU format. The work involved in hosting VST on OS X is rather substantial, and doesn’t appear to offer user’s much of an improvement over just support AU (which we do already).

Cool, I figured that’d be the case. Better that time’s spent on areas with greater return :slight_smile:

Good news!

Does this mean that x86_64 get VST support now? Sure would be swell to not have to use dssi-host and externally route through jack to use plugins. Does the ‘Vestige’ header compare to the 2.4 or SDK? or 3? anyhew… great news, and thanks a ton!

j.

We have no plans to support VST on x86_64 … this needs a lot of kludgy work to make it work - all win32/x86 VST plugins are written for a 32 bit environment and the VST API contains pointers in structures, which makes it fundamentally broken for mixed 32/64 bit environments. I know that Cakewalk have hacked up a wrapper for win32/x86 VST plugins so that they can be used in their win64 version of Sonar, but frankly, the amount of work involved in doing this compared to the benefit to our user community doesn’t justify starting on this effort (certainly not for me).

Vestige currently “models” the 2.4 SDK.

Even though I’m using Ardour on xubuntu 8.10 x64 I will NOT complain about VST. Ardour is still alive and that’s what matters. X32 machines can still tear through audio processing without the need to go 64bit.

Kudos for making Ardour VST ready in the first place!

I want to clarify my comments about VST support on x86_64 … It needs to be made clear that there is nothing to stop someone using a 32bit build of ardour on an x86_64 system. This can be done, and it will be able to host VST plugins. Its not necessarily easy to build such a thing, but if it becomes available for your distribution, you won’t need to worry about that.

The only thing that is not going to happen is to support VST within a 64-bit build of ardour, and this is caused by the design of the VST API itself. As noted above, its not impossible to hack around the problems (Cakewalk did it, for example), but the work involved isn’t justified by the payback. At least, that’s my feeling on it.

This is fabulous news! Please keep up the astounding work.

There, my 10 bucks for the month made a difference!

:stuck_out_tongue:

Truly, this is great news…

Let’s keep it up!

Great those donations for this month. I hope a big part of it are subsribers and that this is not something for one month…

Subscribe people! :wink:

I think it’s a good decision to make Ardour a bit more useful, also for people who want to use proprietary software like VST. There was also a discussion about improved possibilities for exchanging files between apps like Cubase and Cakewalk and Ardour on IRC. Whether or not this feature will be improved, I think the core idea should be to get more (different) users, so the community will be better capable in keeping ardour financial alive.

For those who are skeptical of the efficacy of the open-source community (and for all of the Mac fanatics who continue to ask me, “why don’t you just use ProTools like the rest of the industry?”), here is proof that open-source delivers. I find it extraordinary that, in the face of a global recession, a small group of people are able to pool their resources and keep a project going not because of an expected financial return but because they want to make the project better. If Digidesign or Steinberg received a voluntary contribution of this size, what is the likelihood either of those companies would be prompted to crank out a new release from their stable branch with major feature additions in a two-week time frame? A round of applause to everyone who decided to help out this month.

At the risk of harping on the subject like a pledge drive volunteer, I want to let the users who are still unsure about subscribing know that honestly, it does feel good when you know that you’re making a difference. Whether or not I pay my cell phone bill has a diminutively marginal effect on the accounting books of a big telecommunications corporation and the quality of its service, but a mere $10 a month makes a huge difference for Ardour.

The changes Paul has proposed will be ground-breaking. This means not only stable VST support (I’ve used the new FST and it’s superb) but also no more labyrinthine connections in the JACK patchbay since all plugins can be hosted within Ardour. More importantly, this will (once distributions and sites like getdeb.net and rpmfind.net catch up) widen the Ardour user base substantially because inexperienced users won’t need to hack their systems to run non-native plugins. Say goodbye to that vestige :wink: of a Windows partition you’ve been using solely for REAPER; it’s time to make the switch. Now, if I’ve sufficiently worked you up into a fervor, please click the Subscribe button on the right.

very, very good news on this rainy San Franciscan day
I will continue to spread the news of Ardour
:slight_smile: