So, this has probably been brought up before but I didn’t find it, and for linux users it wouldn’t be such a big deal, because we have a ton of free, great plugins easily obtainable with a few install commands, but for Mac and (Yes I know, technically unsupported) Windows, this could help draw in a lot of people who don’t want to/can’t afford a lot of/any third party plugins.
Are there any plans to create some stock plugins for ardour, and is this something the rest of the community would like to see?
AFAIK in the past they always said to develop a daw and not plugins.
And i’m pretty sure that there are far more free plugins for windows then for linux.
If you search on kvraudio then you’ll find 472 vst/vst3 plugins for windows 64bit and ±300 for OSX.
I think the bigger issue is support. The devs prefer to not have to support plugins, but instead point people to their respective developers.
I also think it would be good if there were a set of cross platform plugins that could be “recommended” but not “supported”, but at this time such a set with sufficient quality to recommend doesn’t exist.
@cajmere Well for the first bit, that’s all well and good, but we’re at a point in time where --every-- DAW has stock plugins included, so to really be competitive I think that it’s somewhat important. For the second point, first of all, sure windows might have more free plugins (I’m not sure it really does, I have around 900 on my ubuntu machine. Obviously I don’t personally use all of them, but for this example that isn’t the point), but windows also has exponentially more plugins in general, so that’s only natural that it would accumulate more freebies. Second, trying to find GOOD free plugins in Windows/OSX is an egg hunt at best from my experience, some types really just don’t have any good answers in the free world (ex: where is a good free multiband compressor on windows?), and finding enough good ones to be able to use only freebies and still produce quality work is arguably not possible, so I’d say that argument is somewhat moot, imo at least.
@ssj71 In my eyes, that’s a much more reasonable excuse for avoiding including plugins in Ardour. I think that increasing the appeal of Ardour for other platforms would be more beneficial than the issues of extra support that it would accrue, though. I also think you could be onto something. If there were like a solid suite of plugins that could be recommended for every platform, that would probably help; or maybe even an “Ardour Edition” of a suite of plugins that could be included in Ardour but have support linked to the respective dev.
I think a “solid suite of plugins” kind of solution is already there: Mixbus. It s cross plattform and has amazing plugins. of course not open source etc…