What you tend not to see are large-scale touring bands playing live with plugin synths. This is mostly from fear - that something will crash. There are gazillion of smaller bands performing live with Ableton Live and its own plugins, along with 3rd party engines.

I know of a few Ardour users who are using git to collaborate on sessions. Once you figure out how best to deal with the audio data, it seems quite promising.

The user experience is a different story. That's the result of choices made by Linux distributions, most of which can be avoided by picking the right distribution or by doing some work. The biggest issue is the decision made some years (partly at my suggestion, ironically) to adopt PulseAudio as a desktop sound server (rather than JACK). This situation has been compounded by long-lived bugs in the versions of PulseAudio shipping with distributions that blocked the long-planned ways to tell PulseAudio to give up an audio device for "pro" use.

If you install the right Linux distribution (eg. AVLinux) then I would wager that its about 20 minutes from starting the install to "press the record button", with almost all of that being the distribution installation (it comes with Ardour already installed).

There's nothing to be done about the proliferation of Linux distributions that are not suitable for pro-audio or music creation workflows. It is a natural consequence of Linux' ecosystem that there are many, many distributions, each with different goals. A lot of people expect that "Linux is Linux is Linux", but for audio work, this isn't true. Installing Ubuntu and expecting that tools like Ardour will just work is incorrect and bound to lead to disappointment. It just isn't their target.

Note that Ardour no longer requires JACK on Linux. And this thread is actually about the release of Ardour 5.0, which runs on OS X, Linux and Windows. It seems a bit sad that people just want to talk about the situation on Linux as though that's the only place the program runs.

Yeah, I noticed that, and that's awesome. But, I want to run it on Linux! That's one of the very big selling points of Ardour, for me, and one reason I would pick it over Reaper (on the day when I finally do pick it over Reaper).

I hope I was clear that I'm on your team. I want Ardour to be successful, and I want Linux to be a platform capable of media production. And, when I'm able, Ardour is one of the OSS projects I donate to.

But, maybe I'll try it on Windows sometime. That would certainly solve the VST problems, among several others.

This is a recent list of PT user's most-wanted features.

http://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-page/2016/6/21/which-of...

Every single one of the 7 completed items out of the 20 existed in Ardour for years before they were in ProTools.

We were the first DAW to provide anything-to-anything routing. We were the first DAW to have sub-sample accurate timecode lock. We were the first DAW to have sample-accurate automation. We were the first DAW to allow in-track mixing (transparent regions). We were the first DAW to offer PFL/AFL solo models in addition to solo-in-place. We were the first DAW to offer a dedicated monitor section in addition to the master outs. We were for a very long time the only DAW that could handle multichannel master outs (used, for example, in ambisonics set ups - 40 channel master bus, anyone?).

There are certainly areas where our functionality is behind the current state of one or more other DAWs. That's true for all DAWs. Our MIDI workflow is still weak, but evolving. But the idea that we generally "lag" behind other DAWs is mostly a conception of people who like and use what I term "modern pop production techniques", which has never really been my own personal focus. If there's another DAW out there that works better for you than Ardour, you should use it. But you might also be surprised at how well Ardour works for you, especially if you record people playing instruments.

And as you note, you don't know what the "something that was more sustainable is", whereas I've been doing this for 16 years, and have been through almost every "how to make money with open source" idea that there is. The vast majority don't apply to niche software, even on the odd occasion that they work for some other things.

I've made a living (of some kind) from working on Ardour for nearly 8 years now, and worked on it without need of income for 8 years before that. I think i'm

From the download page it looks like your anchor point is a one-time $45 for unlimited upgrades. This is already fairly cheap for DAW software, but I would be interested to know which of your pricing options actually does generate the most revenue. That would probably give you clues as to how to build a stronger free (gratis) version that doesn't reduce overall value for the user. Subscriptions being popular means you can probably consider paid add-ons and services. User wants to use proprietary plugins? It's added maintenance costs, make them pay for it. One-time purchases being popular means you probably need to pursue sponsorships. Unfortunately I don't know a good way to do this at scale without either A) embedding obnoxious advertising, or B) finding generous corporate benefactors. Everyone obviously wants option B and option A sucks for everybody. Whoever can find the equilibrium in between these will get rich.

I also want to add that I tremendously respect what you're doing and how far you've come, and that I probably would not be a musician if Ardour did not exist :)

Ardour 5.1 will also see support for the Ableton Push 2 device.

Popularity: right now, someone starts a bundle of Ardour obtained from ardour.org roughly once every 4 minutes. There were 10,000 downloads of Ardour 4.7 from ardour.org. We're more like the members of the Fight Club network than we are like the ProTools club: we're everywhere, but you can't see us. Every laptop distributed to the favelas by the Brazilan government comes with Ardour. There are at least 10,000 users of Ardour in each of the USA and Germany alone.

Are we "as popular" as Reaper, Logic or Cubase? Almost certainly not. Are we popular enough? Sure.

that's goddamn great. Keep up the awesome work, this program is a masterpiece

I think you're also not fully informed on the scale of existing plugin development on Linux. Several commercial developers now produce plugins for Linux, and there are some open source ones for many tasks that are actually outstanding. Noise removal/restoration is one particularly weak spot.

Finally, Ardour doesn't run on just Linux. Anyone on OS X or Windows can use the program, along with their full set of VST (Windows) or AU (OS X) plugins on those platforms.

I've demoed a large number of open source or Linux-compatible plugins; with the exception of Pure Data and the Calf Studio plugins, they were uniformly awful. Pure Data is still substantially inferior to Reaktor. Last time I checked, the Calf Studio plugins weren't cross-platform and had considerable shortcomings compared to their proprietary equivalents.

A huge proportion of my bread-and-butter plugins have no Linux equivalent that is even remotely comparable: Kontakt, Vienna Symphonic Library, Omnisphere, Melodyne, Izotope Rx and Ozone, Bias FX, the UAD and Arturia emulations etc.

Producing music on Linux would be an exercise in frustration. The plugins available on Linux compare very badly to the bundled plugins that come with Logic or Cubase, let alone the whole market.

The very best open source plugins are mediocre at best. In many absolutely crucial categories, they are laughably bad - compare Freeverb3 with Vienna MIR or Altiverb, for example.

PureData is a VERY VERY different program from Reaktor, capable of things not possible in Reaktor, but also with a totally different work flow and interaction model. There are many PD users who would absolutely disagree with your characterization.

My point was not to say "The plugin situation on Linux is totally comparable to the one of OS X or Windows", indeed far from it. But your post suggested that there's no signs of life at all there, and this just isn't true.

You also seem very focused on a style of music production that is really built around plugins. This is common today, but far from universal. I know many studio owners in the USA and Europe who use plugins very minimally, because they focus on recording performing musicians.

As I've said many times, if you have a workflow that is tightly bound with platform-specific plugins, you should stay on that platform. With this release of Ardour, people are now free to consider using Ardour on that platform. That is all.

I mean some of them are, but there's no sampler that will painlessly play modern sample packs, no usable pitch correction, nothing a tenth as good at noise reduction / audio restoration as Izotope RX.

Also, maybe a violin is as good as a guitar, but you can't hand a guitarist a violin and expect them to be fine with that. Or vice versa, if you prefer.

I like, use and pay for Ardour, but I also like realism.

But why is there no Izotope on Linux? People gripe at free software developers for "not providing Izotope", when in reality that software represents years of dedicated R&D, something that most people are not willing to pay for (even on platforms other than Linux). The simple reason why Izotope and Kontakt and Melodyne are not available on Linux is not that free software developers haven't written them, it is that the companies that do write them have chosen not to make them available.

I was very fortunate to start Ardour at a time when I did not need the income. Expecting to see world-class plugins like these show up without the involvement of the companies that did the R&D (and/or defined the proprietary file formats in use) is naive.

FWIW, I have talked to Melodyne in the past about adding support for their non-linear data access API, but they have been "unable to come to a consensus about how we could permit this in an open source project".

So for sure, these kinds of plugins are not available on Linux: because their developers have chosen that.

Edit: To be clear that isn't intended as a gripe at Audacity, just at the misrepresentation of Audacity.

The point is this: its up to the user to gain maximum value from their investment. Nobody is going to do that for you.

We (ardour.org) do not (and cannot) support distro-built versions of Ardour.

This leads to 2 errors, one irritating, one that prevents the program from functioning.

Irritating: GTK+ loads the system GTK theme during a call to gtk_init(). If this theme is based on clearlooks but contains declarations unknown to our (older) version of Clearlooks, you get errors.

Blocking: GTK+ loads the system GTK theme during a call to gtk_init(). If the theme file defines a "color theme", then when Ardour defines its own, GTK will block for ever, because of a bug in GTK+2. This doesn't happen if the system GTK theme has no color theme definition.

Those are the two main issues. They cannot be worked around without rebuilding the GTK+ stack so that it cannot or will not load the system GTK theme.

If you've contacted GTK about upstreaming your patches, what was their response? I'd be surprised if they didn't want to.