Until then, for most users, it’s a fantastic option especially if you work primarily with audio. Once they deal with the MIDI and arrangement deficits, it will easy compare with other big-name DAWs costing $600. That said though, for a very reasonable price, Ardour is an excellent option in today’s world of a million DAWs.
You’re on your own in the wild world of LV2, VST and possibly AU to find products to supplement your software use. Ardour also does not come with a plethora of demos for you to ponder spending your money on. It also has many of the disadvantages, such as the relatively basic MIDI support. I don’t think I could definitively say that I prefer Ardour over Mixbus or Mixbus over Ardour, but they both offer clear advantages.Īrdour has most of the advantages I covered with Mixbus, including the amazing team of people working on it, but minus the Harrison DSP additions.
Metering point is more flexible - A meter point can be setup and put pre/post fader or at any point in the plugin signal flow as desired.Pan is movement is editable - You can bias the pan to one direction or the other if necesseary.Channels can be made narrow on a per-track basis.I/O, Monitoring and polarity inversion is always visible.Obviously mixbus comes with its own setup as I described before.Īrdour in my view has some benefits though. NightliesĪ big difference between Ardour and Mixbus is the mixer. Overall the setup is much better in Ardour I feel. There’s other examples that I’ve encountered, but I think that is sufficient to get my point across.Īrdour also allows having a track being controlled by multiple VCAs like Mixbus. Sometimes I’ll have the whole choir, a soloist section, and each solist individually miced. A choir is another single ‘instrument’ with multiple multi-miced “instruments”.I will often want to automate the drums as a whole kit, but need to control multiple snare tracks (2-3 mics on a snare) as well. A drumkit is a single instrument that has many single instruments that may be recorded with multiple microphones.This workflow is fantastic when you’re working with instruments that contain multiple tracks of single instruments. It’s become somewhat of a joke during this review (in my discussions with other folks) that I really prefer the ability to assign a VCA to another VCA. LOOK! LOOK!! I’m assigning a VCA to a VCA. Review of Mixbus instruments and MIDI plugins.I won’t be covering all of the differences between Mixbus and Ardour, but I will cover what I feel is fairly important.įirst check over the other posts I’ve written about Mixbus and Ardour. So I’m going to take a moment and give a very short review of Ardour and explain some differences from the Mixbus review I did. According to my time sink logs I’ve spent about 60 hours in Ardour working on a project, and looking at the differences between the current version 5.12. I previously started a review with Ardour, and stopped due to some issues that made it not possible for me to work efficiently.Ĭlearly, as I’ve been using Mixbus 4.1/4.2, Ardour is up to the task of being used and I have been using it. You may also know that Mixbus is based upon Ardour, an open source DAW.
If you follow this blog then you’d know that I’ve been reviewing mixbus for “30 days” (more like 2.5 months).
Ardour, using the 'Cubasish' colour theme