[Ardour-Dev] funding priorities

[Олег Шаронов]

Hello!

I'm another silent reader of this list. I'm very interested in Ardour as it gives me a hope to see linux as a professional DAW. I watch for Ardour for a couple of years. And the problem is - it is still not usable for me. I would be happy to subscribe or/and donate money if there would be any usefulness, but yet I download it (and you count it), install, compile etc but I can't use it. Nowadays I think that only 5% of all the DAW users can rely only on microphone / audio input. Without MIDI & Synths Ardour area is very limited to studios that record classical music, jazz, one-man bands and so on. When recording a rock song for example, you need to have real drumset with mics and a drum player, guitar combos and so on. Most of those recording cases are not a low-budget, and using free GPL DAW not a real interest in those cases. If you have live musicians that you need to record right now, it's better to have something solid and well-tested.

But! The rest 95% of music producers (in my estimation) are home-studio users, who use soft-synth, midi, etc... So, having good MIDI / VSTi support in ardour would dramatically expand the users area! People would be able to try ardour without loosing their favourite VSTi's and VSTs. Migration from other DAWs to ardour would be much simplier then. And I would be the first to donate as soon as I will be able to write my first song with it.

I know that now it's possible to sync ardour with other sequencer, but that's now the kind of workflow I'm dreaming of.
I know that I can user standalone VSTi hosts like Savihost for using soft-synths with ardour 3.0 but this isn't way it should be done.
I know that Rosegarden supports VSTi by DSSI but it doesn't have setChunk / getChunk support so it also useless for sequencing with VSTi. LMMS have the same problem.
I know that I can use LADSPA effects but when I use a parametric EQ for example, I work 10 times faster if I can see EQ curve.
I really appreciate exceptional DAW functionality of Ardour, and really hope to be a grateful user of it in future.

So, just to sum what I think Ardour needs to become really popular DAW:
- MIDI
- VSTi support
- VST getchunk/setchunk support for N.I. Kontakt & similar
- VST GetTimeInfo support for Celemony Melodine & similar
- MIDI multitimbral support (the one that Rosegarden lacks)
- Latency compensation (I don't know if there is any)
- Correct VST window placement =)

And just the things I dream of:
- Clip realtime effects (what Cubase lacks)
- Score editor for printing MIDI parts.

All the above is just my opinion based just on my experience. Don't blame me for ingratitude, I really appreciate all the work done on Ardour development and this is really a miracle that Ardour exists! I may seem biased towards VST, but as I can see, it's the most evolved area of effects/synths in both commercial and freeware ones.

Thanks for your attention. Oleg.