News

(this announcement comes from John Emmas, developer of ArdourXchange)

Owners of Harrison's Mixbus can now obtain a very cheap copy of ArdourXchange if they act quickly. Throughout July 2010 AxC will be on sale for just $20 (US) - that's less than half its normal retail price.

AATranslator is a Windows program that converts sessions created in one DAW (or video editor) into formats understood by others. It supports session formats used by ProTools, Nuendo, Cubase, PreSonus Studio One, Vegas, Reaper, Wavelab, Pyramix, AMS Audiofile, Fairlight, Waveframe, DAR, N-Track, Sadie, Soundscape and more.

We heard today that its support for Ardour is now complete (for the moment), meaning that it can both import and export to/from Ardour. Read on below for more details on what it can do ....

Max Breakwell has done what looks like a great job at providing a TouchOSC template for controlling Ardour. He has written all about it and for those of us with iPhones, iPod Touch or iPad (not sure if TouchOSC is available yet, but it will be), it looks really interesting and useful. Great job Max!

(Edited April 7th with some updates)

Ardour 3 has a relatively sophisticated mechanism for creating predefined mappings for MIDI control surfaces. We need people with MIDI control devices to help create a rich set of default (or even non-default) bindings for their equipment. To do this, you need to be comfortable using a text editor. The rest of the document will explain how to create a binding. Please help us out so that Ardour 3 will have a great collection of bindings right from its initial release. You can email bindings to the ardour-users mailing list or provide URLs for them in comments to this post. Don't be afraid to ask questions if things are not clear.

Jono Bacon and Stuart Langridge spend 12 minutes discussing possible models to fund the development of open source software, with Ardour as a featured example. There are some blog comments too (including a long one from me). http://shotofjaq.org/2010/03/opening-the-filthy-lucre/

There hasn't been much news posted here for a while, so I thought it was appropriate to update subscribers and other supporters of my work on Ardour on what has been going on. Development efforts have ben split (about 60:40) between Ardour 3.0 and continuing work on the 2.X series, both to fix bugs and to support the continuing improvement of Mixbus. Read more below ...

There is a new manual for Ardour available from FLOSS Manuals, a primarily volunteer organization dedicated to providing documentation for FLOSS ("Free Libre Open Source Software"). In this case, long time Ardour user and advocate Derek Holzer organized a week long effort to get the basics of the manual in place, with great results. At this point, there are more than a dozen contributors who have helped the documentation effort. The contents continue to expand and improve - you can volunteer to help out too if you wish. Read what Derek had to say about this on the Ardour forums.

There is now an excellent "Intro to Mixbus" video available for $19.99 from Harrison Consoles. Although it obviously covers some Mixbus specific techniques, a lot of its 2 hour length is completely applicable to users of Ardour.

The video CAN be played successfully on Linux although you may have issues depending on which video playback software you use, and which video codecs you have installed. Successful playback has been noted using VLC and MPlayer. A more portable transcoded version might be available in the future.

Produced by Nathan “Adan” Adam of AdanAdam.com and Multi-Platinum.com, this HD video download features in-depth overviews of the Edit and Mixing system, Power-user tricks, Keyboard shortcuts, Compression settings, Recording and Automation.

Other Topics Include: Playback & Editing Options, Right Click Tricks, Plugins, Inserts & Sends, Tape Saturation & Mix Busses, Punch Ins & Outs, Nudging, Splitting, Meters, Tempos, Snapshots, Solos, Crossfades, Ranges, Gain Automation, Duplicating, Muting, Exporting, Filling, Spliting, Arming, Routing and so much more...

If there is enough demand, there may be future videos from Adan specifically targetting Ardour.

There's a new book out on using open source/free tools like Ardour, GIMP, Blender, Audacity and more. I haven't seen the book, but its author Daniel James is one of the people behind the 64studio "creative-centric" distribution of Linux. It could be an interesting read for those new to these tools, although its not by any means a manual on Ardour (coming soon!).

I wanted to alert Ardour users to the arrival of a couple of interesting new plugins in LV2/Linux format. LinuxDSP has been producing several JACK clients that implement rather good traditional DSP processing, and have recently started implementing some of them as LV2 plugins for easier integration into a DAW like Ardour. At present the MX-EQ1 (a parametric equaliser) and MX-DYN1 (dynamics processing) are available as free (mono-only) versions or as paid-for stereo ones.