[HN Gopher] Ardour 9.0
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Ardour 9.0
Author : PaulDavisThe1st
Score : 193 points
Date : 2026-02-05 18:30 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ardour.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (ardour.org)
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Happy to answer any questions about this release, and/or the
| future of Ardour.
| miggol wrote:
| Just wanting to say thanks to the whole team for creating such
| an inspiring and useful creative tool!
|
| I'm most excited to try the perceptual analizer, which was
| something I found always had disappointing performance in
| plugins.
|
| Which of the new features would you say posed the most
| interesting engineering challenge?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Well, I can't answer for @x42 (Robin Gareus) but for me
| personally the refactoring of the Editor code so that we
| could have multiple "editors" was both interesting and hugely
| challenging.
|
| I didn't want to replicate the code we already had for the
| Editor, and figuring out to refactor this took a lot of time
| and experimentation and failures. Although there are still
| some rough spots, in general I'm very happy with how things
| turned out.
|
| Clip recording was also a bit of a challenge. It uses an
| entirely different mechanism than timeline recording, and as
| usual I got the basics working in a couple of days, followed
| by months of polishing (and likely, quite a few more to go as
| we get feedback from users).
| soperj wrote:
| > analizer
|
| analyzer. I think analizer has a different meaning.
| pwdisswordfishs wrote:
| Every set of release notes that's intended to double as a press
| release needs to involve the judicious inclusion of a blurb
| that immediately explains what the hell the thing actually is.
| document.querySelector("#content .section-header +
| p").className = "date"
| document.querySelector("#content .date + p").outerHTML = (`
| <p> We are pleased to announce the release of
| Ardour 9.0. </p> <p style="font-
| style:italic; font-size:smaller; margin:2em
| 4em">Ardour is a free and open-source digital audio workstation
| app that works cross-platform on Linux desktops, Mac OS, and
| Windows. Get Ardour or get involved with the community at <a
| href="https://ardour.org/">Ardour.org</a>.</p>
| <p> Ardour 9.0 is a major release for the project,
| seeing several substantive new features that users
| have asked for over a long period of time. Region
| FX, clip recording, a touch-sensitive GUI,
| pianoroll windows, clip editing and more, not to mention
| dozens of bug fixes, new MIDI binding maps, improved GUI
| performance on macOS (for most)... </p> `)
| jumpocelot wrote:
| Congratulations on the new release! I've seen some forum
| discussions on this in the past, and I'd imagine it's a
| frequently debated topic. However, I'd like to ask about the
| technical feasibility of implementing a feature similar to
| Ableton's 'Warp' within Ardour. I understand that Ardour and
| Ableton have fundamentally different architectures and that
| different DAWs can prioritize different workflows. Given the
| current state of the codebase and the development roadmap, I'm
| curious how realistic the implementation of BPM-synced time-
| stretching actually is or if it remains significantly outside
| the project's scope.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The biggest issue here is that the best library for doing
| audio warping (ZPlane) is not available to us. We already do
| realtime audio warping for clip playback, just like Ableton,
| using RubberBand (and might consider using Staffpad at some
| point, which we have available for static stretches).
|
| However, following the tempo map is a very different
| challenge than following user-directed edits between warp
| markers, and neither RubberBand nor Staffpad really offer a
| good API for this.
|
| In addition, the GUI side of this poses a lot of questions:
| do you regenerate waveforms on the fly to be accurate, or
| just use a GUI-only scaling of an existing waveform, to
| display things during the editing operation.
|
| We would certainly like to do this, and have a pretty good
| idea of how to do it. The devil, as usual, is in the details,
| and there are rather a lot of them.
|
| There's also the detail that having clips be bpm-synced
| addresses somewhere between 50% and 90% of user needs for
| audio warping, which reduces the priority for doing the
| human-edited workflow.
| sovietmudkipz wrote:
| Hi! I recently (2 weeks) chose this software to invest time
| into in order to make music/sfx for video games. Do you
| personally use this software to create music yourself? Just
| curious!
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Not really. My only released music is a single album at
| https://pauldavismusic.bandcamp.com/album/suspended-
| generati... which was made almost entirely with VCV Rack
| (Ardour was used for some pretty minimal editing). I've also
| used it for a short podcast series ("Audio Developer Chats")
| that is currently offline. I do try to talk to musicians and
| engineers almost every single day about what they're doing,
| however.
| breezykoi wrote:
| Hi! I have been happily using Ardour as a hobbyist since
| version 5. At the same time I also started learning Pure Data.
| I was wondering how difficult it would be to implement a
| feature similar to "The Grid" from Bitwig. I'm not sure whether
| this could be done as a simple plugin, or if it would require
| much deeper integration with Ardour.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Most likely we would do a closer-than-normal integration of
| Cardinal ....
|
| https://cardinal.kx.studio/
|
| You can already load Cardinal as a plugin and get the full
| scope of is power(s) (or VCV Rack if you paid for the "pro"
| version). You just don't get the GUI "integrated" into
| Ardour, and its tied to a specific track.
|
| We might do this via I/O plugins (an existing Ardour
| feature), which would make the inputs & outputs of Cardinal
| be just like your hardware. Lots of details to that sort of
| design, however.
|
| There is also PlugData which could theoretically be handled
| in a similar way.
|
| What we will not try to do is to implement Yet Another
| Software Modular Environment ourselves. Cardinal/Rack (or
| even PD) are approximately infinitely better than anything we
| could or would do.
| bilegeek wrote:
| Do you test on different kernel preemption models? If so, do
| you feel PREEMPT_RT really gives an advantage over full
| preemption with threadirqs?
|
| (Cyclictest gives me between a 3x and 5x worst-case latency
| improvement depending on the background load, but I'm not
| nearly musically skilled enough to try a real-world test.)
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| We don't care much about "full preemption" because the only
| threads that have time-critical behavior are all scheduled in
| the SCHED_FIFO and/or SCHED_RR classes. If you had other
| workloads that could benefit from preemption without using
| realtime scheduling, then full preemption could be the way to
| go.
|
| We haven't really tested this sort of thing for quite a few
| years.
| sovietmudkipz wrote:
| Hobbyist game dev here. Getting into audio and music effects has
| been fun but I constantly feel overwhelmed. I chose Ardour as my
| DAW (digital audio workstation) and have been excitedly working
| on learning. I also bought the book " Writing Interactive Music
| for Video Games: A Composer's Guide" which has been very helpful
| at understanding high level vocabulary.
|
| It's a lot of work. I slightly enjoy it but boooooy is getting
| into audio and music pretty challenging. It'll be good if I ever
| need to know what I'm talking about when working with others...
| in the future where I can dedicate myself full time to game
| dev... One day one day...
|
| I don't really have a point here. If anyone has any resources,
| tips, or recommendations on this subject let me know.
|
| Edit: Congrats on the new 9.0 release!
| marai2 wrote:
| A light weight journaling of your learnings as you go along
| would probably be real beneficial to many (such as myself who
| has zero knowledge on the subject of DAWs and creating music
| effects for games). And since you said it's very challenging
| maybe writing about it in small bite-sized learnings might make
| the process easier? Going from "I must learn all this stuff!!"
| to "let's see what audio gems we pick up in our adventure
| today".
| sovietmudkipz wrote:
| Good point w/ journaling and maybe even preparing stuff to
| share. Right now it feels like trying to eat a whale whole.
| ...That's the beauty of doing something in a new (to me)
| domain though. Even if I don't share, the practice of
| formulating how I would explain to someone is beneficial.
| iainctduncan wrote:
| At the risk of sending you down a giant rabbit hole, the book
| Designing Sound is all about making programmatic sounds with
| Pure Data, and open source low-code programming environment
| available for all platforms. From what I've read, the book is
| considered a classic in the video game sound world. It's really
| good. Combine that with the Cipriani book on PD and learning
| Ardour would give you a very good learning path.
| sovietmudkipz wrote:
| Investigating...
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| I recently dated someone in her 30s with a DMA, and she she
| told me how proud she was to know me because I was the first
| non-musician friend she's ever had. It's a very deep and
| insular world.
|
| Pablo Casals famously replied when asked why he was still
| practicing in his 70s that he "felt like we was making
| progress", so don't let yourself feel inadequate.
| bityard wrote:
| Stuff like that sends me down rabbit holes and when I finally
| come up for air, I say, "Gee, now I see how people can build
| their entire career around this!"
| Etheryte wrote:
| As no small feat, this release is on the HN front page at the
| same time as Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3-Codex. Big day, big
| names, congrats!
| dakiol wrote:
| Is this similar to Ableton? Wanted to "create" music as a hobby,
| but don't really wanna pay for Ableton. I tried once
| https://lmms.io/ but didn't stick. Never heard of Ardour.
| timc3 wrote:
| Similar but not quite. One of the problems that you might face
| is a lot of tutorials are for Ableton, Logic, Cubase etc. It
| shouldn't actually matter, but you might find it confusing what
| you can and cant do if you are following what someone else is
| doing in another program. It's like learning C# from a Java
| course. Once you understand the fundamentals it does not matter
| what you use within reason.
|
| But I've used Ardour a long time ago and I don't see why you
| couldn't release music with it. Another alternative is Reaper.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Ardour is not _as_ focused on "in the box composition" (i.e.
| making music entirely on your computer) as Live or Bitwig are.
| It originated as something closer to ProTools or Logic or
| Digital Performer in the sense that it _was_ focused on
| recording people doing stuff
| (blowing,hitting,singing,speaker,scraping etc. etc).
|
| However, in recent years, we've added a lot of the stuff you
| need for "in the box composition" and many people do use it
| that way. There's (always) more to do, but it's fairly capable
| in this sort of workflow now too and will continue to improve
| over time.
|
| Ardour has been around for more than 25 years.
|
| Please be aware that almost any fully-capable DAW (everything
| named here except lmms) has a steep, challenging learning
| curve. Don't jump in thinking it will be easy.
| 4k93n2 wrote:
| if you mean you just want to make music and arent too bothered
| about recording then Cardinal is a free modular eurorack synth
| you could mess around with
|
| or you use a VST host like Kushview's Element and load up on
| all the free VST instruments and effects that are out there.
| you would just need a midi keyboard hooked to it then or use
| Cardinal to generate note patterns
|
| https://cardinal.kx.studio
|
| https://kushview.net/element
|
| or something like Orca if you want to go off the deep end!
|
| https://github.com/hundredrabbits/Orca
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| I just setup my first little Linux home studio and Ardour is a
| large part of that. It's a great piece of software with an
| admittedly high learning curve for a novice like myself, but it's
| been incredibly fun learning.
| tarball wrote:
| Ardour is very good and needs more attentions. My respects to the
| developers, I use it every day, and I am very happy with it and
| its community. I also like the paying / open source model, and I
| wouldn't change it for a proprietary DAW 99% of the musicians
| use.
| locusofself wrote:
| Very cool, I have not given Ardour a try in many years but the UI
| looks quite nice. Will give it a go
| n_kr wrote:
| I'll take this as an opportunity to thank the Ardour developers
| for making a truly great product. Its really really good.
|
| Off topic but is there a linux DAW which focuses on live loop
| recording? Something like what the LoopyPro app does on iOS ?
| mjorgers wrote:
| You might wanna give Bitwig a try, it's one of the best
| commercial DAWs available on Linux. You can record live loops,
| similar to Ableton (it was originally built by ex-Ableton
| developers)
| kvemkon wrote:
| Very nice looking UI! Powered by forked GTK+ 2 [1]. (First
| release almost 24 years ago [2]).
|
| [1] https://github.com/Ardour/ardour/tree/9.0/libs/tk/ytk
|
| [2] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-
| list/2002-March/msg00136...
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| GTK doesn't play _much_ of a role in our GUI. When you 're
| looking at most of the main tabs in Ardour (editor, mixer,
| recorder window, cue page) almost everything you're looking at
| is either our own Canvas or custom widgets. Still we do sit on
| top of GTK+ 2's basic infrastructure and still rely on it for
| the "big widgets" (file browser, tree/listviews, menus, color
| dialogs, text entry).
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