At the risk of sending you down a giant rabbit hole, the book Designing Sound is all about making programmatic sounds with Pure Data, and open source low-code programming environment available for all platforms. From what I've read, the book is considered a classic in the video game sound world. It's really good. Combine that with the Cipriani book on PD and learning Ardour would give you a very good learning path.

I recently dated someone in her 30s with a DMA, and she she told me how proud she was to know me because I was the first non-musician friend she's ever had. It's a very deep and insular world.

Pablo Casals famously replied when asked why he was still practicing in his 70s that he "felt like we was making progress", so don't let yourself feel inadequate.

Alex Rome has really really amazing easy to follow videos about some patterns in music development: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh1MtJ4rx4n4PQGYNYK_UXA

I've been making music now for 8 months and have absolutely fallen in love with it. I'd love to write music for a game, what kind of game are you creating?

Here's my stuff if you're interested: https://aaronholbrookmusic.com

Feel free to reach out!

In the Axiom Verge noclip documentary, the dev talks about how everyone is surprised about how he really made the whole game himself (except localization + marketing (and I imagine final testing but...)).

And he was like "people say 'even the music?' The music was the easiest part!!!'

It does make me feel like once you get into the right headspace and figure out how most of the tooling works all of this becomes quite smooth.

Stuff like that sends me down rabbit holes and when I finally come up for air, I say, "Gee, now I see how people can build their entire career around this!"

A light weight journaling of your learnings as you go along would probably be real beneficial to many (such as myself who has zero knowledge on the subject of DAWs and creating music effects for games). And since you said it’s very challenging maybe writing about it in small bite-sized learnings might make the process easier? Going from “I must learn all this stuff!!” to “let’s see what audio gems we pick up in our adventure today”.

You might like SuperCollider! It's free and a programming language made for sound design. Just writing code - but quite far from a DAW.

Congratulations on the new release! I've seen some forum discussions on this in the past, and I'd imagine it's a frequently debated topic. However, I'd like to ask about the technical feasibility of implementing a feature similar to Ableton's 'Warp' within Ardour. I understand that Ardour and Ableton have fundamentally different architectures and that different DAWs can prioritize different workflows. Given the current state of the codebase and the development roadmap, I'm curious how realistic the implementation of BPM-synced time-stretching actually is or if it remains significantly outside the project's scope.

Thank you Paul, for all the years you've been doing this. For the patience and keeping subscription for your binaries affordable. For how you managed to keep it opensource, alive AND expanding.

You likely could not buy a single coffee with my lousy subscription contribution over a decade ago - the more I have respect for how it was developed.

Just wanted to say thanks one note time!

We have been running Ardour 9 for a while now during band rehearsals. Currently 12 channels that we record and monitor in realtime with some effects on top.

Just wanting to say thanks to the whole team for creating such an inspiring and useful creative tool!

I'm most excited to try the perceptual analizer, which was something I found always had disappointing performance in plugins.

Which of the new features would you say posed the most interesting engineering challenge?

I've got 9.0 running self built on Fedora 43; it's working OK, I have had a couple of crashes (which I can't figure out how to report); a seg: #1 0x00007f5085ea1663 in jack_port_type_to_ardour_data_type (jack_type=0x0) at ../libs/backends/jack/jack_portengine.cc:71 #2 0x00007f5085ea346a in ARDOUR::JACKAudioBackend::port_data_type (this=0x1ac84ad0, port=...) at ../libs/backends/jack/jack_portengine.cc:465 #3 0x0000000000e3c719 in PortGroupList::gather

which I think is a lack of cast check in port_data_type? (from IOSelector::setup_ports -> PortMatrix::setup_global_ports )

I also got an assert in; #5 0x00000000011fa927 in StartupFSM::check_session_parameters (this=0x3dcf00a0, must_be_new=true) at ../gtk2_ardour/startup_fsm.cc:740 #6 0x00000000011f80d2 in StartupFSM::dialog_response_handler (this=0x3dcf00a0, response=-3, dialog_id=StartupFSM::NewSessionDialog) at ../gtk2_ardour/startup_fsm.cc:267

I think this was opening an existing ardour project that I'd copied onto this machine and was the first run of ardour on this machine.

Hi! I have been happily using Ardour as a hobbyist since version 5. At the same time I also started learning Pure Data. I was wondering how difficult it would be to implement a feature similar to "The Grid" from Bitwig. I’m not sure whether this could be done as a simple plugin, or if it would require much deeper integration with Ardour.

Do you test on different kernel preemption models? If so, do you feel PREEMPT_RT really gives an advantage over full preemption with threadirqs?

(Cyclictest gives me between a 3x and 5x worst-case latency improvement depending on the background load, but I'm not nearly musically skilled enough to try a real-world test.)

Every set of release notes that's intended to double as a press release needs to involve the judicious inclusion of a blurb that immediately explains what the hell the thing actually is.

    document.querySelector("#content .section-header + p").className = "date"

    document.querySelector("#content .date + p").outerHTML = (`
      <p>
        We are pleased to announce the release of Ardour 9.0.
      </p>

        <p style="font-style:italic; font-size:smaller; margin:2em
        4em">Ardour is a free and open-source digital audio workstation
        app that works cross-platform on Linux desktops, Mac OS, and
        Windows.  Get Ardour or get involved with the community at <a
        href="https://ardour.org/">Ardour.org</a>.</p>

      <p>
        Ardour 9.0 is a major release for the project, seeing several
        substantive new features that users have asked for over a long
        period of time. Region FX, clip recording, a touch-sensitive
        GUI, pianoroll windows, clip editing and more, not to mention
        dozens of bug fixes, new MIDI binding maps, improved GUI
        performance on macOS (for most)...
      </p>
    `)

Hi! I recently (2 weeks) chose this software to invest time into in order to make music/sfx for video games. Do you personally use this software to create music yourself? Just curious!

Glad you're enjoying Ardour and thanks for supporting our work.

Things aren't often "ported over from Mixbus", though there are a few features that do start life there (the new perceptual analyzer is one good example).

The pianoroll stuff was started so that we could do clip editing. It appeared in Mixbus first because ... well, let's just say that there was some disagreement about when it was appropriate for that stuff to go public, and the release of Ardour 9.0 represents the ardour team's judgement on that :)

Ardour is not as focused on "in the box composition" (i.e. making music entirely on your computer) as Live or Bitwig are. It originated as something closer to ProTools or Logic or Digital Performer in the sense that it was focused on recording people doing stuff (blowing,hitting,singing,speaker,scraping etc. etc).

However, in recent years, we've added a lot of the stuff you need for "in the box composition" and many people do use it that way. There's (always) more to do, but it's fairly capable in this sort of workflow now too and will continue to improve over time.

Ardour has been around for more than 25 years.

Please be aware that almost any fully-capable DAW (everything named here except lmms) has a steep, challenging learning curve. Don't jump in thinking it will be easy.

Similar but not quite. One of the problems that you might face is a lot of tutorials are for Ableton, Logic, Cubase etc. It shouldn't actually matter, but you might find it confusing what you can and cant do if you are following what someone else is doing in another program. It’s like learning C# from a Java course. Once you understand the fundamentals it does not matter what you use within reason.

But I’ve used Ardour a long time ago and I don’t see why you couldn’t release music with it. Another alternative is Reaper.

if you mean you just want to make music and arent too bothered about recording then Cardinal is a free modular eurorack synth you could mess around with

or you use a VST host like Kushview's Element and load up on all the free VST instruments and effects that are out there. you would just need a midi keyboard hooked to it then or use Cardinal to generate note patterns

https://cardinal.kx.studio

https://kushview.net/element

or something like Orca if you want to go off the deep end!

https://github.com/hundredrabbits/Orca

Please use our forums to keep us in the loop if you have problems.

There's approximately 736 different workflows for this; the ones we've tested work as intended, but regularly we hear from folks who use a different one and something breaks ... we want to fix it.

You might wanna give Bitwig a try, it’s one of the best commercial DAWs available on Linux. You can record live loops, similar to Ableton (it was originally built by ex-Ableton developers)

Not exactly a DAW, but check out Giada.

GTK doesn't play much of a role in our GUI. When you're looking at most of the main tabs in Ardour (editor, mixer, recorder window, cue page) almost everything you're looking at is either our own Canvas or custom widgets. Still we do sit on top of GTK+ 2's basic infrastructure and still rely on it for the "big widgets" (file browser, tree/listviews, menus, color dialogs, text entry).

There's always been a pianoroll in Ardour since we added MIDI for v3.

It's just an inline pianoroll, which is cool for ProTools and award winners like Olafur Arnalds, but apparently not good enough for everyone else.