Why Ardour is the GarageBand of Linux (LogicalArdour talk)

I stated last week in my stem separation thread that I would be doing a talk and demo of LogicalArdour at Ohio Linuxfest in Columbus, Ohio. My talk was called “Why Ardour is the GarageBand of Linux: Elevating Ardour with Lua Scripting”

I did the talk and demo, it went well for the most part, Pipewire behaved itself so my demo didn’t blow up on me and the feedback I got from it was mostly positive.

It’s still a work in progress, but I felt it was in a good enough state to present at a Linux conference.
I am hoping to have this officially released for Ubuntu and Fedora by the end of the year.

Here is the youtube recording of my talk:

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Hi Justin, this is off topic
I have seen your speech at the OLF conference, and have seen some very interesting lua scripts. I downloaded some that are very usefull, like the possibility to view a midi region in Musescore. I am on a manjaro linux os, and only have the appimage version of MuseScore.
Looks like the script cannot find the appimage. Is there a way to make it work anyway?
I would also like to know which script is responsible for the creation of a midi track with MidiArpeggio, MidiStrum and the FluidSynth, with one click as you did on the presentation.

Thanks for a reply.
Jean

Hello Jean,

For your Musescore issue you will need to rename the appimage file to “mscore” then move or copy it to your /usr/bin folder in order for the musescore script to work.

As far as the Session Player (Synth arp and strum) they are actually track templates with presets that are called by newtrack.lua script which presents the menu for creating the different track types. It is also called by Sessiontrack.lua which presents the same menu as newtrack.lua whenever you first start Ardour and are starting a new session. There is also a script called Sessionplayer.lua that changes the instrument plugin for a session player track.

Keep in mind in order for the session player tracks to work properly with audio loops you will need tempo.lua to estimate the tempo of the audio loop as well as key.lua to estimate the key of the audio. You will also need the chords if you don’t already have them.

If you want I can provide the files needed for the Session Player tracks to work when I have a little more time later today. I can share them out via Google Drive and provide instructions on where to put them.

I also have a shell script for Ubuntu that installs everything and puts all the files in the right places. (I was just going to focus on Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora since those are the distros I am most familiar, and I am not against writing scripts for requested distros)

If you want, I can write an install script for Manjaro, but I may need a few days to complete it since this is a hobby project for me.

Forgot to ask and mention, what version of Musescore are you using? As far as I know right now versions 2 and 3 should be able to connect to Ardour via Jack but not version 4. This is so musescore can I connect to whatever synth the midi region is associated with.

I also have my own special appimage that comes with my install script.

Thanks Justin, i have musescrore Version 4 working, but first, because i use Ardour with alsa, i have to go to Window/Audio-Midi Setup, and then stop the alsa service, otherwise nothing can be heard in musescore, or any other applications that uses pulsaudio. That would, at least for me, be a good script, to stop and start the alsa server with one button.
I have the Tempo and Key script, that is working fine to. Tomorrow i will check the templates. Thanks again for your time.
Jean