Thinking of learning Ardour - some questions

Hello everyone!

I’m looking at Ardour and it looks really good!

At the moment I’m making music with Audacity and a certain commercial sequencer - using Audacity to squash loops into the correct period of time without changing the pitch, and then dropping them into the commercial sequencer to add effects, sequence, and add programmed drums and synths, but it looks like Ardour would allow me to do that all within one program which is WAY more convenient. Also - very interested to see that Ardour can talk to Blender (I’m a Blender professional)

So - here’s the questions…

  1. The demo version cut out periodically after 10 mins - what does that mean exactly? I do want to try before I buy, but what does this mean? Does it mean I have to save and restart every 10 mins?

  2. Can you guys recommend any good soft synths where I can do things like slides and altering parameters via piano roll?

  3. I’m also fond of Beets slicing. Sometimes I do it with melodic samples as well - creating new tunes be re-arranging the notes. How’s Ardour for this?

Thanks everyone!

Mike yogyog Futcher

P.S. Here’s an example of my previous music … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeCGi6NIYLc

hi! :wink:

  1. i cannot really tell you something about the demo restrictions, since there are at least for linux full featured versions of ardour that come with the linux distros, so if you are on linux, you can try ardour that way without any restrictions. but on the other hand, you can purchase the full version of ardour for at least one dollar, which is more than fair.
  2. there are a lot of synths with slide features, one of my favorites is zynaddsubfx.
  3. ardour has a feature called rhythm ferret, which can slice audio regions corresponding to different algorithms. ardour manual rhythm ferret
    hope, i could help you bit. :wink:

For beat slicing you can also use a plugin called Ninjas2: https://github.com/rghvdberg/ninjas2/

You can see it in action in this video I recorded of one of my tunes:

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Thanks for your advice, guys! I get the feeling I should have converted to Ardour ages ago… I’m on Windows by the way.

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“you can purchase the full version of ardour for at least one dollar, which is more than fair.”

come on man lol

What happens with the free/demo version is that everything continues to work forever except that after 10 mins, there’s no audio output anymore. You can ask for 5 more minutes, then 2 more minutes, then 1 more minute ad infinitum. Everything else about the program is identical to a full version that you either (a) get from ardour.org (b) get from somewhere else © build yourself.

@speak nice one, didn’t know about that plugin - does it’s job. some time ago, i tinkered a beatslicer in pure data, because i couldn’t find something useful for linux. these days seem to be gone. :wink:

@ahms maybe i didn’t express myself clearly. i didn’t want to advice anyone only to pay a dollar for a wonderful daw like ardour. what i tried to say, was, that everyone is able to purchase it for a reasonable fair price in regard to it’s own financial situation, since not everyone is a rockefeller (including me). so please don’t get me wrong in this point. :wink:

@yogyog not sure what you mean with slides (maybe portamento?) but here are some of my favorite synths in no particular order.
Helm https://tytel.org/helm/
TAL Noisemaker https://tal-software.com/products/tal-noisemaker
Tyrell N6 https://u-he.com/products/tyrelln6/

There are many many many more good free synths to be found. KVR Audio is a good place to find such plugins.

Have fun!