[ardour-users] To and from Ardour

[Josh Karnes]

OK all seriousness now...

I really wanted to use Linux
I really wanted to use Ardour
I really wanted to run open-source software
I really wanted to explore the virtues of LADSPA
I really wanted to experience the system stability and efficiency of Linux 
in Audio
I really wanted to be able to abandon Windows forever

But unfortunately there are too many holes to fill and we have a studio to run.

It all came crashing down with a one-two punch starting with my studio 
partner's computer dying from a lightning hit and the need to immediately 
get Nuendo+Win98 running post haste on SOME computer, so the available one 
was my Linux+Ardour box.  So I decided to wait for 1.0 Ardour and rebuild it 
at a later date and perhaps on different hardware, and give the machine up.

Then the #2 punch, Paul's email regarding his life changes with respect to 
Ardour.  That makes the liklihood of 1.0 in the nearish future look a little 
shaky.

So the other things that piled up:

1.  Reputation. This is meaningless to me, I use what works, but now we are 
running a not-just-for-Josh studio.  "Nuendo" by now is a known name and 
"Ardour" is not, so "Nuendo" gets clients and "Ardour" scares them off.

2.  Portability.  While Ardour seems to be (potentially) good at importing 
and exporting some universal project file format, Nuendo is not good at 
importing and exporting the same thing, so moving projects to and from 
Nuendo was not likely to be possible.

3.  MOTU.  Got gobs of MOTU hardware, not so gobs of support in Linux.

4.  VST.  Yeah I know there's some way some day of making it work some.  But 
at the moment, the hill is just too tricky to climb for the limited use of 
VST, which work obviously natively in Windows 98 and Nuendo.

So those four road blocks were precariously counterbalanced by the imminent 
1.0 and more stable version of Ardour with promise of being able to run as 
many copies on as many machines dongle-free as we wanted, and all the 
windfall of merit from using open-source, etc.  So now, we're back to Win98 
and Nuendo albeit 1.61 and I'm still remotely successfully staving off an 
"upgrade" to XP and Nuendo 3.0.

We have managed to end up with a complete extra machine and we may end up 
using it for a backup to the main machine, and dual-boot it, still use 
Ardour but it makes little sense if we own a license of Nuendo (and we do).

You know Ardour has great potential but is impeded by some things that can 
be overcome (1.0 stability) and some that may not be overcome (reputation, 
hardware lack-of-support, easy and functional VST).  I hope to be back in 
the Ardour camp but for a while at least, I'm going back to familiar Nuendo.