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The fine folks who develop the Ardour Digital Audio Workstation for linux have released version 2.8.4. This will be the final release of the  2.x series unless there is a catastrophic bug or something similarly problematic that needs to be addressed. This is largely a bug-fix release, with a few new features, and should be very stable.

Next up on the Ardour to-do list is continuing development of the 3.0 code-base, for eventual release. Version 3.0 is greatly anticipated since it will incorporate MIDI support, which is something that Ardour users have been looking forward to for some time.

As I said in a previous post, Ardour is an amazing tool that rivals the big commercial DAW programs. If any of you do digital audio work, and have been thinking of switching to linux, now would be a great time because of the robustness and availability of great tools like this.


Ardour DAW 2.8.4 Released

I've been following the development of the Ardour DAW program for years.  Back in the day when I was a very new Linux user I took note of this program, its goals, and its development.  At that time, installing it required lots of libraries, and there really weren't any pre-compiled binary options.  Since I wasn't a very experienced Linux user, the idea of compiling the program, and all of its dependencies was very daunting.

Well times have changed.  All of the good Linux distributions have package management programs that install the programs and all necessary dependencies.

Since I became unemployed, I have been very interested in getting back into audio production, and recording, again.  I installed Ardour onto my desktop machine last month, and found it to be a very capable DAW that is rich in features.  Unlike the commercial DAW programs, I can log into an IRC channel and speak to the main developer (and most of the developers) at any reasonable hour, almost any day of the week, which is an amazing resource.

Of late I've been more involved in some of the online music forums, and I've made a few new friends, and I ended up using Ardour to mix a tune that a friend from Vancouver recorded, and I found Ardour to be an amazingly powerful program, that was very easy to understand and adapt to with all of my analog audio experience.  Steve and I are pretty happy with the way the tune came out, and the tune called Big Mouth, can be found here.

If you're a Linux or MacOS user, I would really recommend using Ardour, and donating to the development team.  I made a modest donation myself, and when I get some spare cash, intend to build a dedicated Ardour box, and hope to make some money on the side mixing projects for people out there on the inter-tubes.  Pipe Dream?  Maybe, but I'm gonna give it a shot as soon as I am able.

 Ardour 2.8.1 released