Ardour 6.0 Digital Audio Workstation Released

[stalkerg]

omer666 I am not a troll, it's just my opinion, but I was surprised by your and Paul's reaction. We just have a different mindset and trying to solve different issues.

[omer666]

I can't help but notice that you suppose to know things which you don't actually know.
As stated in my previous post I don't use Ardour (since several years btw) simply because I *don't* have an use case for it anymore.
I used to use it to do mastering and studio recordings up to 16 tracks, including 5 separately mixed headphone monitors with several plugins each. Now I don't use it simply because I'm not doing recordings/mastering anymore, not because Ardour suddently became bad.

Ok, I've got to admit I've been a bit harsh on this one. It's just that these forums are so full of ignorant trolls that I jumped to conclusions. Sorry for this.

By the way, about the current situation, I don't have to rely on wine in my workflow because I can get a native plugin for every use case, but there are some limitations, and more so when it comes to reverbs (in my humble opinion). For example, you like to have a console EQ, analogue modeled 8-band EQ, mastering EQ, and maybe another digital one for very precise cuts, and as long as they work as intended and sound great that's fine. And on Linux, we've definitely got plenty to chose from: I've got all the OvertoneDSPs, x42, zam and three others from Harrison (and that's without Mixbus' integrated EQ which works great when you know what it's good at).
But when it comes to reverbs, it's a matter of character and taste and having a wide range to chose from is critical. That's where we're lacking, right now. And I tried to like IRs, but obviously I don't... (matter of taste I guess...)

[darkbasic]

I can't help but notice that you know nothing about DAWs

I can't help but notice that you suppose to know things which you don't actually know.
As stated in my previous post I don't use Ardour (since several years btw) simply because I *don't* have an use case for it anymore.
I used to use it to do mastering and studio recordings up to 16 tracks, including 5 separately mixed headphone monitors with several plugins each. Now I don't use it simply because I'm not doing recordings/mastering anymore, not because Ardour suddently became bad.

You want Ardour to run natively on Wayland, but the fact is that audio plugins simply don't. So why bother?
In fact there's a good many audio plugins that don't even support HiDPI. Deal with it.

Did you ever hear about the chicken and the egg? I'm sure I won't have to explain this
Anyway having XWayland plugins is not as bad as having an XWayland DAW.

But the current state of Linux audio is that we don't even have enough plugins to cover all our needs, so if you start bothering devs with GTK3 and HiDPI, that situation isn't going to improve anytime soon.

I don't know about the current situation, but back in the days I had to rely on wineasio alot.

[prokoudine]

I'm running Ardour on a HiDPI display under Wayland right now. Zero issues. Scaling is fine. Plugins' UIs load alright.

Can't help myself wondering if some of the most vocal people here actually have any hands-on experience with Ardour whatsoever.

[omer666]

Sure, I won't use Ardour... But I will still feel sad for the direction the best-software-in-category is taking.

^This.
As a daily user of both Mixbus and Ardour, I can't help but notice that you know nothing about DAWs. You want Ardour to run natively on Wayland, but the fact is that audio plugins simply don't. So why bother?
In fact there's a good many audio plugins that don't even support HiDPI. Deal with it.
Have a look at the state of music production on Windows, there are many users who are struck with 32 bit versions of their DAWs in order to run their decades-old plugins which are 32 bits only.
And if you look at other major DAWs on Linux, absolutely none of them supports Wayland natively.
The current state of music production is such that Ardour simply doesn't need GTK3. That's funny because you just sound like "I ain't gonna use this software if it's not running on Wayland", but the fact is you don't need it because you don't know what it's used for.
If one day, people start porting all and every plugin to a brand-new technology which makes it all secure and clean and your DAW needs it, then why not. But the current state of Linux audio is that we don't even have enough plugins to cover all our needs, so if you start bothering devs with GTK3 and HiDPI, that situation isn't going to improve anytime soon.
On a good note, there are much more plugins getting ported these days, and some coming from major developers, but again, those are VST, which means decade-old technology.
Paul's point about Ardour's packaging for distributions is right too, and I've always been using official binaries.
PaulDavis You do an amazing job and Ardour is one of the best open source software I've ever used and recommended to anybody. Don't pay attention to these forums which are full of trolls, it's always like this in here. Thank you so much for your commitment and hard work, it's very much appreciated.

[darkbasic]

File a bug with Wayland? Don't use Wayland? Don't use Ardour on Wayland?
Possibilities...

Sure, I won't use Ardour (Ardour on Xorg will break per monitor scaling so it's not an option as well).
But even then I will still feel sad for the direction the best-software-in-category is taking.

[mos87]

Ardour runs *natively* on Wayland or it simply runs on XWayland? Because if it's XWayland it would be a blurry hell for me because of the way scaling is handled on XWayland.

File a bug with Wayland? Don't use Wayland? Don't use Ardour on Wayland?
Possibilities...

[mos87]

why do you think we don't value HiDPI ... ardour already works with hiDPI, on all platforms.

see the PS (if you had GUI heavily-relying on GTK2 actual HIDPI support would be impossible, since GTK2 doesn't know about it)

does phoronix have the worst forum system ever, or what? it's appalling. logging in is hard enough, and then in your post, for example, i can't see the "PS" until i quote your message.

it's "hairy" for sure. not to mention slow, but who mentions slow in 2020? Your Threadripper and 32 gigs of RAM ought to be enough!
it tries to be a sort of a "posting studio" - a feature rich desktop-like app inside the browser obviously using JS.
That's the (sad) "future" of end-user apps for you...

[mos87]

HiDPI

Paul says they already support it. Frankly it's about the only major end-user desirable upgrade between gtk2 and gtk3

Wayland,New FileDialog,Security and bug fixes,

doubt users/developers care much about these

as I know, Ardour is using gtk very limited

Well that might be one reason they don't prioritize porting that much

PS when Linux distributives will drop gtk2 as deprecated?

not anytime soon. not by a long shot.

[darkbasic]

Why are you sorry to hear that? Ardour already runs on Wayland. What do you imagine you would gain, as a user, from a GTK3/4 version?

Ardour runs *natively* on Wayland or it simply runs on XWayland? Because if it's XWayland it would be a blurry hell for me because of the way scaling is handled on XWayland.
Let's not talk of per-monitor scaling or non-integer scaling: lots of users nowadays have HiDPI laptops attached to standard-DPI external monitors and this works like hell in X (never got the xrandr hack working properly).
I'm not using DAWs anymore like I used to (thanks for your work on Ardour btw), but lack of native Wayland support would definitely be a showstopper for me if I had to.