[Ardour-Dev] Ardour 2.3 released

Fons Adriaensen fons at kokkinizita.net
Sat Feb 9 15:58:52 PST 2008


On Fri, Feb 08, 2008 at 09:25:10AM -0500, Paul Davis wrote:

> 2.3 includes major new features in the area of tempo management
> and feature analysis, a dozen or so important-to-useful bug fixes,
> another dozen or so improvements and provisional LV2 (LADSPA version
> 2) support.


Congratulations to all involved !

While it's good to see development of Ardour continue,
this announcement saddens me in some way. 

What follows is my personal impression and evaluation,
things may look different to others, and it's not meant
to degrade the magnificent work done.

What saddens me is that the new features make it
plain clear what has been in the air for some time:
that Ardour is moving away from being a DAW to being
a WPMPW - a Western Pop Music Production Workstation.

Features such as tempo analysis, editing while
preserving beat alignment etc. are very centric to
one particular type of music and make absolutely no
sense outside that area of interest. Add things like
time strectching or even just midi and the picture
is complete.

Of course this is 'market driven' - it follows 'the
competion' and viewed in that context it is only to
be expected.

But if you want a DAW that just does 'audio' processing
- recording, editing and mixing - without in any way
touching the 'musical' aspect, all these stuff *does*
get in the way, even if only by complicating the user
interface.

And it certainly gets in the way by increasing complexity
and consequently degrading stability and reliability.
I'm seasoned enough in software engineering - and so all
the Ardour developers I imagine - to know this is really
unavoidable. And none of these features are optional -
you can't build Ardour without them unless you really
love a major headache.

What this means is that at some point I'll have to
abandon Ardour and search for another solution. Or
build one myself. And that makes me sad, because
Ardour is a great piece of software. 

Ciao,

-- 
FA

Laboratorio di Acustica ed Elettroacustica
Parma, Italia

Lascia la spina, cogli la rosa.




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