I don’t understand how this unbelievable software can be free. The more I learn about Ardour the more amazed I become at this fact. And another thing - the people here who develop this product are so helpful and accessible - it just blows me away! I mean, ask a question about a plugin and the person who wrote it answers you. That is unheard of in pay-for-play software. I’ve been using computers since before the IBM PC was introduced (yeah, I’m old as dirt) - a 10 meg hard drive cost thousands of dollars. In all that time I don’t ever remember such attitudes put forth by programmers. So thank you to everybody involved. I’ve donated what I can afford and will do so again as $$ permit.
I agree with pretty much all of your observations, except one…
The official Ardour binary provided and supported by the Ardour developers is not free, to obtain the fully operational version from this site you need to either pay at download or subscribe…
Ardour is left open to being Packaged by Distributions and other means (ie Flatpak) so in that sense you can obtain a free version, but to be clear these 3rd party ‘hackages’ are not endorsed or supported by the Ardour developers…
I wasn’t trying to be a Captain Corrector, it’s been a hot potato topic a few times…
By the way I checked out your Pick website, super cool! You have an impressive list of Artists using them, Once I wear through my last bag of 10 Tortex picks I may be coming your way!
There are free versions of Ardour. The source code is free. You can always build your own “latest version”. The value of something is revealed pretty well by folks who pony up without asking though.
I build Ardour regularly from the source code. I’ve also had a $4/mo subscription so long my Ardour use has probably gotten a bit expensive. I have some instance running 24/7/365 and it’s well worth it.
Except the source code isn’t free. You can only download the tarball that goes silent after ten minutes, unless you have a subscription. Plus a build procedure that’s … probably not doable by anyone coming to the proejct from scratch. (832 packages that need to be cross-compiled for a windows build? lol)
The demo version that goes silent is a pre-compiled binary, not the source code. Subscriptions are encouraged to support the project, but you can obtain a copy of the full version of Ardour for a one-time payment as little as $1.00 without one.
Regarding your comment about building Ardour on Windows, I recommend reading this.
I don’t know about that. I pull from github maybe weekly. No
subscription at all needed and you can certainly build an optimized, no
restrictions version. For other architectures too, if you know what you’re
doing. Never, ever tried the tarball.
