Ardour

The Ardour Community

The Ardour community consists of a large group of developers, editors and users who collaboratively help to design the application, track bugs, provide documentation and help to users. As a result, there are variety of types of support available for the program:

If you have questions that are not answered by these resources, please e-mail help@ardour.org. You will generally get better and quicker answers by using our online chat systems or the mailing lists.

Support Expectations

You should probably make sure that you have the right idea about support for Ardour.

The Reference Manual

The Reference Manual is a complete and detailed guide to Ardour. It is managed and edited collaboratively.

The Tutorial Manual

The "Introduction to Ardour" FLOSS Manual is a free (gratis/libre) tutorial-style book, which introduces the program without expecting a vast knowledge of computers or sound editing from the reader. Read more about how it was made and what its goals are.

This manual was written for Ardour 2.X, and so many parts of its content will be somewhat inaccurate with respect to Ardour 3.X.

Translations are available in Spanish and French.

Online "Chat"

#ardour at irc.freenode.net
#ardour-osx at irc.freenode.net

Ardour's core developers and several key users hang out here on IRC, at pretty much any hour of the night or day. This is where the majority of discussion about ardour development and design takes place, but user problems get addressed too. This is the best and fastest place to get immediate help with issues.

If you wish, you can use IRC directly from within your web browser: click to join the the main channel or the OS X specific channel. Please pick a sensible nick/handle - that is how we will know you. Note: as of Ardour 2.8.1 or later, you can also use IRC via your browser directly from the "Help->Chat" menu item within Ardour.

You may prefer to use an application specifically written for IRC like xchat (native OS X version here). If you use Linux, xchat is almost certainly available as a package for your distribution. OS X users may like adium, a native IRC application for that platform.

Mailing Lists

the Ardour users mailing list
This is where users and some developers discuss all kinds of problems and ideas related to using Ardour. When necessary, people report new issues and ideas to the developers mailing list. This is an active list, with many helpful and knowledgeable users around to help guide less experienced people. There are sometimes more general discussions about topics like recording technique, audio interface selection, etc.
the Ardour development mailing list
This is where developers and technical users discuss substantive design issues with ardour. Many bugs get reported here too, but are normally re-reported to Mantis, our bugtracker (see below). Since we started using IRC, this list has become very quiet.
the Ardour CVS (commit) mailing list
This is a read-only list that sends a message every time a commit is made to the Ardour source code repository. If you are in anyway involved in development of Ardour or testing bleeding-edge versions of it, it is good to be on this list.

Keyboard Cheat Sheets

These are easiest way to get started with Ardour and to get an idea of the scope of what it can do. We have versions for X11 and OS X (those 2 are on US Letter paper; there is an A4 version of the Linux cheat sheet. Some other info can be found here.)

Frequently Asked Questions

We have a few here.

The Bug & Feature Request Tracker

Mantis is the place to report and track bugs, as well as file feature requests. You should read read about how to report a bug before using it.

If you find that Ardour does not cater for your needs, please look in the Mantis database to see if anyone has requested the feature you need, and put your vote on it.

If the issue is not mentioned, open a new Bug and state how you think Ardour could become better (remember to use clear language; be specific and verbose in you description - we have a hard time reading minds). Please read our guide for writing good bugs reports.

And please remember: a bug report helps us make Ardour better (over time, not necessarily tomorrow!). Strongly languaged complaints and moaning on mailing lists, home pages, news groups, and other places does not (it does zap our enthusiasm though). The first and only place to file a complaint or feature request is in Mantis. Do it anywhere else, and it will not reach the precious few who are willing to do anything about it!

Video Tutorials

These 3 tutorials were produced by an Ardour user and posted to Youtube. To date, they are the best introductory free tutorials that I've seen. You might not learn precisely how to do a lot of things with Ardour, but you will get clear sense of how to go about doing basic things and will lose the sense of "this program is so confusing".

Here is another series of tutorial videos: Here are some other good user-produced videos from Kris

If you know of other good Ardour tutorials on Youtube, Vimeo, etc, please write and let me know.