Ardour

I would no longer call Ardour "Donationware"; nor if I were KVR Admin, would I be listing it amongst the freeware. The only "free" version available now and going forward, is a demo version which after 10 minutes, inserts silences into music at random intervals. If one doesn't donate, this demo version is all that is available to the user. Mandatory donation to get a fully functional product = commercial software at "pay what you like" pricing; not freeware or donationware!

Hypnogoddess: what you say is incorrect, Ardour can be obtained without charge. To obtain a ready-to-run version, yes, you have to pay a minimum of $1, or there's the demo version which goes silent after 10 minutes.

It is possible to obtain Ardour, unrestricted, without paying anything. The source code is available free of charge – a donation is totally optional – and there is no 10 minute restriction. All that is required is to build it from source yourself, which isn't difficult (I've done it myself a few times) and something that many Linux users are comfortable with. Also, it is available free-of-charge in many repositories, although some lag behind the version available from the Ardour website.

@Lost_Highway.

Is that source code for Windows, or for Linux? I'm a Windows user and a non-coder. A demo version which goes silent after 10 minutes is of no use whatsoever except for eval purposes, which is why such are made. The article in question was about the current version of Ardour, not a repository version which lags two or three revisions behind.

Therefore, seeing as how unless there is a compilable version for Windows, which will still require one to find a compatible compiler (which will most likely come at a further fee) there is still a mandatory donation to use the full version of Ardour, my statement that it cannot be considered either freeware or donationware still stands. Most true donationware I have seen is a voluntary rather than a mandatory donation, and the pre-donation download isn't crippleware.

The source code may be free, but you get no support.

For those not being a professional computer troubleshooter that just aint enough.

You have me wondering how you define 'support', since there's a ton of material on Ardour online, as well as perhaps some self-support user-forums.

From what I've read, some, perhaps many, paid programs offer shoddy support, if any at all, and sometimes just disappear/get abandoned. Since Ardour is FLOSS, that would seem less likely to happen since the code can be picked up.

I'd be curious to know of any sufficiently-used-and-complex FLOSS that offers free as in no-cost direct-dev support for the possibly thousands or more of people across the globe who use their software. IOW, some forms of support would seem impossible such as if we want the devs to have the time to work on their software and the responsibility for 'support' should essentially rest with the end-users...

Like, see also the FAQ, the bug reports, the feature requests and the manual. Lose the crutches and excuses.

Hypno: Pull down a free multimedia Linux distro such as UbuntuStudio, and Ardour is free. It obligates you to use Linux as your OS but that really ain't so bad.

"It obligates you to use Linux as your OS but that really ain't so bad."

I'm not going to brown nose Microsoft any here but it does come pretty much ready to go. Linux is for people who might want to actually do something with their computer but instead love to build every piece of its software identity that they never go outside and play. Funny aside, I really gave Ubuntu a solid go and I have to say that I spent about 90% of my time trying to fix and re-fix installs of everything I wanted to use, including the aforementioned DAW. I have other things to do besides spend my time in every Linux chatroom trying to understand what was always going wrong with my system. I even dual booted Windows with Ubuntu so I could atleast have a functioning machine while trying to learn all of the intricacies of Linuxese when it dawned on me that all of the tools I love to use were in my Windows install already. I formatted the partition and never looked back. Yeah, Microsoft creates lots of problems but I can make music in it a whole lot better than I ever could with Ubuntu.

I dual-boot Open SUSE with Windows 10 these days; but with all of the dynamite DAWs available on the MS platform; plus the fact that Ardour is the Linux version of the extremely proprietary (Last I looked it wouldn't take standard VST synths and all effects plugins must be bought from the devs) Harrison Mixbus, I've given up on Ardour entirely.

I use Linux for occasional video creation (still do most of that in Windows); and anything from Adobe Audition, to Zynewave Podium for audio in Windows. I'm not brown nosing MS either; but the whole Linux Dev community is fragmented, with new "distros" coming out every month or so. They can't even agree on which mainstream distro is best to base spinoffs on; I track Distrowatch bi-weekly, so I know what I am talking about when I say this.

Like @Lhud said; one can make music a lot more easily in Windows, so I that is what I'll stick with for media production in general. Linux is an "OS playground" for me and most likely will remain so.

I am the lead developer of Ardour, and just came across this pile of complete misinformation.

Ardour is licensed under the GPL. You may obtain the source code without charge, you may build and modify it yourself, and use it for any purpose. You may give copies to your friends, run it on as many computers as you wish to. The only limitation is that if you distribute it to anyone else, you must give them all the same rights we give you.

If you do not get Ardour from a friend, or from a Linux distribution, and do not wish to build it, then we ask you to pay some amount for the ready-to-run releases that we make available at https://ardour.org/download - you get to choose how much you pay, the lower limit is US$1. You are paying us for the service of building the software for you.

Because the process of building Ardour correctly can be challenging, the builds we provide are the only ones we offer support for. If you run into problems using a self-built version, or one obtained somewhere else, we may choose not to try to help you, but if the problem is obviously nothing to do with the build (which is increasingly the case), we'll try not to be jerks about it either.

Ardour loads plugins in the VST2, VST3 and LV2 formats on Windows, Linux and macOS. It additionally loads AU plugins on macOS. You can use plugins from any 3rd part, you do not need to "buy them from Harrison Mixbus". We do include several proprietary Harrison plugins in our ready-to-run releases which require payment to use fully, but you are free to ignore them entirely and use plugins from other plugin developers.

You cannot run Windows VSTs in Ardour on Linux, any more than you can run macOS VSTs on Windows. There are wrappers/tools available to do this - we recommend that if your Windows plugins are so important that you cannot work without them, you should run Windows.

Ardour does not care about the Linux fragmentation that you write about. Our releases for Linux run on every Linux distribution, except one.

I dual-boot Open SUSE with Windows 10 these days; but with all of the dynamite DAWs available on the MS platform; plus the fact that Ardour is the Linux version of the extremely proprietary (Last I looked it wouldn't take standard VST synths and all effects plugins must be bought from the devs) Harrison Mixbus, I've given up on Ardour entirely (I'm Steinberg-only when it comes to Virtual Instruments; I don't rate LADSPA at all. That's why I gave up on LMMS at an early stage in my music making.).

I use Linux for occasional video creation (still do most of that in Windows); and anything from Adobe Audition, to Zynewave Podium for audio in Windows. I'm not brown nosing MS either; but the whole Linux Dev community is fragmented, with new "distros" coming out every month or so. They can't even agree on which mainstream distro is best to base spinoffs on; I track Distrowatch bi-weekly, so I know what I am talking about when I say this.

Like @Lhud said; one can make music a lot more easily in Windows, so I that is what I'll stick with for media production in general. Linux is an "OS playground" for me and most likely will remain so.