Ardour 6.0 released

That Ardour website is a pretty nice website.  I am pretty sure @AVLinux uses it.  It is interesting to note that bad things are said about Ardour.   Many bad things are always said about Cinelerra to include the old-fashioned gui and missing features.  But I think that this is true of almost every software program. 

Even Gimp, which is practically a necessity these days, has been criticized as shown in this quote:  "Honestly, its hard to say what's wrong with Gimp, because I can't figure out anything fully right about it. Even the fact that I'm comparing with Adobe Photoshop, a program itself known for horribly beginner-hostile and unintuitive (but in a weird way "learnable" and "natural") UI is a sign of how off things are.

Posted by: @andreapaz

Period full of releases of excellent Open Source programs. The new version 6.0 of DAW Ardour has been released. Visit the site for news:
https://ardour.org/
I don't know the world of audio mixing; I often hear bad things about Ardour in terms of the old interface and lack of essential features. Is this true? Are there better alternatives in Linux?

Hi @andreapaz

For Audio recording Mixing and Mastering work Ardour can easily go toe to toe with any other DAW out there on any platform, as far as it's interface it uses GTK2 so it looks very 'Linuxy' but in my opinion they do a very good job of making it quite attractive and functional at the same time. Using Ardour with 'JACK' allows Audio routing anything to anywhere and routing any other JACK-aware applications (ie Hydrogen Drum Machine) in and out of Ardour is only one of its very powerful traits.. that's the good stuff..

Where Ardour needs improvement is... Working with MIDI: Ardour has a decent foundation for MIDI work but the focus over the past few development cycles including a complete Audio engine rewrite has been on Audio so MIDI needs some detailing, finishing and finessing to compete with other DAWs also Ardour is not ideal for modern loop-based EDM (Electronic Dance Music) types of production, it of course is possible to do but it is not an intended focus for Ardour to do loop-based production (even the Ardour devs will tell you this), applications like the commercial 'Bitwig' are more intended for that sort of workflow.

As far as Audio interfaces Ardour itself has nothing to do with that, any driver limitations for Audio hardware fall at the feet of ALSA and Kernel developers, so Ardour has no more limitations than Linux in general does. That said Linux has increasing support for many pro Audio recording interfaces and control surfaces and any USB Audio devices that are designed to be "class compliant" are general seamlessly supported under Linux.

There are an increasing number of professional DAWs for Linux users now:

Ardour, Harrison Mixbus (based on Ardour with professional recording console DSP), Reaper, Bitwig, Qtractor, Tracktion, Renoise to name a few of the most common ones..

Thanks for the info, Glen.
I bought a book on sound technique; sooner or later I'll try to figure it out 🙂

Do you think audio or video editing is more complex?