Hey, Paul here. I’ve become a little concerned that the public impression of Ardour recently has been dominated by cases of entirely valid bug reports that go unnoticed and unresolved. Someone who is not quite connected to our development process might understandably get the sense that we’ve stopped working on the software.
This is absolutely not the case. Instead, what has been going on is that for the last several months, both myself and @x42 have been involved in work that has no immediate payoff for Ardour but we believe has long term significance. This has been going on in several development “branches”, and below I’ll go over these branches and what we’re up to:
“Pianorule” : this branch contains a massive refactoring and rearrangement of code so that we can implement MIDI editing anywhere we feel like it, without duplicating code. This is primarily focused on providing a MIDI editor for the cue (“clip”) page, but may later make it feasible to add a standalone “piano roll editor”. This branch is currently stuck because the changes have exposed that the (hidden) assumption that the left edge of the editor track canvas is zero on the timeline has turned into a much more pervasive part of our code than was ever intended.
“cliprec” : this branch is rather young but is a test bed for ideas about how to do clip recording in Ardour. This is surprisingly hard to do correctly, mostly because of assumptions and decisions that go back to the early 2000s. We have some good ideas though, and I’m optimistic that the experiments going on will land successfully.
a “new” DAW focused on front-of-house operations : this is where @paul has been focused for much of the last month, and is a resuscitation of the ideas behind Waves Tracks Live, a commercial GPL’ed product from about 2015 that was based on Ardour. There is a vague idea that this will become an additional DAW available from both ardour.org and also from other commercial partners. The main idea for WTL is that is a “front-of-house” recording tool for live sound engineers. It has no plugin support, no MIDI support, and is massively simpler to use than Ardour. It also has a clever trick to help with so-called virtual soundchecks, where you use a recording of a previous live gig to do most of the work for a soundcheck at the current one.
“mode-clamping” : this is where experiments with adding ideas orbiting the concept of “this thing has a scale” are happening. This is much more complex than most people imagine when they voice their desire to “tell Ardour what scale I’m using”. Lots and lots of music from all over the world doesn’t work with scales in a simplistic way (even a lot of western pop). Currently the most promising idea is a heirarchy of objects that can each have their own scale, starting at the session level and going all the way down to individual regions. If a scale is not assigned, an object inherits one from its parent (ultimately the session).
“region-fx” : @x42 has been busy with adding per-region plugins in this branch, and it is currently being tested/evaluated by some of our early beta-testers.
On top of all this, both myself and @x42 were quite involved in the work done on Ardour to provide support for Dolby Atmos now present in Harrison Mixbus 10. Sadly because Atmos is proprietary technology, Ardour itself cannot use this work at present. Nevertheless, we designed things so that should somebody create something broadly equivalent that is GPL compatible, it would be relatively easy to make it work with Ardour.
So, that’s what’s going on in the background. All this stuff does tend to mean that most new bug reports are not being attended to, and many already-known bugs too. Obviously if we had a larger development group, we could be doing both types of things, but we don’t, and so we aren’t. I’m not offering to change what we do, but let us know what you think of this prioritization/allocation of resources.
I know how resource constrained you guys are but the apparent lack of progress in fixing bugs was a bit concerning.
The launch of Mixbus 10 was a bit of an “aha” moment for me. Hopefully, now that is launched, there will be more time for these branches. I wish I had the time or skills to help.
Some of these developments sound really promising, especially (for me) pianorule and cliprec. I hope you manage to get unstuck soon.
There was talk about giving Ardour the ability to do “Live Looping” where you can record into a clip on the fly. (It would work great with the new Launchpad support.) Is that what “cliprec” cover?
It’s great to hear about all the branches. I guess it’s really hard to prioritize. Personally, I’m excited about the “livetrax” plans. Tracks Live was such a great tool. Recording the whole live show as a multitrack in 2 or 3 mouse clicks just is phantastic. Nothing to worry, no caveats: It just, plain and simple, worked.
Ooo! I’m looking forward to that one! I presently have a full version of Ardour that will probably only ever do that, in a new digital rig that directly replaced an analog one that had an Alesis HD24 in its insert loops.
@paul , @x42 Thank you so much for your great work, Ardour is truly a fabulous tool.
The Region fx feature makes it even better for mastering several tracks as a set, e.g for album, ep, soundtrack etc
The live version is gonna be so useful as well.
Let hope Linux drivers become available for stage boxes before too long
region-fx could be useful as a method of applying custom plugins per song, when mastering a complete album.
I’ve never found a workflow for mastering a whole album that doesn’t get fiddly with automation to change adjust per song, or just end up with too many copies of plugins. thankfully, I usually am not mastering more than a 4 track EP at a time… (Although album work is a more interesting challenge )
Happy to do a bit of beta testing, but as I’m about to re-locate including setting up a new studio, that could be patchy for a couple of months.
Aside from checking out the correct branch and compiling, do you have any guidelines for beta testers, or is feedback all managed via the bug-tracker?
I’m a new user to ardour but I really put it through it paces during my last mini-movie project, so i got to learn from Zero to Hero what’s weird, what works, and so on.
Excellent program so far, to be honest. Really works well.
But I do believe there are 2 major issues with ardour.
The inability to undo changes when using plugins and in the mix buses. I did read somewhere else on the forum that to fix this would require major rewrites, so I can imagine this isn’t something that will be fixed anytime soon. But it is an issue and it is really unusual for a program all about artistic experimentation to hamper small adjustments and a way to easily reverse those adjustments. I use a lot of programs, from compositing software to coding itself, and every single one allows the user to undo changes. So, I’d consider this a severe issue.
Now, the second issue. This one should be an easy fix, though I found it to be very painful.
Installing Plugins
There’s a folder you can put all the LV2 Plugins inside. I don’t know where it is, or how i get there, and I always forget.
It would be perfect if the path to the plugins had a button that simply opened the path on my system because then I could simply drag ‘n’ drop my downloaded plugins into the path. Easy.
You’ve actually done this already in the Export menu. There’s an “open folder” button which is sooooo nice and convenient. I just export, and when i forget where it’s exported, I go back and press the “open folder” button and I can use my files as I need to. In my case, it’s dragging those files into my NLE, or editing software, and continuing my video project now that I have mixed sound.
Thanks!
“region-fx”