I’m not sure you’re aware of this and if you like ardour will be used this way… take a look there:
Nexus Consulting: Nexus Consulting hiring Ardour Expert (Remote) in European Union | LinkedIn
I view this development with considerable reservation. I am not at all comfortable with the direction in which things appear to be heading. While I cannot prevent Ardour from being used in certain ways, I also do not feel this is a type of use I would want to actively support.
In my opinion, this direction is concerning — particularly if open-source tools are being leveraged for purposes that conflict with their original spirit and values.
What do others think about this? I’d be very interested to hear different perspectives.
There’s no shame in refusing an ecocidal madness that randomly aims at removing all the fun in actually learning and doing things. Musicians who just want to play music don’t ask AI, they ask a fellow musician. I believe it’s the same with sound engineer, either find one or learn to do what you need. The whole point of free software is to give back power and understanding to the people, this will just do the opposite.
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Hey, maybe this will lead to a few features being contributed. That would make Ardour more flexible with regard to the future of AI, and we as users would all benefit from it. Isn’t that the FOSS philosophy? I think AI will still remain just a tool.
While I personally would not want to listen to AI generated or AI enhanced music - I simply would loose interest very quickly - it enables other creative persons to make music - based on their unique ideas but not having the in-depth knowledge to implement them.
And there is a grey-zone in between.
To be honest I could not care less about the mass through-away music - which ever way it is produced, like it it was through-away music also in earlier days created by session musicians.
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Interesting find.
There is a related pull request Ardour MCP server by zabooma · Pull Request #1060 · Ardour/ardour · GitHub that we’re currently debating if to merge. It allows to ask an LLM to interact with Ardour.
It allows basic prompts like “Mute ardour’s master track and save session”. So far it’s not very impressive, and somewhat limited by the number of tool actions that are exposed, but I expect that may change.
The MCP API is not too different from what Ardour already exposes (OSC remote control, Websocket,…). I can see use-cases e.g. allowing visually impaired people interacting with Ardour.
Also the GPL does not discriminate, if someone wants to use Ardour with an LLM, it’s perfectly in their right. Maybe at some point there will be a new XGPL (like AGPL triggered by tivoization) to prevent LLM use, but those won’t apply to Ardour. Anyway…
I believe that we cannot prevent and resist this by technical means, but should rather focus on educating users. While one can use an LLM/AI, there are very good reasons why you should not.
That being said if you want to toy with it, and don’t want to use any of the commercial / proprietary LLM listed in the PR’s Readme, here’s how you can run it locally with ollama:
## see https://docs.ollama.com/linux to install ollama
ollama serve
ollama pull qwen2.5:7b
python -m venv mcp-bridge
source mcp-bridge/bin/activate
pip install --upgrade ollmcp
ollmcp -u http://localhost:4820/mcp
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