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.
Most plugins are not just file to drag into the the right place. e.g. LV2s are bundles. Many come with an installer that also deploys presets, etc.
As for LV2 (and AudioUnits on macOS), Ardour does not even know (nor care) where plugins are installed. Ardour uses LV2’s lilblilv (or Apple’s AU SDK) which handles all this behind the scene.
Furthermore one ideally only installs or updates plugins while Ardour is not running (!). This is because updating a plugin while it is in use can cause various issues.
You could also enable “Analyze Exported Audio” checkbox in that dialog…
…and In the Post Export Report window you’ll find a similar button.
or you can use Ardour’s status bar at the top: Show “Path to Session” (if it’s not already visible), and then double click on it to open a File Browser; then navigate to the “export” subfolder there (default export path).
There’s a joke/parable we like to tell about DAWs.
For every user, there’s only about 20 really important features (e.g. for you, mixer undo/redo is among them).
The problem is that no 2 users have the same set of 20 really important features so by the time you form the union of all of them, it’s 2000 or 20000 really important features.
It is almost certainly true that for your actual or imagined workflow, mixer undo/redo is critically important. Rest assured however that there are thousands to hundreds of thousands of DAW users (Ardour or other DAWs) who function quite happily without it.
If you think about it, the overall nature of my comment is simply for more ease of use in the program.
Finding the plugins was not straightforward
Figuring out which ones I needed was the same.
And so on.
Same with global undo.
Now, as a community member, I can actually help to make dealing with plugins easier - this is reasonably straightforward. I even used to have very detailed beginner-friendly tutorials on my website for moviemakers who may want to become linux users (I’m sure it helped exactly 0 people lmao). It covered every issue I ran into setting up my machine and various different workflows.
But the other issue is more difficult.
Making things for other people is not easy, and having to go even further so users can easily interface with the program… it’s a lot of work. Believe me when I say I understand this more so than 99% of other people… with opinions.
Maybe my first comment came off as flippant. I’m sorry; wasn’t meant to be.
I’m not offering to change what we do, but let us know what you think of this prioritization/allocation of resources.
To answer your quote, I do believe a think on how to polish of the interface is due - just to make things that much easier.
“Small things” that add up and help a lot.
You can make presets in the plugin… Sometimes i do that, but for better workflow it would be great undo/redo. Some windows vst’s have a arrow left/right for undo/redo. So you can click it with the mouse manually. You can run this plugins under linux with yabridge or linvst.
On linux plugins, i never saw this arrows. As I said before, I agree that undo/redo would be important for better workflow. But probably only a small part of the ardour community thinks like we do
Hi Paul,
is region-fx removed from the nightlies (Ardour-8.6.506) or was it moved to another menu? I know it was there and could be found in region properties, some weeks ago.