[Ardour-Dev] Some additional ideas for Ardour

[Grammostola Rosea]

Hi,


Congrats with the new website. I think this will pull more people to Ardour.
To improve the picture of Ardour to the external world and to get more 
financial resources, I have the following suggestions:

1) Focus more on educational institutions (like SAE)

Ardour could be the perfect DAW for educational purposes like it is used 
by SAE. I can imagine Ardour is attracting for more educational 
institutions like SAE is.
- Ardour is a good tool to learn how to work with a DAW
- You can learn working with a DAW without having to pay a lot of money.

But on the new website I can't find anything about a 'special student 
version'.
Is there still some kind of SAE version? I would offer it and name it on 
the new frontpage (call it SAE version or student version). I would even 
thinking about a special Tab on the website with title 'student version' 
or 'educational version', with some information about how to get that 
student version and maybe with a description about the support you can 
offer for educational institutions.


2) Buy support option / Tab

I think some (professional) people would prefer an Buy support option. 
It would give those people more security and trust to use Ardour. When 
something is broke in you professional studio (or educational 
institution), you can't loose much time. You need it to be fixed as soon 
as possible, and an payed support  option could guarantee this.
Some examples:
http://linuxmint.com/support.php
http://www.64studio.com/support


3) Advise GNU/Linux users to use a GNU/Linux distro optimized for audio/ 
multimedia production.

Also among Linux users, people tend to be negative towards the 
combination Ardour and Jack sometimes. This is in much cases due to bad 
configuration. You could avoid this to advise Ardour users to use a 
GNU/Linux distro optimized for audio/ multimedia production and point to 
a place where they can find information about it, for example:
http://wiki.linuxmusicians.com/doku.php?id=linux_multimedia_distro_s&DokuWiki=163d78ad48181810cff937ec97bac37e
http://apps.linuxaudio.org/apps/categories/linux_audio_bundles_distributions

4) Publish an list of the names of the financial subscribers, sponsors 
and donators

You could  publish a list with the names of the  subscribers, 
contributors, sponsors each month. People are willing to donate more 
money when they know their names will displayed in paper for example 
(source: Influence, science and practise, R.B Cialdiani)
(I think you should give donators and subscribers to option to stay 
anonymous on such a list..)
For example: http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/?p=710

5) Some little  points.

a) On the front page I miss the statement that Ardour is for 
professional usage and that it is Free to download. (You should state 
this smartly, cause some people think Free (as beer) is equivalent  to 
'not good'. But other people might  find it more attracting when it is Free.

b)  I miss the notion on the frontpage that Ardour supports LV2 and it 
would be good if there is also a list (tab -> plugins) with commercial 
VST plugins, which are supported on GNU/Linux. Now there is only a list 
with VST which are working with Wine.


I hope these suggestions are helpful for the project Ardour.

All the best.

\r