I have no doubt really, that Ardour is very powerful. But one important measure of how a musician will like the software, is in how it will be useful to him. I’ve never really looked at the different Web -based definitions of “DAW” or “multitracker”. I do know that a musician friend of mine uses his software in ways which might be different from any of you.
What this friend of mine does, whose name is Danny, is that he accepts the sound quality of his sound card, as being a preview quality. Then, he takes advantage of the fact that his software will allow him to export his music into high-quality sound files, so that he can record the music at a much higher quality, using dedicated boxes. I do understand that Ardour will also allow him to do that. Also, Danny experiments with different ideas on his Mac, before actually playing those ideas with his own hands. This latter part is something which I may never be able to do.
But when Danny asked me the other day, what exactly Ardour is, because he saw Ardour listed in a Web page, I needed to give him an answer which was both honest and quick. And so at that moment I do have to know, how to explain to him, whether and why he can use Ardour for what he wants to do. And so I told him, that it’s not really a DAW as such, but rather ‘more like a multitracker’. I did know that if I had told him, that this was a DAW, Danny would have expected to be able to use it much as he uses “Garage Band Pro”, which means with the computer as a comprehensive platform to experiment with.
Now, if I had asked Danny to indulge me, I might have tried explaining to him that on some computers, it’s possible to have a system such as “JACK”, and that the outputs from “Hydrogen” could be redirected into ‘Ardour’, for example. But Danny is also a person without the attention span needed to understand JACK, and needed to know how to redirect a significant number of inputs and outputs using JACK. His expectations are a WYSIWYG-type of approach. So I also don’t get to define my words any way I like them, myself.
It’s true that my own expectation is for a DAW to be very self-contained. This doesn’t mean that any of my own programs need to be, because my own needs are again different from Danny’s. I have more than one Linux computer set up with many sound and music programs, and I distinguish between sound and music editors in ways which I think make sense. But because I’m a visual person, I can keep track of JACK connections, I tend to think of LASH as a potential annoyance myself, because it adds another layer of indirection. And I’d say that maybe Hydrogen is closer to being a ‘classic DAW’ than Ardour is.
This doesn’t in any way mean that Hydrogen is better than Ardour. It just means, that Hydrogen is expected to fulfill a different need. And of course, the fact that I can trace many connections on a logical level, isn’t musical in its nature, and makes me a bit special in the world of musicians which I’m used to seeing. The fact that you guys do make use of Ardour, is typical on this bulletin board, but not in the social milieu I live.
And so one thing which I have already achieved, is that people on this one thread are discussing possible ways of defining terms, which I think is still healthy. Because as soon as one person can understand our words to mean something different from what we’re trying to say, we have a problem.
Danny has told me in person, that his sound card, on his Mac at home, is crap. And so he understood me, about where I was going with Ardour. He also understood the screenshots already, to imply that Ardour can apply effects. I plan to go back to Danny soon, and to emphasize the fact again, that Ardour will apply many effects. What I expect him to answer, in his own logic, is ‘What good will that do me, if I can’t play them?’
And I’m thankful for your tip, to just (Ctrl)+(Left-Click) on an Ardour control, in order to assign which MIDI controller number to it.
I think that what the WiKi stated about MIDI controllers the last time I read it, was in there existing “major controllers” and “minor controllers”. According to the WiKi, the major controllers include the actual keyboard, and have at least 16 bits of precision, so that a trombone slide won’t sound like a fretted guitar. And WiKi defined the kind of item you call a control surface as a “minor MIDI controller” that last time I checked, stating that it only has 8 bits of precision.
I needed to make the connection first of all, to see that your “control surface” corresponded to a MIDI minor controller, according to what I last read. But I think that I already last read this in 2009. By 2010, the WiKi itself might have been updated somewhat, by people who also care about how to define things.
Dirk