[LAU] FOSS DAW recommendations

Dave Phillips dlphillips at woh.rr.com
Fri Nov 17 16:08:48 UTC 2017


Hi James,


On 11/17/2017 10:38 AM, James Harkins wrote:

> I don't often need multi-tracking, cross-fading or tempo-synced editing, but when I do, that's when I want a DAW. There, it seems like it's pretty much Ardour or go home. Contrary to some suggestions, I'm not scared of routing dialogs or submix channels. (I particularly enjoyed the comment about being "savvy enough to operate Supercollider" LOL :D .) It worries me a bit when David K. says "It's when you start editing that things get awful" -- because, tight, tempo-synced editing is exactly the time when I want clips whose edges you can edit easily and instant cross-fades.
>
> Ages ago, I used Digital Performer on Mac, and courses at my school now tend to use Cubase (the latter of which... sheesh, Steinberg are really tone deaf about interface design). I know my way around. Complexity is fine. Stability is a higher priority than a simple interface -- given the choice between a beautiful, easy interface that crashes often and a complex interface where things "just work" once you learn them, I'll go with the stable, complex interface, every time.
>

For my purposes Ardour is a perfect fit. I use it to edit and arrange 
project soundfiles created with Csound, SuperCollider, HighC, Bitwig, 
whatever from wherever, and I use it to record myself playing and 
singing my own songs, mostly acoustic blues. I don't use a lot of 
plugins with it, and when I do they're primarily mix-oriented - 
compression, limiting, EQ - not synths or typical effects.

I usually run the current development version here. I don't recommend 
you do the same, there's always the possibility of Things Going Very 
Wrong, but over the years I've been using it I've suffered some crashes 
but no remarkable loss of sessions. IMO, Ardour is seriously 
well-designed software.

Must also mention that it has a great community of users and developers. 
It's quite the talent pool. :)

Best,

dp



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