Digging up an old discussion. Just for reference (might be interesting to folks around here), I stumbled upon an incredibly detailed article about fading, zero crossing etc. Just, wow.
The Art of Looping, by Chris Meyer and Bill Aspromonte. In: Music Technology, December 1987:
What I love about Ardour:
Where I think Reaper is better:
What I think they both should improve:
I’ve always loved Reaper’s default theme 
I don’t mind the way Ardour looks either, although there is always room for improvement. I think the UI could be a bit slimmer (less cluttered), some of the tool buttons could be replaced with key shortcuts and context awareness, ala Reaper.
I don’t think it’s possible for Reaper to be more extensible than Ardour since Ardour is open source and scriptable. You can literally add new script bindings (even I managed to do this once and I’m no C++ developer).
You can already use PipeWire with Ardour.
Isn’t it already vector based? I think there are some limitations to what can be done with the UI due to the UI toolkit/framework that’s in use.
I don’t think it’s possible for Reaper to be more extensible than Ardour since Ardour is open source and scriptable. You can literally add new script bindings (even I managed to do this once and I’m no C++ developer).
That’s true in a technical sense, but in a practical one, I don’t think any user looking to design a simple script would go deep into Ardour’s source code and develop it there, and then risk having this commit being rejected by Ardour’s developers. What I’m saying is, Ardour should of course remain FOSS, but design a versatile scripting interface with documentation that script developers can readily use.
Ardour does having a scripting interface (it’s a bit ugly and limited though). And there is good documentation in the manual and example scripts.
Ardour’s UI Is already “vector based”. There are no pixmaps/bitmaps/images used for anything. That’s why our UI works without changes on 4k screens as well as tiny ones (tiny ones are a challenge for different reasons).
Reaper’s scriptability is greater than Ardour’s if you want to create new GUI elements, which our Lua scripting does not support. On the other hand, as DHealey points out, all of Ardour is open source and there are zero limits on how it could be extended. Our Lua scripting provides scriptability/extensibility in some areas that Reaper cannot match. A few years ago, I wrote a long post about issues in this area, which I’m not sure you’ve read: Is Open Source a diversion from what users really want?
We have no plans to move to Wayland, because there will be essentially zero benefits to our users from doing so until the day that XWayland stops working, which is far, far away. Would users prefer a benefit-free major engineering effort on Wayland, or improvements to the cue page? The answer is obvious.
Pipewire is not an API, it’s an implementation of (at least) two APIs (JACK and PulseAudio) and Ardour already supports both. Ardour runs fine on Pipewire, to the extent that Pipewire runs fine - the improvements right now need to come from Pipewire (and they are coming).
Not sure where anyone thinks we would get the money to hire “a UX/UI professional”. I’m friendly with Tantacrul (the Musescore/Audacity person you’re referring to), and I have a reasonable idea what Muse Group is paying him.
Re: the cue page, see both Ardour Roadmap and https://ardour.org/clip_differences.html (the latter is important to understand some of the ways we are not “years” behind, the former acknowledging that there are major items to do there - clip recording and editing).
In general, posts like this are not helpful or useful. If Ardour development was not resource limited, perhaps it would be useful to have users provide some sort of high level feedback on the stuff we should direct our massive engineering team to focus on. But it is severely resource constrained, and drive by pieces about what we could improve really just function as noise with a rapid decay time.
Where does the ugliness come from?
What are the limits beyond not being able to create new GUI elements with it?
I meant the interface (as in the scripting window in Ardour) is limited, not what you can achieve via scripting.
It’s also limiting to only have a few buttons in the top corner of the screen to trigger scripts. Although I use a lot of shortcut keys too, but still I’m limited to 32 action scripts. I think a more dynamic approach like Reaper’s action window would be less limiting.
The scripting window is just a black screen, no syntax highlighting, no keyboard shortcuts to run code, no IDE features. Ok I do all my scripting for Ardour in an external IDE, but I still need to copy/paste it into the Ardour window to test it. Maybe a file watcher could work, then there is no need for additional code editing features in Ardour itself and the ugliness isn’t an issue, other than a shortcut key to run (F5 perhaps). It actually reminds me of Kontakt’s scripting window, it’s even more limited than Ardour’s but it does have a file watcher so you never need to work directly in it.
Ah, understood better now. Thanks.
Thanks Paul and others for correcting me on some of the stuff I had wrong (vectorial UI, scripting, cue page development, PipeWire), I stand corrected.
In terms of general Ardour ‘ugliness’ (wrong word because I wouldn’t say it is ugly per se), for me it looks stale and too contrasty at times. I also don’t like the very contrasty arranger window elements, too dark stuff interspersed with too bright lines, separators etc. The buttons also look stale. And there’s some need for UX improvements here and there.
Here are some Reaper themes for comparison:
I mean, don’t get me wrong nor take it personally, Reaper devs also regularly get the fat end of the stick regarding UI and UX 
The amount of comments and posts asking for a vectorial revamp are numbered in the hundreds.
But is Tantacrul really that out of reach? What about other designers? I’m sure there are other, more affordable professionals out there…
It’s not clear to me that you are aware of the different Ardour themes …
BTW, the “ugliness” I was asking about related to DHealey’s comment, not yours.
In general, it is my policy to completely ignore GUI critiques. For every person who says they find Ardour’s GUI to be <insert-negative-adjective-here>, somebody else says they love it, and so there’s not much point considering general aesthetic remarks.
However, for UX it’s a different story. Here, there is a lot of scope for useful suggestions and observations.
The problem with the comparison with Musescore (which Tantacrul has indeed helped improve dramatically) is that while complex, it is an order of magnitude less complex than a DAW. Martin’s general approach with MS has been to really focus on “the most used” aspects of the UI, and hide the rest (not very far) away. This is relatively easy to do when the task at hand is constrained to “create notation”. In the DAW context, you’ve got the massive issue that there’s a different workflow for every 10 users, and coming up with something that is just naturally “right” for everyone is massively harder.
The most common approach to this is to allow users to hide/show many different parts of the UI so that they end up with something “right” for them. Reaper does this to some extent, but I’ve seen lots of complaints from a certain type of user that they find this approach too geeky and creates too much of a burden for them. So … great for some, not so great for others.
There are very few DAWs (other than Garageband) which really pass the UX smell test, because all of them (us!) have to deal with the almost impossible task of balancing exposing functionality and cluttering/overwhelming the interface. GB works because … well, it doesn’t have much functionality. Even with Reaper, there’s a clear fanbase of people who love its dense, context-menu heavy design but also a bunch of people who tried it and just couldn’t (or didn’t want to) deal with it. They’ve already moved on, and don’t spend much time writing up critiques of Reaper.
Over the years, I’ve heard from people who say things like “Logic Pro is just so confusing and ugly to me, and I’ve used it for 10 years, but Ardour is so lovely to use”. But I also hear from people who say “Ardour is a piece of shit and you should embarrased to even be trying to sell it”. So … it is necessary to give up the idea that one DAW can possibly be the DAW for everyone. I’m fine with that. Fortunately, most people have at least a dozen excellent, capable DAWs to choose from, and if it turns out that Ardour doesn’t satisfy their aesthetic sense and/or workflow needs, almost certainly another DAW will.
What I am Interested in is actionable, debatable, ponderable changes that come with a cost/benefit analysis. DHealey already got halfway to providing an example above:
Of course, the cost/benefit analysis is missing there, which needs to grapple with the usual challenge of discoverability versus clutter. By contrast, people who say “be more like ” are (a) missing the point (b) just going to be ignored, because this is not actionable, or debatable and has no cost/benefit analysis.
Eeeegads!
Sooo… Although I’m not over the moon about either Ardour’s UI or Reaper’s default, those themes you’ve linked are hideous (IMHO)… So, now what do the Ardour devs do…?
I think the appearance of Ardour is beautiful and easy to use. It is especially suitable for everyday studio work, which includes recording, editing and mixing. As well as producing, sequencing, songwriting. In other words, all the working stages of modern music production.
Please people please don’t ask the developers to change it to look like some other DAW. This is Ardour one of the best there is. Over time, it will continue to develop, but it’s not worth fixing what works. And I think Repaer is terribly ugly and difficult to use. Of course, everyone uses what they like. I use Ardour and Mixbus 32C. And if they disappear from the world, I’ll move on to making cabinet clocks and candlesticks.
I totally agree. I love the look’n’ feel of Ardour and this is what keeps me using it. I tried to use Reaper several times but the UI is unusable for me. But I know this is a personal preference. Ardour is beautiful :D.
And the dark theme is awesome after some tweaking. There’s one thing missing - to save own presets, export and import via GUI to share presets with others.
Couldn’t agree more. I absolutely love Ardour’s appearance and UI and always have, even before v2.
I’ll go a step further and add that so many features and options are already at hand and a quick look through the (very good) user manual can be all that’s needed.
For example, and I feel embarrassed about this one, I wondered for a long time why [space] always paused playback instead of going back to the point at which playback was started, like Reaper’s default action. A quick flick through the manual recently however brought my attention to the little ‘auto return’ button next to the transport controls top left of the editor. Voila, it was there all along, I just didn’t look up the function in the manual.
Same revelations with things like appearance options (eg. grid transparency), automation modes, stacked region editing, etc.
Don’t know what Paul considers a ‘drive-by’ comment, but I rarely comment on forums, so this should be taken as something positive. I always mention Ardour as a successful FOSS story that knows how to both make money and stay FOSS, and plan on keep doing it. I’ve stated my opinion and have corrected myself on some of it. I still stand that some features need improvement (some of which lies in UX improvement rather than the features themselves). I also still believe that Ardour’s UI and UX need improvement, because as it is right now they look too simplistic and too contrasty (for example, buttons and marker lines, and the colour palette itself is… too basic for me or some colours don’t match?). This improvement can come from a professional, which I’m not, I just state what I feel is right or wrong. Maybe you (Paul) just need to select / design / accept a different default theme?
In any case I currently prefer Reaper, although I’d rather prefer Ardour - but I don’t. Nothing personal, I paid for them both (as well as for BitWig and FL Studio way back). But I’m looking forward to the improvement for the Cue page!
Once again, I am not sure that you are even aware of the existence of nine themes for Ardour?
Okay - Below is a categorized version of the original list, obviously edited with additions for Ardour, cuts for stuff specific to Reaper, etc. I’ll add links to some of the entries when everything is finalized. Please feel free to suggest additions/edits, and thanks for the feedback! Again, if you think there’s a killer feature, or just something your workflow couldn’t survive without, please let me know. (I think we’re good on the “it’s free and open source” part.)
I wasn’t, thanks. Xcolors is the most palatable for my taste, and probably I can make it even more attractive by tweaking it. However, this does not change the look of buttons, sliders and the like, as well as the general UX. For example, I’d make the toolbar contextual based on what the user hovers / clicks / in which page it is in (cue, mix, edit, rec) and thus decrease its size by 1/2, leaving space for other stuff. I’d also make it movable, so I can move it to the side / down or make it floating. I’d also make the different pages detachable, so I can move them to another monitor. Don’t know if this is possible already, maybe I’ll be corrected on this as well.
In any case I’ll try to give this discussion a rest, I am looking forward to future improvements of this good DAW.
It is possible 
Right click the mode switch and you can move the window to another screen.