[LAU] FOSS DAW recommendations

Ralf Mardorf ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net
Fri Nov 17 05:33:36 UTC 2017


On Thu, 16 Nov 2017 18:48:12 -1000, David W. Jones wrote:
>What Ralf thinks about it is Ralf's opinion, not mine.

Actually I'm an Ardour user, however the OP mentioned

  On Thu, 16 Nov 2017 08:29:24 +0800, James Harkins wrote:
  >Because my usage is rare, I've shied away from Bitwig, and even
  >Ardour.

and he also pointed out

  >I don't want to pay money for something I'll use, oh, maybe 10-15
  >hours in a whole year.

The OP already tried to use Ardour. The user interface has a design
that requires without doubts more than 10-15 hours of usage a year.

It's not the audio routing that makes Ardour's user interface less
intuitive. It's e.g. based on too much shortcuts, one of the most
important zoom shortcuts e.g. didn't work with my German keyboard, so I
had to reassign the shortcut. Let alone that the more shortcuts, the
more could collide with lower level shortcuts a user might use for the
window manager, this might require to change shortcuts for window
manager usage. Ok, somebody could do this in the 10-15 hours of the
first year, so in the second year there's no need to care about this or
similar things, assuming the user doesn't upgrade Ardour.
Using Ardour with mouse only isn't intuitive to do, since the menus
aren't that clear as for a lot of other DAWs. You need to get used to
Ardour, wich is hardly to to do for users that don't spend more than 15
hours a year with using it.

Things like the routing are basics, once you learned the principle,
you'll never forget it. After learning this and a few other principles
users need to learn oddities of the DAW or DAWs they use. Some have got
a few oddities other, such as Ardour have a lot of it. The oddities are
things a user needs to get used too and the user will forget them, if
the user doesn't use the DAW very often.


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