First should I continue my subscription? That is, can I expect to see an Ardour version for Windows in the next year?
Last If the answer is no please help my “can’t hack the curve” brain to understand. Feel free to use small words and vitriolic phrases, I sincerely want to understand the reasons.
I am with Gabe Newell in loathing the big W. I have installed Ubuntu for months at a time on three separate occasions. I could not “hack the learning curve.” Because I couldn’t hack it and still need computers I now use Windows. I may go back but I need to edit content today. It is important to note here that I am not willing to switch to Apple products for personal and deep seeded reasons. I saw the many excellent aspects of Ardour and subscribed happily. I realize now that just having the excellent aspects of Ardour work for me, may never happen on Windows.
I sincerely thank you for your any time and effort you are willing to give me in response and have a great day.
JackOTrade: the source code for Ardour that can be obtained from our git repository (specifically the “cairocanvas” branch) builds and runs on Windows using mingw, and has a packaging script that provides an installer. Substantial amounts of work have been done to make this happen. It may also be possible to build with Microsoft Visual C++ at some point in the not too distant future.
The people involved in developing Ardour itself have absolutely no plans whatsoever to release a prebuilt version for Windows because we will be drowned in the world of supporting Windows users. This is just simply not going to happen. We do not have the resources for this and there is no sign of them ever showing up.
I will repeat what I have said for years: there is nothing stopping people interested in Ardour on Windows from forming their own group, doing their own release and providing whatever level of support to users that they feel like offering. This effort will derail Ardour development if it is taken on by the existing Ardour community, and I do not want that to happen (neither do our existing Linux and OS X users).
Thanks for your support. We have made Ardour ready for Windows but releasing it in a ready to run format is an entirely different question.
Thanks for the quick response.
I am going to try the mingw. Paul, in another one of the forums there was a defunct link to an article that explained why the Devs here didn’t want to be involved with supporting windows. I am new to this debate and as the link was defunct I was hopping you could give me a way to understand your values on this subject. Thanks and I will get back to you on how mingw worked for me.