If you like Ardour, consider a monthly donation! As other mentioned, it's a longtime work of Paul Davis and a close-knit community. Paul works full-time on Ardour thanks to these donations.<p>See "Finance" sidebar at <a href="https://community.ardour.org/community" rel="nofollow">https://community.ardour.org/community</a>
Ardour is one of my favorite open source projects, and it's especially admirable considering that it's not a developer and/or server admin tool. It's rare to see people hack away for years on open source desktop software and constantly improving it.
In time for the Linux Audio Conference in Saint-Etienne, which starts this Thursday. (<a href="http://musinf.univ-st-etienne.fr/lac2017GB.html" rel="nofollow">http://musinf.univ-st-etienne.fr/lac2017GB.html</a>)
I just downloaded Ardour (after trying it out a while back and somewhat giving up) and it's a pretty fantastic application.<p>What prompted me to get into it again was that I wanted to combine it with Hydrogen (<a href="http://hydrogen-music.org/hcms/" rel="nofollow">http://hydrogen-music.org/hcms/</a>) using JACK (<a href="http://www.jackaudio.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.jackaudio.org/</a>).<p>I can _immediately_ see the power of JACK, but I just can't get my immediate use to work, which is when I hit play/pause in one application, the other starts as well.<p>In general though the potential in JACK just seems awesome, it's almost as intuitive as just routing patch cables in meatspace and I can't wait to get into it more. It also seems like something that'd be brilliant for a touch-screen.<p>I'm considering setting up another partition just for audio work.
I'm here late but wanted to mention what I consider to be Ardour's "younger sibling" (functionality-wise): Audacity.<p>It's usually enough to do what I need, clipping & cropping existing audio.<p><a href="http://www.audacityteam.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.audacityteam.org/</a>
Now that the MP3 patents are expired, it'd be nice if Ardour added MP3 import / export. I understand why they didn't in the past, but it's been a showstopper for times when I wanted to recommend a FOSS audio editor to non-technical friends.<p>Here's the latest discussion I saw on it: <a href="https://community.ardour.org/node/14616" rel="nofollow">https://community.ardour.org/node/14616</a>
Ardour if fantastic. Its mixer is better and more usable than pretty much any other DAW I've tried. They are competing with software that costs hundreds of dollars and winning in many aspects. They should be an example.
I have been very pleased with Ardour - only took me a few minutes to have my XLR mic go through a compressor / limiter / expander virtual rack effects setup for better screencasting.
I'd love an open source DAW that was easy to use and didn't slavishly follow the UI constraints of a physical mixer (which works great on a physical mixer, but not so great when you're trying to control it with a mouse). Is there one?
If you are curious about Ardour (or creative software for Linux in general) I highly recommend back issues of the Linux Voice magazine (RIP) which often reviews and explains such software:<p><a href="https://www.linuxvoice.com/creative-commons-issues/" rel="nofollow">https://www.linuxvoice.com/creative-commons-issues/</a><p>For example issue 24 reviewed Ardour 4.6 and some plugins.<p>(no affiliation. the issues are under CC BY-SA )
For those interested in learning Ardour, YouTube has a lot of tutorial videos that have helped me. Seeing someone do something is sometimes easier than RTFM, especially when it comes to workflow. You do need to use some caution because there are so many videos and some are outdated.
I bought Ableton years ago after trying really hard to tame JACK, Ardour, Hydrogen, and a handful of associated utilities unsuccessfully.<p>It makes me REALLY happy to see this community still going. I know it takes time but the results are usually well worth-it, to get open software ecosystems thriving.