An Ecology Of Ardour

"This article is a brief report on some of the current news and activities going on in the world of Ardour, Paul Davis's superb open-source digital audio workstation (DAW). What began as a labor of love has become one of the most significant projects in the world of Linux audio and in the more general world of Linux applications development. Its importance reaches beyond its status with recording musicians by supplying an open-source realization of software on the order of professional-quality (and typically closed-source) commercial products. Designing an audio/MIDI sequencer with fully professional capabilities is a non-trivial task, but thanks to the efforts of Ardour's development team future programmers will be able to access Ardour's freely available codebase to extend the DAW itself or to develop new projects based on its many innovative software resources.

"Like the many projects, Ardour is developed in two main branches. Ardour2 is the package you're likely to find in your distribution's software repositories, though the available version is probably not the latest release. Currently Ardour2's official release stands at version 2.8.11. A feature freeze is in place at this time while the main developers prepare Ardour3 for its first public appearance. Ardour3 essentially raises Ardour to the functional level of the popular commercial audio/MIDI sequencers available for Windows and Mac users, but it is definitely not yet ready for any kind of public release or use. At this time Ardour3 must be built from its Subversion codebase, and the developers have not approved it for inclusion with any Linux distribution, media-optimized or otherwise."

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