I’d like to help ardour any way I can. I used the program exclusively for my debut album and plan to use it on future projects. My idea is this; I’ll post a “Made with Ardour” logo on my website and albums from now on, to garner more interest in the project, as I’ve been touting it’s benefits to friends for the last year, one can only hope that the more people are interested in the software, the more will donate (even if it’s only a small percentage).
Also, I’ve been thinking alot about making complete systems available to people, much in the way apple does, but specifically designed for audio/video/graphic use. Of course A/V Linux and UbuntuStudio are great distros already, so not much work would need to be done in the packaging area, but I think if people could buy a system built to spec with a custom tuned os, completely uniform image (logos on hardware, bootup, login, and start button, as well as using ardour’s gtk theme for the default in gtk and qt apps), and a complete user manual for the whole thing, I have a feeling they would catch on. Think about having a machine that looks/works as slick as a mac which is also completely customisable and would probably be cheaper. A person building systems like this could easily take $100 of the profit from each one and disperse it between the software developers. Alas though, this may be a couple years out of my reach and may in fact never happen. Meanwhile I’ll be helping with the ardour manual an anything else I can.
Any other ideas for marketing the world’s greatest DAW???