"We are encouraging people to download Nightlies to see if issues they are having (bugs or un-expected behavior) still exist. The session they open could have been created on a purchased, but not subscribed to, version of Ardour."
That is precisely what happened to me. Paul (rightly), said the nightly version should fix the problem, so I tried it. It may be a corner case, but this is the second time I’ve had to use a nightly build to overcome a bug in 3.5.4xx (one MIDI, one from this thread) and both times I have lost my plugin data, despite the fact I’ve technically done nothing wrong. I simply couldn’t recover my Ardour session in 3.5.4xx, so the only way to move forward with my previous recordings was to sacrifice my plugin settings (6+ hours of work). That’s a very frustrating bug fix method. I am really enjoying Ardour, but if this keeps happening I’m going to have to go back to another DAW, as it’s really crushing my workflow to have to re-do plugin work.
Since 3 days the free/demo versions available from http://nightly.ardour.org/ do no longer affect any session state. Ardour loads, uses and saves plugin settings.
Instead it turns silent after 10mins and shows a dialog which allows to get another 5 minutes… then another 2 1/2 mins and after that every minute (until ardour is restarted). That should more more than adequate for testing & evaluating.
Very likely the official Ardour 4 freebie/demo will do the same, although the time-period (10mins) may change… (e.g. 16/8/4/2/1,… that part needs a bit more research).
What you’re not free to do is to utilize my resources (my time, my webserver, my computer) without helping to support them. The old free/gratis version did not restore/save plugin settings. While this seemed to be a smaller limitation, as the thread above shows, it could easily lead to people losing substantive work when they were checking to see if we had fixed a bug. That wasn’t acceptable, so we changed the limitation of the gratis version. As ever, you are free to avoid the gratis version if you wish to, in a variety of ways.
Nothing has changed other than how the ‘free’ version is evaluated. And the term ‘free’ version is even a bit of a misnomer as anyone could check out the source and compile it themselves, which is what most distributions of Linux do. However my understanding is that the versions from ardour.org get support. So Ardour is ‘free’ in the open source sense of the word, which is what i support personally.
Also to me this is decidedly a better option than risking losing data on existing sessions.
I suspect the time frames may be to short. My suggestion would be to think about things in terms of a typical session length, how long it does to edit and mix a test session for instance, for demonstration purposes. Yes it is much longer of a time period, but I wouldn’t consider that a bad thing in this case personally. Of course everyone has their own opinion.
I will subscribe at a higher level if I’m able to use Ardour successfully in my sound work. I signed up for the low level subscription to try it out. I think it will do the job for me if the problems I’m running into can be solved.
ICoppo: free software includes the freedom to add limitations best example is Apple + Darwin. Anyway Paul said everything that needs to be said and put it very well.
seablade: I dare say you could record an entire 2:10min pop song in 10 + 5 mins, mix it in the same time and master it in yet another 10min. The undo history is kept so re-starting ardour is not that big a deal.
You’d be hard put to find a tune that is > 10 mins these day and that’s what typical session lengths are (except for soundtracks, full live concert recordings or multi-song CD arrangements).
IMHO the better argument is: you can’t really evaluate/demo ardour in 10mins, also checking up some bug-fixes may require more time.
It's not a pb of money, who seriously cares about 10 dollars per month for such a daw ? Its a matter a principle...
Isn't the principle that you should pay someone for their work / time / etc? If you don't feature restrict it in some way there's no incentive to do so - even Reaper has a nag screen / startup delay / nuisance feature / on the free version, and as paul says, you can obtain a fully functional version in several ways which don't require payment, and the ardour source is fully available - something which you can't say about Reaper, and that's not meant as a criticism.
I can't read your comment in any other way than that you don't want to pay for paul's time / resources to build you a fully working copy of the code. as little as $1.00 that's all. You probably expect to be paid for the work you do, and so do software developers - otherwise its very much a 'principle' of what you want should be free, but what you do should be paid for - and that's nothing other than an illogical and misplaced sense of entitlement dressed up in some kind of invented 'moral' stance by way of justification.
There are good reasons to dislike commercial software if it artificially locks you into cynical methods / business practices designed to extract money from you, but that's absolutely not what we're talking about here.
ICoppo: prebuilt windows versions without limitations are available to subscribers only on the nightly.ardour.org web site, mostly as a courtesy to our subscribers who may be interested in using the application on that platform. There will be no windows version available via ardour.org/download until there is a support community in place. So we do not “sell windows binaries” - we provide a service for our subscribers, and nothing more.
Nightly builds are not official builds. There is no support for Windows at this time, and there will be no support for Windows until a group of people (it needs to be at least two, I think) step forward with a coherent and believable plan to provide support for Windows. The existing users and developers of Ardour cannot and will not do this.
best example is Apple + Darwin. Anyway Paul said everything that needs to be said and put it very well.