thanks for your thoughts, greg! i am in a very similar position to you, and agree with most of what you have to say. irrespective of ardour's current status, it IS a shame that there is not at least one other viable professional multitracking/editing package nearing completion. as for ardour itself, i HAVE seen quite substantial leaps in its stability and usefulness over the last 6 months, (and my current machine -- only a pIII at 500 MHz) demands efficient and well-written software. i CAN get things done with it now. HOWEVER, there have been a few disasters, and, as you point out, when things are not rock-solid, it IS very hard to really put your trust in it enough to use it in "prime time". i still have hope that ardour will get sorted out, but i suspect i will have to throw better hardware at it to make it really happy. that brings me to the question of options -- even if ardour was fully reliable, there are things about how it operates which would make me want to look for alternatives. the only one i have found with real potential is protux. it is a beautiful and thoroughly alternative concept, but still in its infancy. currently, the developers are in the process of building the primitives of which it will, finally, be constituted. it does a few things, but is not useful yet and is not scheduled to reach v1 until 2006. http://www.nongnu.org/protux/ as far as i can see, there is still nothing which offers a "three-point" editing solution, advanced dithering, and impulse response convolution reverb (three features which are important to me in particular). having said all that, if one adopts a different working methodology linux may, even now, offer a more flexible overall solution. there are numerous, varied, tools available, with various strengths, weaknesses, and styles. i've begun to come around to the idea of using a variety of tools in any given project, rather than expecting any single, big application to be the "virtual studio" which does it all. think more in terms of the OS as the virtual studio. one package which i must not leave unnamed is bill schottstaedt's SND. it is an extremely rich and robust tool which CAN do just about everything i'm looking for. HOWEVER (and so far i have not come to terms with this) it is a destructive editor -- sounds are loaded into RAM, worked on, and then saved in their modified form back to disk. it is near-impossible to step back and tweak an EQ you adjusted a few days ago on a particular component of your mix. but still, take a look if you're not familiar with it. http://ccrma.stanford.edu/software/snd/ another one that's very much worth investigating, especially if you are into some coding (just to provide a friendlier UI if you need it) is ecasound. it is deeper than a lot of people realize. well, my response has been almost as long as your question.... i look forward to others' thoughts! best- -p
