Portable version for Windows?

Question from end-user level: how much of a hassle would it be to provide a portable version of Ardour for Windows?

I’m currently (and happily!) using Ardour on Linux, but may have to start jumping between a couple of Windows boxes in the near future. Years ago, as a Reaper user, this was not a problem, since it worked great off a USB drive. I do not want to switch back to Reaper at this point, so I’m looking for possible solutions for a portable Ardour on Windows 10.

Thanks for thinking along,
Mart

There’s nothing in particular that we do to make it non-relocatable. What have you tried?

@paul Nothing at this point, because I don’t have a Windows box at the moment. I just vaguely remember (from using the Windows version maybe 2 years ago) having some kind of drawbacks during a simple test (copy the Ardour folder to a public, university library machine and try to launch the program), but now that you reply like this, I’m not really sure any more. :confused:

I guess I should’ve tested first, prior to asking on the forum – not good behaviour! I apologise.

Might also be that, because Ardour is such a complex application, I assumed blindly that It’s probably not going to install without writing to the Windows registry etc – to which I will not have access due to lack of admin rights on one of the Win boxes. I’ll test again soon and report back here.

One caveat with Ardour sessions is that the filenames are case sensitive.

This is not usually an issue, except with some USB thumb drives that use a VFAT file system.

One solution there is to zip up the session first, another is to reformat the drive using ExFAT.

There are problems using LV2 plugins. LV2 (or Ardour?) use symlinks in Linux, so you can’t use them seamlessly in Windows. I stumbled upon this when using LSP plugins in Windows.