> For option 1, Ardour has a lot of features, but seems to lack in > stability and usability. I have to restart ardour/jack several times > during a session because one or the other becomes unresponsive or > flaky. The transport even completely stopped working last time I > used it. I lost 2 - 4 hrs work and have not been able to get it > working again. Granted, I have not tried too hard to receive help > with it, but I just haven't had good luck with its stability yet. > Perhaps, my problem is more with usability than stability. It may be > intuitive to some people to use the middle mouse button or ctl+right > button combinations, but I have a really hard time getting around in > ardour. > > Another thing about ardour that makes it hard for me to adopt it > wholeheartedly is the way it is developed. It seems, IMHO, that > Release 1.0 should've come out a long time ago, like after real-time > multitrack recording, editing, and mixing were available. Or maybe > start over, do a refactor, then release when those features are > working again. There's something psychologically limiting (to me) > when a product reaches version 0.9beta19 and still doesn't seem ready > for a "release". To me, that seems to create a culture where things > move very slowly and gives the impression that it will never really > be production-ready. I recognize that there are very differing > opinions on what a "release" actually means in open source. I also > recognize that ardour doesn't have my name on it anywhere so I can't > really complain unless I'm contributing to its development. I'm not > trying to start a war, just to figure out what direction I need to > settle on, so I'll shut up about that. It depends on what you are looking for - for me - needing just the features ardour has, multitrack and DAW ? la pro-tools, JACK, I honestly can't see any other option, audacity is way off, it's good but not a good multitrack DAW. As for the UI it is just like you would expect in a DAW, It's hard but thats mostly the way life is when you want to do hard stuff: like good recording, mastering, composing, lossless editing. Personally I find ardour well above acceptable in terms of usability and even stability in the sense that even though it's not crash-proof i've never lost anything, I guess I'm lucky... I can't imagine any better free professional alternative, hardware monitoring, unlimited tracks and "busses", jack connections to other software et cetera. If you don't need it, just use something else, spend $$ on pro-tools and you will get just the same(UI and all) but a bit less flexible and lose lots of money. Just use what works for you, it's just wrong to use Ardour if you don't need the features. Try rezound or whatever they're all good. Ardors strength is that it's flexible, got professional features and high end hardware "support" in the sense that it's made with RME-Hammerfall and similar hardware in mind, it's kind of useless with you're grandma's SoundBlaster 16 ISA card :) I can recommend you try some commercial alternatives, and all available linux software as well just to see the difference. In my world what makes ardour good is that it "gets it right". Which I guess is a matter of taste. And since Ardour is beta it will probably get even more things even more right in the future :) I'd say, go for ardour, once you'll get a hang of it you won't regret it. /z
