Does it interact with pipewire any? Or prefers existing apis like jack?

No native Pipewire API support and none planned. On Linux, there are audio/MIDI backends for ALSA and JACK. Pipewire mostly supports the JACK API (and likely will do so completely in the near future).

Not an ardour user but I have a good time intergratimg everything with pipewire just by running it with the pw_jack command.

Hi Paul, just wanted to say thanks for working so hard on Ardour. I just started playing with Ardour in Fedora on my Framework laptop, but I've been thinking about buying a M1 mac to make music because I miss Logic and Ableton. These release notes have got me hyped because now I might not want to! I'm very excited to try out the clips and freesound features. I'll definitely be buying a license soon. You (and the rest of the brilliant Ardour contributors) seriously rock!

Thank you. Just to be clear about one thing: nobody buys a license for Ardour, it is released under the GPL.

You can choose to pay us for the service of building it for you, or if you like, providing a ready-to-run version that we can actually support. That revenue allows myself and other Ardour contributors to work on Ardour as a way of making a living.

Thanks also, I had the privilege to exchange with you on the linux-audio-dev mailing list a few times way back in the time of quasimodo and creation of LADSPA, I learned so much thanks to your dedication and knowledge about audio programming and how to create an useful api !

Can I use to make a Dj mix?

You'd have to explain what "a DJ mix" means to you before I could answer that.

That said, it certainly is possible to make _a_ DJ mix with Ardour...

It's all gone Pete Tong.

Ardour was impressive since the first time I opened it. Thank you for making such high quality software for linux.

what was your motivation to start this project?

how do you use ardour yourself?

do you have any music to share ?

Ardour history (also posted downthread): https://discourse.ardour.org/t/ardour-20th-birthday/102333

I don't use Ardour much myself. When I make music, I mostly use the amazing VCV Rack or its slightly-more-FLOSS fork, Cardinal

As for music, not really but last December I did release this: https://pauldavismusic.bandcamp.com/album/suspended-generati...

That is soo soothing to hear Is that also made using Cardinal? Can the same be achieved using VCV Rack?

That was made using Rack 1. You could use Rack 2 or Cardinal to do the same thing, though some of the modules I used for those pieces are not available for one or both of Rack 2 and Cardinal. But that should never limit you - even Cardinal has more than 800 modules.

Have you made any money from it?

Ardour revenue is about US$180k/yr at present. I make a reasonable middle-class income from it, help support another full time developer, and put aside any surplus to help pay other people associated with the project (e.g. website, documentation).

Can you share subscriptions vs single payments rough percentages?

Roughly speaking, about 95%+ subscriptions.

Thanks for making Ardour! When will it be upgraded from GTK2 (which reached its end of life two years ago) to GTK3 or GTK4, and are there any plans of supporting SDL2 instead, to ensure stability and portability over time?

There are zero plans to port to SDL2.

There are zero plans to ever move to GTK3 or GTK4 or GTKN.

There are dreams & aspirations to drop our use of GTK and fall back on GDK (just a window & event abstraction), but this is not on any timetable because it means reimplementing text-entry, menus, tree/list views and the file browser.

By "zero plans" do you mean you have evaluated them and decided they are incompatible with Ardour's goals, or just that there is nothing in the pipe or on the roadmap to do the port?

One major feature that gtk3+ (or SDL2) brings is Wayland compatibility.

Porting a 600k line codebase to a different GUI is a fool's game (the vast majority of Ardour's code and complexity is in the GUI, not the backend).

We did it once before, from GTK1 to GTK2, which should have been easy. And indeed, the actual GUI toolkit switchover was relatively easy. The problem is that along the way, you keep running into other issues and ideas. We likely could have done GTK1 to GTK2 in a month, but it took nearly a year.

We have no need of traditional desktop GUI toolkits (or SDL) except for the 4 widget classes I mentioned. We have our own internal canvas-based "toolkit" that is Cairo-based, and thus only requires a window+rgba-buffer+event abstraction.

i’m a long time cubendo user. i’ve tried to switch to ardour a couple of times (although perhaps lacking in sustained effort), but i can’t ever quite seem to get the same productivity in my workflows - e.g. multi-track slip editing for a whole drum track recording, sidechaining effects, and routing (a non-exhaustive list). this is most likely a time/experience issue, to be fair.

what tips would you give me for making ardour feel a bit more familiar? i understand that’s a very vague question, and a vague response would be justified :)

It's not something I think I can usefully address in HN comments, but please free free to join us on our forums at discourse.ardour.org or IRC at #ardour on libera.chat and we'll be happy to listen to your workflow and make some suggestions (which you're free to ignore, of course).

It’s not a question about this release, I guess, but are there any plans to support CLAP?

We do plan to do so, but it's not a high priority for us at this point. A more urgent plugin-related task is an internal redesign to be able to handle multi-output-bus VST3 plugins. Unfortunately, Steinberg used a totally different model for this than Apple's AudioUnits (which was the basis for the existing design in Ardour), and some rather severe changes are required to get VST3 plugins that do this to work.

CLAP doesn't really much for an Ardour user that isn't already addressed by LV2 or VST3, so although we do want to support it, it's not really on any critical path (other than wanting to support the general move to a not-owned-by-one-company plugin API).

Thank you Paul, the story of Ardour is really inspiring. Have you looked into potentially porting it to WASM and running in the browser? Is there a Figma for audio already?

Not seriously.

Running this sort of thing in a browser has become more and more feasible, but I still consider it fundamentally a broken idea. Even if the browser environment started to offer sufficient low level OS interaction (e.g. setting relative real time thread priorities, using SIMD correctly for metering and gain control, and lots more), I can only really see one reason to want to do this: ease of "delivery" of the software to the user.

Porting the 80+ libraries we use to wasm is no laughing matter, and it would be even harder to run plugins, since each of them would have to be ported by their respective developers (in the case of proprietary plugins. A browser based version that could not run Kontakt or Valhalla Shimmer would be a significant step backwards for most serious users.

However, you can already run Cardinal (the FLOSS-ier fork of VCV Rack) in the browser, so at this point it's anyone's guess where this idea might lead us.

That makes sense, cause it's true that the audio world -compared to design- is really plugin heavy. However, VSTs are mostly used by real pro users and the distribution the browser offers is not to be dismissed easily. Amateurs could get away with a few good plugins. When they are ready to make the transition, a native app or extension could be installed. But it would open an interesting door to quick editing something online, and even collaboration if integrated.

1. "VST" is often used as a synonym for plugins, but it absolutely is not. It's one particular plugin API/format.

2. If you're doing in-the-box composition, every sound you work with probably comes from a plugin. So the idea the plugins are mostly used only by pros is not really true. Synth choice is a hot topic and highly subjective issue, I don't think people would want to be heavily constrained there.

3. "quick editing" is already available online. Not much point with us trying to compete with that.