Any way to tryout?

As far as I understand, this month the Ardour-team has put a minimum donation (10€) on all downloads, due to lacking resouces for development. This seems fair enough, and I would be happy to donate whatever the developers need, but I really need to know if Ardour will work with external soundcard, that it does what I would expect it to do, recognizes my midi-controllers etc.

Is there any way to test Ardour without “buying” (which I would happily do if I knew I was going to use it) - maybe as a trial, as a demo with disabled save-functionality, or something similar?

Thanks in advance.

This doesn’t depend on ardour.

It should be supported on linux by alsa or ffado in case of firewire device.
If you use mac os x, then it should be supported by os x or developpers of the soundcards.

If you use linux rme is well supported with pci of pci express cards. I use multiface II with hdpsp pci-express card.
Works perfect out of the box.
In the past i worked with m-audio delta 1010lt wich worked also great out of the box.

For firewire devices, check http://www.ffado.org/

If you are on Linux you can always install Ardour from repositories as well. While the binary from this website is what we request everyone use to get support, you can try it out with the distro versions should you care to. What distro are you on?

    Seablade

Ardour doesn’t communicate with your soundcard directly, and as such it neither knows (or cares) what the audio interface is - Instead ardour communicates via the JACK audio server, and the JACK audio server routes the audio between compatible applications (such as Ardour) and also to and from the soundcard hardware. To do this, JACK uses either ALSA drivers (normally for PCI(e) cards and some USB devices) or FFADO drivers for firewire. The audio path is something like:

Ardour -> JACK -> ALSA -> Soundcard -> speakers

and

Microphone -> soundcard -> ALSA -> JACK -> Ardour

If you are already running a linux distribution which has ALSA or FFADO drivers compatible with your audio card, then it’s highly likely that Ardour (via JACK) will work for you. You should be able to install a version of Ardour (to test) from the distribution’s package / software manager.

If you don’t already have a linux distribution installed, there are several ‘Live’ distros which you can run from a USB stick or CD / DVD and install later if they work for you.

Some good examples:

AV Linux:

http://www.bandshed.net/AVLinux.html

and

Dream Studio

http://dream.dickmacinnis.com/forum/