30 Sep
2004
30 Sep
'04
7:45 a.m.
For option 1, Ardour has a lot of features, but seems
to lack in
stability and usability. I have to restart ardour/jack several times
during a session because one or the other becomes unresponsive or
flaky. The transport even completely stopped working last time I
used it. I lost 2 - 4 hrs work and have not been able to get it
working again. Granted, I have not tried too hard to receive help
with it, but I just haven't had good luck with its stability yet.
Perhaps, my problem is more with usability than stability. It may be
intuitive to some people to use the middle mouse button or ctl+right
button combinations, but I have a really hard time getting around in
ardour.
Another thing about ardour that makes it hard for me to adopt it
wholeheartedly is the way it is developed. It seems, IMHO, that
Release 1.0 should've come out a long time ago, like after real-time
multitrack recording, editing, and mixing were available. Or maybe
start over, do a refactor, then release when those features are
working again. There's something psychologically limiting (to me)
when a product reaches version 0.9beta19 and still doesn't seem ready
for a "release". To me, that seems to create a culture where things
move very slowly and gives the impression that it will never really
be production-ready. I recognize that there are very differing
opinions on what a "release" actually means in open source. I also
recognize that ardour doesn't have my name on it anywhere so I can't
really complain unless I'm contributing to its development. I'm not
trying to start a war, just to figure out what direction I need to
settle on, so I'll shut up about that.
It depends on what you are looking for - for me - needing just the
features ardour has, multitrack and DAW à la pro-tools, JACK, I honestly
can't see any other option, audacity is way off, it's good but not a
good multitrack DAW.
As for the UI it is just like you would expect in a DAW, It's hard but
thats mostly the way life is when you want to do hard stuff: like good
recording, mastering, composing, lossless editing.
Personally I find ardour well above acceptable in terms of usability and
even stability in the sense that even though it's not crash-proof i've
never lost anything, I guess I'm lucky...
I can't imagine any better free professional alternative, hardware
monitoring, unlimited tracks and "busses", jack connections to other
software et cetera. If you don't need it, just use something else, spend
$$ on pro-tools and you will get just the same(UI and all) but a bit
less flexible and lose lots of money.
Just use what works for you, it's just wrong to use Ardour if you don't
need the features. Try rezound or whatever they're all good. Ardors
strength is that it's flexible, got professional features and high end
hardware "support" in the sense that it's made with RME-Hammerfall and
similar hardware in mind, it's kind of useless with you're grandma's
SoundBlaster 16 ISA card :)
I can recommend you try some commercial alternatives, and all available
linux software as well just to see the difference. In my world what
makes ardour good is that it "gets it right". Which I guess is a matter
of taste. And since Ardour is beta it will probably get even more
things even more right in the future :)
I'd say, go for ardour, once you'll get a hang of it you won't regret
it.
/z