Ardour

[Michael Willis]

Has anybody here used a recent release of Ardour?  I'm using Ardour 4, and 5 has been recently released with some features that seem nice. How does it compare to some of the proprietary options? Seems like Reaper is popular around here. I'm mostly new to using a DAW, I tried some of the open source options about five years ago but wasn't really happy with any of them. Now that Ardour has good midi support, I'm happy with it, but maybe I don't know what I'm missing.

If I remember right, according to the docs, Ardour has better support for arbitrary signal routing (both audio and midi) than even some of the more expensive proprietary DAWs. Like I said, I don't have any experience with them, so I can't really compare. Any opinions?

[Otto Halmén]

I'd love to test it on a real project. I really would. I'm a huge fan of open source. GIMP and LibreOffice are my main apps for images and documents respectively, and learning Blender well enough to be able to ditch After Effects (and possibly iMovie as well) is on my to do list.

But I'm probably not going to.

Frankly, their open source crippleware release model feels wrong. I tried it back when version 3 was out, and the unpaid version didn't let me save plugin settings.

They're asking $45 for the current version with minor updates. I'd rather bring up an extra $15 and get REAPER, a commercial all-purpose DAW. I just wonder why they are compelled to do this, when open source behemoths like Blender and GIMP seem to have made it just fine without anything like it. They probably have valid reasons, but it doesn't exactly give a good first impression.

As a side note, the whole "[...] get the source code and build it yourself. We do not provide assistance with this process and particularly on Windows and OS X this can be challenging [...]" feels kind of un-open source.