Hi all,
new to the forum.
I was wondering, to populate “missing” concepts in Ardour documentation,
what other DAW is Ardour envisioned to be conceptually similar?
Say I have a reference manual for another DAW I would like to use in combination with the Ardour manual, would I be better using Pro Tools manual or Logic manual.
I’m talking about general workflow concepts, not details and features.
Welcome!
All of them, which applies to all other DAWs as well. 
The concepts of recording and mixing have not changed since a very long time.
In the modern digital world Ardour equally pioneered as many features as it catches up to.
Keep in mind that the Ardour manual is a reference manual. General workflow concepts don’t belong in there. The tutorial would be a good place for those though.
IMHO Pyramix v12 manual is very well organized. But’s also a DAW reference manual, not a lot of concepts in there.
The edit view seems to give a hybrid of Logic/Pro Tools type of vibe. Where the Cue view (clip launching) gives a more Ableton like vibe.
I love the Cue.
Thanks to all devs out there. It’s a heaven’s sent.
By the way, I built 8.11 on Fedora, and this thing is picking up pace.
Totally usable. Considering either subscribing, or developing stuff.
I’d like to see, and this is what I’m missing in ALL the software except Logic (and Ableton, but we’re talking nix here) => realtime quantize.
Essentially, MIDI options in context menu for MIDI region/clips should also be a strip in the Edit view.
I’m also using REAPER, but I don’t want Ardour to become that. REAPER is a little bit self-absorbent, if not the greatest thing that happened to nix world in a long time. Closed source tho.
Ardour has a philosophy and discipline and mantraistic approach. Feeling it.
By the way, another contester in the nix world is Fairlight’s DaVinci… Audio only I think, but it seems they got their head straight.
If you want to learn about Ardour philosophy, I would recommend podcasts featuring @paul talk about it.
2018, interview by the late Darwin Grosse, who worked at Cycling 74, which is today mostly known as max4live:
Here, from 2021. Funny pairing with Pete Brown from Microsoft (Who is advocating for the audio community at M$ and partially responsible for the new, open source, midi system. I still hate windows for all the ads and history. Pete seems nice though)
Paul also made his own podcast, him interviewing folks such as Justin Franklin, the father of REAPER. But I can’t find that rn. Maybe someone else can post a link
And as stated by @x42 , tutorials are for the flow questions. There is a lot on the Ardour YouTube channel.
I know a lot of concepts for DAWs haven’t changed.
But there is something in writing multi-layered documentation.
Sometimes, even a reference manual teaches you how to do things in general. Not really “in general” but in the spirit of the application.
It’s about order, phrasing, and general organization. I’m not so much a video person, more of a written word person.
Say what you want about Windows, their documentation folks are probably the greates experts in explaining things on multiple levels. I learned a lot from .hlp files and WinHlp viewer. Just reading intros.
Why wouldn’t a reference manual include some common concepts in “side-box” fashion… I believe there is no purely “technical” manual without adding some context, just like there is no truth without an artistic take on things.
If one were to write a purely technical manual, let’s just dump circuit schemes on folks, and expect them to get how the device works.
Actually, since Ableton Live came along (around the same time Ardour did), a bunch of concepts have changed quite a lot.
The problem with “general principles” is that a lot depends on workflow. Movie post-production, podcasting, in-the-box groove-centric composition, single performer recording, large ensemble recording, mastering … and lots more … all involve very different workflows, and thus the subset of “common DAW concepts” that are relevant to the workflow will vary significantly.
The common DAW concepts didn’t change. That’s why [TAB] switches from clip to arrangement.
Ableton just avoids the common concepts in favor of their commercialisation.
That’s why I switched to Linux, Reaper and Ardour.
I don’t want to avoid these concepts, just so I could have a DAW acting like a performer’s tool.
Kudos to Ableton team, but I’d rather make my own DAW in Pure Data, than succumb to whatever’s hip. I get the philosophy that clip is a track is a patch is a preset is a loop is a range is a region, and it’s really cool.
Creating an instrument out of a DAW is just making tools toys.
“Clips” didn’t exist pre-Live. Ableton invented the entire concept (which they call “Session View”). The linear timeline model has now been challenged by Live and Bitwig, and rejected by “leftfield” tools like FL Studio. Similarly “elastic audio” didn’t exist pre-Live either.
The founders of Ableton did not originally have any commercial agenda at all. One was a PhD student working on electronic music composition, two of them performed electronic music live and wanted a tool to realize the way they wanted to work, which existing DAWs could not do.
Also, they did in fact make the original version of Live using Max/MSP (a cousin of Pure Data). They concluded it was not capable of being expanded beyong a prototype.
Bitwig exists because some people at Ableton felt the same way as you, and left to do it over. It is available natively for Linux and is an incredible tool.
I find this attitude puzzling. Ableton’s UX/UI hasn’t changed significantly in the 20+ years it’s been around. That’s as anti-hip as it gets.
Of course, if anything that exists for less than, let’s say, 50 years is automatically hip, then I have a long list of hip things for you. MIDI, for starters