Ardour on iOS?

Community Ideas for Ardour
#1

Hi there,
recently I got myself a iPad and I really dig the hype about it. Its pretty cool and could be a laptop replacement.

I already read the recent ARM thread, but it looks like Apple is heading to ARMing the Macs in the future (10.15 or so).

IMO it would be wise to start to support it. Maybe a additional paid iPad Version would be a good start, and later it could be (propably) easily support the new Macs - and the market is not too fed up with DAWs for ARM and/or iOS.

Waddaya think? :slight_smile:

#2

i’m not the developer here but I can’t see it happening:

  1. Ardour has no touch-oriented user interface
  2. the software tooling for Ardour isn’t avalable for iOS
  3. iPads are poor performers with weak CPUs and little RAM. Laptops with equivalent specs are dirt cheap and eminently more useful for Ardour (they have a keyboard for starters)
#3

@sonnie

Unlikely any time soon, would require almost a complete rebuild of the UI, not even sure you can compile GTK on iOS (My money is on NO, it is complex enough on OS X where there are far fewer limitations on the dev environment). Given the UI is probably 75-90% of the work done for Ardour you would be better off rewriting from scratch anyways at that point for a lot of it.

That being said having been using basic audio editors for iOS lately, they just do not compare to a multi-track DAW like Ardour honestly. Even the multitrack environments on iOS are an absolute pain to use compared to Ardour and not as powerful. There are some basic things I will tackle on iOS these days, I am finishing up a show I used it for a quick VO recording solution for instance that I could quickly record through an Apogee and edit with basic processing an upload to Google Drive to allow me to import into my playback solution. Worked decently for that, but even the single file editing is rough, basic things like a SPLIT command on a touch only interface are difficult, especially when you want to do it with precision (You ever noticed how fat your finger really is?)

   Seablade
1 Like
#4

@seablade: And I think it would require a change in the rules regarding publishing open source applications to the app store - unless this has happened already?
(personally I find phones, tablets, etc to be far more useful for content consumption than content creation)

#5

While iOS in general might be possible. Ardour on the App Store is no-go, because the GPL, LGPL etc is not compatible with the App Store license (see recent VLC issues, the VLC team needed to dual-license it - GPL or MPL - and drop *GPL dependencies).

So even if you we could create an Ardour iOS app, distribution would be an issue.

Using the iOS as remote control surface for Ardour – via OSC (TouchOSC app or similar) – is a very viable option, though.

#6

I am considering developing an app for Ardour that connects to a computer-based instance via RPC or similar protocol. If someone else is interested let me know and if enough overall interest then I can get it started.