Just downloaded Ardour_64bit-3.4-dgb.tar onto my 64bit Ubuntu 13.04.
I hope that there is somewhere on this forum where installation is explained without expecting prior knowledge.
The double click does not work, the terminal will not navigate to to the folder, (which folder?), The use of the ./install.sh command is not explained.
I need help!
Method using a command line (open a terminal application to get a command line).
Here are the commands to use. Below “$” is the terminal prompt
$ cd
$ tar -xf Ardour_64bit-3.4-dgb.tar
$ cd Ardour_64bit-3.4-dgb
$ ./install.sh (which will ask for you password and install Ardour).
Well, I realize this may be cryptic if you have never used a command line. Possibly in Ubuntu you can find the directory containing Ardour_64bit-3.4-dgb.tar in a file browser and right-click on Ardour_64bit-3.4-dgb.tar which might reveal an option to “untar” the file.
However, I do not use Ubuntu, so I don’t know what file browser options it has.
Thanks, Edward, for your help. I have indeed used a command line, but the one thing I can’t get my head around are tarballs. I’m sure they are perfectly simple to most folk, but they tend to assume that everyone knows the secret.
My terminal does not understand your suggested commands at all. The problem is always the ‘cd’ operation resulting in the dreaded ‘no such folder or or file’.
On the other hand I can easily ‘untar’ to produce Ardour_64bit-3.4-dgb, but how to get my terminal to recognise it?
Thanks again, Laurence
Loz56: the problem for a lot of us old-timers is that tarballs are not a secret. We’ve been using for 20 or 30 years, along with thousands of other technically inclined computer users. You’re just unfamiliar with them (and probably with the concept that they represent. This is, of course, not your fault 
To make the commands that Edward offered work, you need to make sure that the tarball is in your home directory (which is where you will end up after tying just “cd”). Then, Edward made a typing mistake by using “dgb” when be meant to use “dbg”. So the second cd command is actually cd Ardour_64bit-3.4-dbg
Thanks, Paul, operation complete. How can I find out about tarballs?
man tar
(and maybe experiment a bit)
Thanks anahata. That just leaves Jack, a facility so unintuitive that it’s own webpage can’t define it.
Actually jack itself is fairly intuitive, for anyone that has worked as an audio engineer for a while. It is primarily a virtual patchbay, but beyond that it also provides sample accurate transport sync. Jackaudio.org does in fact define what Jack is a bit more accurately, though it does leave out the transport sync aspect of it in this particular paragraph on the front page…
JACK is system for handling real-time, low latency audio (and MIDI). It runs on GNU/Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, OS X and Windows (and can be ported to other POSIX-conformant platforms). It can connect a number of different applications to an audio device, as well as allowing them to share audio between themselves.
Most people will use QJackCTL to control Jack, though Ardour can do it itself, many find it easier to do it with QJackCTL. There are also a variety of other programs out there for it as well.
SeabladeThank you Seablade, but I have not worked as an Audio Engineer. I have previously spent months struggling with QJackCTL and LADI/Gladish and only to produce silence. In the end I installed (Sob!) windows on my computer so I could have a DAW that I could work. Is there anywhere I can find out how to work JACK?
Loz56: from your other posts about installing Ardour it seems clear that you are using a Linux distribution that is not properly configured for realtime low latency audio work. You might have thought that you could just pick any Linux distribution and everything would just work, but that is not the case. Various Linux distributions have different goals, and there are only a few that get their configuration right “out of the box” for what you are trying to do. Any distribution can be made to work, but with the amount of work involved can vary quite a bit.
There are many guides available online about this configuration. Some distributions (such as Arch) even have extensive wiki pages on it that they actively maintain.
If you are new to all this stuff, you probably should focus on distributions such as AVLinux that focus on audio + video workflows and attempt to get all this stuff right “out of the box”.
Thank you Paul. My point is that I want to learn how to handle tarballs and Jack. AVLinux looks horrid and is only 32-bit, the Ardour installation will not record me at the microphone, unlike all others I have tried. Arch looks intriguing but will take some installing.
Loz56: “only 32 bit” is just not an issue for almost anything. The performance gains from 64 bit are small, not large.
Ardour has absolutely nothing to do with your audio hardware. It does not care if you even have any audio hardware. Problems with recording from the mic are related to JACK and ALSA, and typically are caused by oddities with a particular machine’s Intel HDA chipset. For example, my machine has an Intel HDA audio chipset in which the “front” speakers are actually on channels 7 and 8, so any application (like JACK) which asks to deal with every channel can have a hard time getting output to the right place. Similar problems can affect input. You should realize that “unlike all others”, JACK simply assumes that your audio hardware (“soundcard”) is set up correctly. It doesn’t try to be clever and figure out what you want to do. So, if the microphone is not selected for capture, you won’t be able to record anything from it (using JACK). There are other tools that let you change the settings on the soundcard.
Paul, than you for being so patient with me. The reason I was attracted to try Ardour again was that the version in the Ubuntu repository, 1.6something, actually recorded and played back. I am getting info which says that there is a version of Jack for multi core processors. Ardour install says my Jack is version is jackdmp version 1.9.10. Is this right for my AMD twin core?
The version of JACK makes no significant difference to Ardour (though there appear to be still some bugs in JACK2 (your version 1.9.10) related to export). In addition, when using only Ardour (and more generally, when using only serial audio data flow), the parallelization in JACK2 is of no benefit to you. It only helps when you have multiple JACK applications that can run in parallel. Ardour3 has its own internal parallelization, but on a twin core, most people will still want the actual signal processing to be single-threaded to leave the other core free for other tasks.
I just looked into installing Arch. Dear Paul, if I ever said anything unfair about Ardour or Jack, I most humbly take it back.
if you want a distro that is setup pretty much out of the box then look at kx studio.