Ardour is a powerful digital audio workstation that gives you everything you need to record, edit, mix, and arrange professional audio. It is similar to other software like ProTools, Nuendo, Sonar and Logic, and capable of replacing analog or digital tape systems.
Specifically, Ardour is a multichannel hard disk recorder (HDR) and digital audio workstation (DAW). It can be used to control, record, edit and run and complex audio setups.
Ardour supports pro-audio interfaces through the ALSA project, which provides high quality, well design device drivers and API’s for audio I/O under Linux. Any interface supported by ALSA can be used with Ardour. This includes the all-digital 26 channel RME Hammerfall, the Midiman Delta 1010 and many others.
Ardour has support for 24 bit samples using floating point internally, non-linear editing with unlimited undo, a user-configurable mixer, MTC master/slave capabilities, MIDI hardware control surface compatibility. It supports MIDI Machine Control, and so can be controlled from any MMC controller and many modern digital mixers.
Ardour contains a powerful multitrack audio editor / arranger that is completely non-destructive and capable of all standard non-linear editing operations (insert, replace, delete, move, trim, select, cut / copy / paste). The editor has unlimited undo / redo capacity and can save independent “versions” of a track or entire piece.
Ardour’s editor supports the community-developed LADSPA plugin standard. Arbitrary chains of plugins can be attached to any portion of a track. Every mixer strip can have any number of inputs and outputs, not just mono, stereo or 5.1. An N-way panner is included, with support for various panning models. Pre- and post-fader sends exist, each with their own gain and pan controls. Every mixer strip acts as its own bus, and thus the bus count in Ardour is unlimited. You can submix any number of strips into another strip.
Ardour’s channel capacity is limited only by the number on your audio interface and the ability of your disk subsystem to stream the data back and forth.
JACK (the JACK Audio Connection Kit) is used for all audio I/O, permitting data to be exchanged in perfect samplesync with other applications and/or hardware audio interfaces.
Ardour is sample rate and size neutral – any hardware formats from 8 to 32 bits, rates from 8kHz to 192kHz. Internal processing in 32/64 bit IEEE floating point format.
Key Features
- Unlimited audio tracks and buses.
- Multichannel recording.
- Input gain control.
- Non-destructive editing with unlimited undo/redo:
- Adjust everything about your session and its timeline layout.
- Trim regions, crossfade by dragging, timestretch useful samples, split and regroup audio, move non-contiguous selections around, identify and use song chunks.
- Full automation support.
- Automatic track delay compensation.
- Sample accurate automation.
- Powerful mixer:
- 32 bit floating point mixer offers endless headroom and guaranteed bit-for-bit fidelity for 24 bit samples.
- Mix any number of tracks that your hardware can handle, and you can use both MMC and generic MIDI control surfaces to manage the mix.
- Unlimited tracks/busses/plugins.
- Timecode synchronization.
- Hardware control from surfaces like the Mackie Control Universal.
- Relies on plugins to enable many features from FX processing to dynamics control:
- Supports the LADSPA plugin API.
- More than 200 LADSPA & LV2 plugins freely available.
- Runs with any hardware supported by JACK.
- Supports a wide range of audio-for-video features such as video-synced playback and pullup/pulldown sample rates.
- Standard file formats (BWF, WAV, WAV64, AIFF, CAF & more …).
- Hi-DPI support.
Website: ardour.org
Support: Manual
Developer: Paul Davis and many contributors
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
Ardour is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Digital Audio Workstations | |
|---|---|
| Ardour | Record, edit and mix with this digital audio workstation |
| MusE | Full featured MIDI and audio sequencer with recording and editing |
| Bespoke | Software modular synthesizer with a large range of modules |
| Zrythm | Automated and intuitive digital audio workstation |
| Rosegarden | Sophisticated MIDI (and audio) sequencer and notation editor |
| Qtractor | Audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer |
| Radium | Music editor sporting a sleek interface |
| LMMS | Digital audio workstation |
| Helio | Music sequencer for desktop and mobile platforms |
| Seq66 | MIDI sequencer and live-looper |
| Stargate | All-in-one DAW and plugin suite |
| tek | Colorful music making program |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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