Hobbyist game dev here. Getting into audio and music effects has been fun but I constantly feel overwhelmed. I chose Ardour as my DAW (digital audio workstation) and have been excitedly working on learning. I also bought the book “ Writing Interactive Music for Video Games: A Composer's Guide” which has been very helpful at understanding high level vocabulary.
It’s a lot of work. I slightly enjoy it but boooooy is getting into audio and music pretty challenging. It’ll be good if I ever need to know what I’m talking about when working with others… in the future where I can dedicate myself full time to game dev… One day one day…
I don’t really have a point here. If anyone has any resources, tips, or recommendations on this subject let me know.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
Good point w/ journaling and maybe even preparing stuff to share. Right now it feels like trying to eat a whale whole. …That’s the beauty of doing something in a new (to me) domain though. Even if I don’t share, the practice of formulating how I would explain to someone is beneficial.
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!"
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.
The biggest issue here is that the best library for doing audio warping (ZPlane) is not available to us. We already do realtime audio warping for clip playback, just like Ableton, using RubberBand (and might consider using Staffpad at some point, which we have available for static stretches).
However, following the tempo map is a very different challenge than following user-directed edits between warp markers, and neither RubberBand nor Staffpad really offer a good API for this.
In addition, the GUI side of this poses a lot of questions: do you regenerate waveforms on the fly to be accurate, or just use a GUI-only scaling of an existing waveform, to display things during the editing operation.
We would certainly like to do this, and have a pretty good idea of how to do it. The devil, as usual, is in the details, and there are rather a lot of them.
There's also the detail that having clips be bpm-synced addresses somewhere between 50% and 90% of user needs for audio warping, which reduces the priority for doing the human-edited workflow.
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.)
We don't care much about "full preemption" because the only threads that have time-critical behavior are all scheduled in the SCHED_FIFO and/or SCHED_RR classes. If you had other workloads that could benefit from preemption without using realtime scheduling, then full preemption could be the way to go.
We haven't really tested this sort of thing for quite a few years.
Well, I can't answer for @x42 (Robin Gareus) but for me personally the refactoring of the Editor code so that we could have multiple "editors" was both interesting and hugely challenging.
I didn't want to replicate the code we already had for the Editor, and figuring out to refactor this took a lot of time and experimentation and failures. Although there are still some rough spots, in general I'm very happy with how things turned out.
Clip recording was also a bit of a challenge. It uses an entirely different mechanism than timeline recording, and as usual I got the basics working in a couple of days, followed by months of polishing (and likely, quite a few more to go as we get feedback from users).
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.
You can already load Cardinal as a plugin and get the full scope of is power(s) (or VCV Rack if you paid for the "pro" version). You just don't get the GUI "integrated" into Ardour, and its tied to a specific track.
We might do this via I/O plugins (an existing Ardour feature), which would make the inputs & outputs of Cardinal be just like your hardware. Lots of details to that sort of design, however.
There is also PlugData which could theoretically be handled in a similar way.
What we will not try to do is to implement Yet Another Software Modular Environment ourselves. Cardinal/Rack (or even PD) are approximately infinitely better than anything we could or would do.
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!
Not really. My only released music is a single album at https://pauldavismusic.bandcamp.com/album/suspended-generati... which was made almost entirely with VCV Rack (Ardour was used for some pretty minimal editing). I've also used it for a short podcast series ("Audio Developer Chats") that is currently offline. I do try to talk to musicians and engineers almost every single day about what they're doing, however.
Ardour is very good and needs more attentions. My respects to the developers, I use it every day, and I am very happy with it and its community. I also like the paying / open source model, and I wouldn’t change it for a proprietary DAW 99% of the musicians use.
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).
Is this similar to Ableton? Wanted to "create" music as a hobby, but don't really wanna pay for Ableton. I tried once https://lmms.io/ but didn't stick. Never heard of Ardour.
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
Not familiar with the software, clicked the link, thought the pianoroll screen was a Gantt chart. Thinking "not another project management solution ..." until I realized I was wrong lol.
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)
I just setup my first little Linux home studio and Ardour is a large part of that. It's a great piece of software with an admittedly high learning curve for a novice like myself, but it's been incredibly fun learning.
Hobbyist game dev here. Getting into audio and music effects has been fun but I constantly feel overwhelmed. I chose Ardour as my DAW (digital audio workstation) and have been excitedly working on learning. I also bought the book “ Writing Interactive Music for Video Games: A Composer's Guide” which has been very helpful at understanding high level vocabulary.
It’s a lot of work. I slightly enjoy it but boooooy is getting into audio and music pretty challenging. It’ll be good if I ever need to know what I’m talking about when working with others… in the future where I can dedicate myself full time to game dev… One day one day…
I don’t really have a point here. If anyone has any resources, tips, or recommendations on this subject let me know.
Edit: Congrats on the new 9.0 release!
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.
Investigating…
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.
You might like SuperCollider! It's free and a programming language made for sound design. Just writing code - but quite far from a DAW.
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.
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”.
Good point w/ journaling and maybe even preparing stuff to share. Right now it feels like trying to eat a whale whole. …That’s the beauty of doing something in a new (to me) domain though. Even if I don’t share, the practice of formulating how I would explain to someone is beneficial.
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!"
Happy to answer any questions about this release, and/or the future of Ardour.
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.
The biggest issue here is that the best library for doing audio warping (ZPlane) is not available to us. We already do realtime audio warping for clip playback, just like Ableton, using RubberBand (and might consider using Staffpad at some point, which we have available for static stretches).
However, following the tempo map is a very different challenge than following user-directed edits between warp markers, and neither RubberBand nor Staffpad really offer a good API for this.
In addition, the GUI side of this poses a lot of questions: do you regenerate waveforms on the fly to be accurate, or just use a GUI-only scaling of an existing waveform, to display things during the editing operation.
We would certainly like to do this, and have a pretty good idea of how to do it. The devil, as usual, is in the details, and there are rather a lot of them.
There's also the detail that having clips be bpm-synced addresses somewhere between 50% and 90% of user needs for audio warping, which reduces the priority for doing the human-edited workflow.
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.)
We don't care much about "full preemption" because the only threads that have time-critical behavior are all scheduled in the SCHED_FIFO and/or SCHED_RR classes. If you had other workloads that could benefit from preemption without using realtime scheduling, then full preemption could be the way to go.
We haven't really tested this sort of thing for quite a few years.
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?
Well, I can't answer for @x42 (Robin Gareus) but for me personally the refactoring of the Editor code so that we could have multiple "editors" was both interesting and hugely challenging.
I didn't want to replicate the code we already had for the Editor, and figuring out to refactor this took a lot of time and experimentation and failures. Although there are still some rough spots, in general I'm very happy with how things turned out.
Clip recording was also a bit of a challenge. It uses an entirely different mechanism than timeline recording, and as usual I got the basics working in a couple of days, followed by months of polishing (and likely, quite a few more to go as we get feedback from users).
> analizer
analyzer. I think analizer has a different meaning.
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.
Most likely we would do a closer-than-normal integration of Cardinal ....
https://cardinal.kx.studio/
You can already load Cardinal as a plugin and get the full scope of is power(s) (or VCV Rack if you paid for the "pro" version). You just don't get the GUI "integrated" into Ardour, and its tied to a specific track.
We might do this via I/O plugins (an existing Ardour feature), which would make the inputs & outputs of Cardinal be just like your hardware. Lots of details to that sort of design, however.
There is also PlugData which could theoretically be handled in a similar way.
What we will not try to do is to implement Yet Another Software Modular Environment ourselves. Cardinal/Rack (or even PD) are approximately infinitely better than anything we could or would do.
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.
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!
Not really. My only released music is a single album at https://pauldavismusic.bandcamp.com/album/suspended-generati... which was made almost entirely with VCV Rack (Ardour was used for some pretty minimal editing). I've also used it for a short podcast series ("Audio Developer Chats") that is currently offline. I do try to talk to musicians and engineers almost every single day about what they're doing, however.
Ardour is very good and needs more attentions. My respects to the developers, I use it every day, and I am very happy with it and its community. I also like the paying / open source model, and I wouldn’t change it for a proprietary DAW 99% of the musicians use.
Very nice looking UI! Powered by forked GTK+ 2 [1]. (First release almost 24 years ago [2]).
[1] https://github.com/Ardour/ardour/tree/9.0/libs/tk/ytk
[2] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-list/2002-March/msg00136...
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).
Is this similar to Ableton? Wanted to "create" music as a hobby, but don't really wanna pay for Ableton. I tried once https://lmms.io/ but didn't stick. Never heard of Ardour.
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
A piano roll in Ardour?! I feel like the earth just moved.
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.
Not familiar with the software, clicked the link, thought the pianoroll screen was a Gantt chart. Thinking "not another project management solution ..." until I realized I was wrong lol.
Very cool, I have not given Ardour a try in many years but the UI looks quite nice. Will give it a go
I'll take this as an opportunity to thank the Ardour developers for making a truly great product. Its really really good.
Off topic but is there a linux DAW which focuses on live loop recording? Something like what the LoopyPro app does on iOS ?
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)
I just setup my first little Linux home studio and Ardour is a large part of that. It's a great piece of software with an admittedly high learning curve for a novice like myself, but it's been incredibly fun learning.
As no small feat, this release is on the HN front page at the same time as Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3-Codex. Big day, big names, congrats!