Up to now I've run away from using Ardour because it's
severe overkill
for the audio work I do, and has a horrendously steep
learning curve.
Hi there, I never had any DAW experience before ardour nor did I have any sound
"engineering" experience whatsoever. I was just and still am a musician /
composer. I never found ardour "horrendously" difficult to use but maybe, since
you are familiar with audacity, you expect both softwares to provide the same kind of
functionality. If such is your expectation, you will be "disappointed": Ardour
is no sound editor, it's a DAW. Audacity is more an audio editor which happens to have
some multitracking capability. In short, each software has a different purpose.
I rarely use audacity since I am doing multitracking and DAW work. But to quickly retouch
an audio file, I find it convenient. No need of jack for this. But on my DAW PC, since
jack is running all the time, audacity via portaudio is doing what I expect it to do,
namely output sound through jack when its transport is activated. But I would not
integrate it into more complex jack graph setup because of its portaudio dependence.
Take the time to learn ardour, believe me, the time will be well spent, unless you are not
into DAW work but audio editing.
Cheers!
J.