Ardour 3: The new Open Source Digital Audio Workstation

Posted by Joel Eaton on Monday 20 December 2010 at 11:57am
Tags: audio | audio editing | open source | software |

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JISC Digital Media Training uses the paid-for Reaper platform, which for its low price offers a hard to beat environment for teaching digital audio production, and towers way above Audacity in its features and usability. However, the newly announced release of Ardour 3 promises the power and creative possibilities of Reaper at the cost of Audacity and could therefore prove to be the ultimate open source free digital audio workstation.

Ardour 3 is very soon to be released and although primarily designed for music production, lends itself to spoken word production and even allows for creating soundtracks to videos with its built in video window. There are many new features marked for the new arrival including batch editing and VST and Audio Unit support, with two particular of note which could make working with spoken word a lot easier and more efficient.

1. Automation - This is the ability to map out changes to parameters so they don't have to be done manually. For example, if you want to fade in some music at a specific time automation allows you to draw the volume line over time so you don't have to move the fader up every time the audio plays. Ardour 3 also allows you to move the automation whenever you move a region of sound. This is really handy when editing spoken word.

2. Non-layered recording mode. Aside from the standard destructive and non-destructive overdub modes, a third mode is introduced. In this new mode overdubs are written to new audio files and new regions are created but if they overlap with existing regions, the existing regions are trimmed so that there no overlaps.

There are further enhanced editing features, MIDI and OSC compatibility and a long list of updates to the old version 2. Expect to see a further blog post after its official release on how it fairs in our hands!

Image from http://ardour.org. Thorsten Wilms & ardour.org. Used with permissions.

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