News

As of now, June 26th, the financial side of thing only looks OK because of a single payment of US$1000. Last month (May) didn't quite make the $4500 goal, and this month was certain to fall short by quite a significant margin. Before the large donation just mentioned, there was still 28% of June's target unmet with only 5 days left this month. There are no companies backing this project at this time, so its totally incumbent on those of you who use the program and have not yet helped pay to support it to step up and do the right thing. Thanks to everyone who has paid for their contributions and support.

Ardour will continue in some sense even if I find other work, and I believe that Carl, Dave, Hans and others will likely keep up some of their efforts anyway. Since the new download system started, there have been about 15000 OS X downloads and 6000 source code downloads. Less than 3% of the OS X downloads and only 23 source code downloads were associated with up-front payment, though it seems likely than many users donated after the fact. The average price per paid OS X download was about US$10. With a user-base like that, it seems to me that it should be possible to pay one full-time north american developer and to offer occasional payments to others for their outstanding work. What do you think?

There hasn't been a lot to report around here recently, but thats not because nothing is happening. Instead, a furious slew of changes have been under development for 3.0, including some really fantastic new designs to aid workflow in many different situations. Lots more news to read below ...

Its hard to keep track of everything that happened to Ardour itself and to me and my family over the last year, but one thing I do know is that its been a year since I last raced the American Triple T near Portsmouth, OH. This last (US Memorial Day) weekend I returned there for a 3rd time, this time with my wife racing as well. This is a unique event that involves 4 triathlons in 3 days: a very short sprint race on Friday evening, 2 olympic distance races (1500m swim/40km bike/10k run) on Saturday and then a half-iron race (1.2 mile swim/55.5 mile bike/13.1 mile run) on Sunday. Even though Ardour 3.0 is not released yet, I take some comfort from gaining another 7-8 minutes over my time from 2008, and in more difficult conditions. Read on for actual numbers ...

Several people have started to add sponsorships to various outstanding issues (see the "Popular Issues" over on the right). I just want to clarify a couple of rather important points about this system. First of all, everyone participating should be aware that it is a pure honor system - we expect and hope that you will pay up once a bug that you have sponsored is fixed for you. The money you pay will be routed (minus the usual PayPal fees) to the developer(s) who actually fixes the bug. Please read on below for more ...

We are glad to announce the availability of Ardour 2.8 for OS X. Delayed a little by the design and implementation of the new "donationware" download system, these packages for Intel and PowerPC systems bring all the improvements of 2.8 to the OS X platform. As noted elsewhere, you have a choice of paying something (anything!) for the version with AudioUnit state & preset handling, or getting a version without those features for free.

As some of you may already have noticed, the way that downloading Ardour works has changed tonight. Rather than everything be available as direct file downloads, the download system now requires you to go through a "donationware" path that is loosely modelled on Radiohead's recent experiment.

Last month, 211 members of the Ardour community donated $8000 to support the continuing development of Ardour. It was a wonderful demonstration of the support for this software.

However, there at least 6,000 downloads of Ardour for OS X every month. Another 6,000+ source tarballs are downloaded every month, presumably destined mostly for Linux systems. And then there are the unknown number of people install binary packages of Ardour managed by their Linux distributions. We don't know how many of the downloads are repeats, how many never even use the software, how many run into a problem that ends their use before they even begin, etc. Clearly though, interest in the software is substantial, and it doesn't seem too unreasonable to guess that there are 100-1000 new users every month.

The donations give during February were fantastic, but they are a one time affair. The costs of being a full time developer of Ardour are, sadly, not one time. It would be great if that new user community could step up and support the project by subscribing, thus helping to build a base of long term financial support. Your $10/month subscription will help maintain our intense level of active development with multiple commits to the tree every day.

Please note: this is not an appeal to the long time user community who have already been very generous. Instead, try to convince another Ardour user (or two or three) to become a subscriber.

Of course, regular donations are still very welcome.

Now, don't get too excited, but we've made some great progress on removing the X11 requirement on MacOS X thanks to the gtk-quartz guys. Of course, you still need Jack, so this is still not a click-n-go thing like Logic. But don't worry, we are also working on removing the need to have Logic installed. :)

Here is a screenshot

It's hard to tell, but X11 isn't running at all. Stay tuned for more updates.

Thanks to the fantastic work of Thorsten Wilms on the new Ardour icon, we now now have Ardour T-Shirts available.

The Ardour project is happy to be able to announce the involvement and support of Solid State Logic (SSL), one of the most respected and trusted names in the field of audio technology. SSL has chosen to support Ardour's development and to promote the idea of its broader adoption within the audio technology industry. Please read on for more details.