News

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.

On behalf of all those who work on Ardour, I am happy to announce the release of Ardour 2.8.3. This is primarily a mantainance released, but does include 3 major new pieces of functionality. It also includes a suprisingly large number of bug fixes for things varying from clean builds with the latest compiler releases to minor GUI tweaks and the occasional crashing bug. As usual please visit http://ardour.org/download to download the source or OS X builds. Read more below ...

FLOSS Weekly and Open Source Musician recently each did a long podcast with Paul about Ardour and all things related. The questions and overall direction of each one are different, so if you have time to spare to listen to them, check both of them out.

Juan Pablo Bouza has a nice short writeup on how to use Blender, the pre-eminent open source 3d rendering and animation tool, with Ardour, so that they share a common timeline.

Its August 29th and with just two days left, the current financial flow for August is about 12% below the goal. Sigh. I guess I'll roll another release next month. The release cycles of proprietary software start to be more and more understandable ...

I'm happy to release an initial version of the Ardour shortcut cheatsheet - a handy 2-sided tri-fold guide to almost every shortcut in Ardour. There is one version for X Window (Linux, FreeBSD, etc) and another for OS X (reflecting different conventions about modifier keys in both systems.) These cheatsheets will hopefully convey a lot of Ardour's power that is generally hidden to most users. (Sept 21 2009: A4 versions now added) Please read more below ....

Taybin Rutkin has been involved with Ardour for longer than anyone except me (Paul). Although its true that these days his actual job and other interests in life have led to a reduction in his work on the project, it is impossible to overstate what Taybin bought to Ardour, or to forget that he still steps up and takes a lot of responsibility for the website. This weekend, Taybin is marrying his girlfriend of several years, Kat Taylor, in Woodstock, CT, and I'd like to take this opportunity to wish the two of them the very best for their continued life together (although I plan to do the same in person on the day). Feel free to pass along good wishes.