SAE Institute sponsors Ardour open source DAW project

Blog
#1

15.5.2007 – London, UK - SAE Institute, the leading worldwide college for audio engineering, has agreed to become a corporate sponsor of Ardour, the open source digital audio workstation project. This major sponsorship ensures continual development of Ardour as a free, community-based audio recording and production software. Ardour has previously received corporate support from Solid State Logic and Harrison, but has primarily relied on donations from the public and the dedication of creator Paul Davis

This new initiative will support the further development of Ardour to become a viable DAW alternative for home and professional studio users, freely available to anyone. Development aims include a more integrated experience on Mac OS X. A separate version is intended to be developed which will be tailored towards beginner students, whilst also being available to anyone and staying compatible with the main branch of Ardour.

Ardour is a native multitrack recording, editing and mixing software. It includes a powerful mixer, automation as well as flexible routing and hardware independency through the underlying JACK audio system. Ardour offers various synchronisation options, varispeed playback, flexible editing options and many more features usually found in commercial products. Ardour supports a wide range of audio-for-video features such as video-synced playback and pullup/pulldown sample rates. There are also powerful features such as "persistent undo", multi-language support, and destructive track punching modes that aren't available on other platforms. The software is currently available on Mac OS X and Linux operating systems.

Above all, Ardour strives to meet the needs of professional users.

SAE is looking forward to supporting a strong open source project. SAE CEO Tom Misner comments, “The audio community will benefit from a viable open source alternative to established DAW products. For a while now some of our staff worldwide have been exploring and using Ardour and I have received positive feedback about this software. It has always been our priority to give our students access to a wide variety of systems. Ardour will be a great addition to our existing industry-standard Digital Audio Workstations”.

About SAE:
SAE Institute was founded in 1976 as the first audio school. It has since grown to become a network of over 45 colleges in 20 countries offering courses in Audio Engineering, Digital Film, Web Design and Interactive Entertainment. With 26 years of teaching experience, SAE teaches students the skills necessary for successful work in the audio and media industries. The concept of SAE is practical hands-on training, combined with solid theory knowledge. SAE offers courses in Audio Engineering, Electronic Music Production, Web Design + Development, Interactive Entertainment and Digital Film making. Students have the option to progress to Degree programmes, validated by Middlesex University, at SAE’s dedicated Degree Centres around the world. SAE is the first step into a career in the future-orientated fields of audio technology and media production.

About Ardour:
Ardour is a free software hard disk recorder and digital audio workstation application released under the GNU General Public License. It currently runs on Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS X. Its primary author is Paul Davis, who is also responsible for the JACK Audio Connection Kit. The Ardour project seeks to provide digital audio workstation software suitable for professional use.

Contact:
SAE Institute
Angi Kuzma
United House, North Road
London N7 9DP
Ph: 020 – 7609 2653
Fax: 020 – 7609 6944

#2

This is great news. The development of a more integrated OS X experience seems a little odd at first glance, as I don’t have any issues with the X11 system we have now. However, I have been using Ardour on OS X with our students (not SAE) for around a year (alongside Pro Tools and Logic), and anything that makes booting the program feel more like the others will reduce any perceived gap between them (the majority of our students prefer working in Ardour over the others, by the way). A smoother experience will also mean more users and a strengthened user base. The main reason we’ll keep running Ardour on OS X is hardware support; we have a few MOTU interfaces. However, we’re running one Intel Mac as an Ubuntu Studio trial system, and Ardour makes much more sense in that setting. I would personally rather boot into a Linux partition to run Ardour than run it in OS X; not because of any issue with Ardour, but because the Linux ecosystem is so rich. The Linux environment is a great teaching tool for more advanced students, with the advantage that they can run the software at home too. I would imagine that having such a high-quality tool available in OS X will draw more people into Linux audio over time, just as it has for us and our students.

#3

Congrats, this is great news! I’m looking forward to not needing to use X11. I’ll bet that this will be a boon to other GTK apps as well, S/A GINP, Inkscape, and the host of other portable linux audio apps.

Maybe you can convince them to contribute to the MOTU reverse engineered linux driver project. :wink: :wink: I also would love to cast off Mac OS X for ubustudio, but my hardware is in the way.

Once more, congratulations on this great news.

~bennyp

#4

Off topic: Running GTK+ apps without X11: http://developer.imendio.com/projects/gtk-macosx

#5

Full,complete YES to this!!

Ardour is the very crownjewel of Linuxaudio - it makes a Linuxbox a serious tool to produce any kind of record (given, one have musicians worth being recorded :wink: )

I write this on an IBook running Linux - 10 days of testing MacOSX lead to the result, that my Linux-Boxes do not need it as a sidekick…

I congratulate both Paul and the Ardour people for the new supporters and SAE for making a sane and futurewise decision!

#6

Great news… On so many different levels… This means not only does Paul and the project get the financial support it deserves but also that Ardour should receive greater exposure to students in that orginisation.

I think the effort to reverse engineer drivers for motu devices is well under way. In fact it is only the second firewire based soundcard type to be supported. (first being the Bebob Devices).
MOTUs attitude towards the linux developers however has discouraged me from ever wanting to buy hardware from them again.

#7

this is great. it’s also good to see SAE looking ahead. i once did an SAE course (in Australia) but left it as i found they were too focused on ‘this is how WE do it, so this is how YOU will do it’, whereas i had just finished a TAFE certIV in audio production the year before and they were much more focused on teaching the ideas behind production, as opposed to ‘the protools method’. perhaps it was just the lecturers/tutors that i had there and not the organisation as a whole, but if this is anything to go by then it is truly a good sign. congratulations!

porl

#8

Great! I was beginning to worry…

Keep the good work!

#9

SAE is looking forward to supporting a strong open source project. SAE CEO Tom Misner comments, “The audio community will benefit from a viable open source alternative to established DAW products. For a while now some of our staff worldwide have been exploring and using Ardour and I have received positive feedback about this software. It has always been our priority to give our students access to a wide variety of systems. Ardour will be a great addition to our existing industry-standard Digital Audio Workstations”.

buy dvd

#10

With all the talk about running gtk apps without virtualization, has anyone been able to get this running on windows? Device drivers for higher end audio cards seem to be lacking for linux. I do audio editing for some video bloggers on my job with an arizona webdesign company and unfortunately we have a bunch of windows workstations.

#11

“Device drivers for higher end audio cards seem to be lacking for linux.”
I think that this statement is not really correct, but the point is that you have to look if your card will be supported in linux before you buy it.
For example nearly all M-Audio devices are supported under linux, also the most of the rme soundcards are.

regards, hg87

#12

Well I have a sb audigy ext card (which is completely unsupported in vista) and I use the emu101 driver and it works but misses out on some of the external device’s functionality - external inputs, controls etc. (I’m a huge linux fan, not trying to crap on all the hardwork the open source community is doing for guys like me) But your point is taken about research before buying.

#13

We love the functionallity of Ardour. Can’t wait for it to become an alternative for home and professional studio users.