At the risk of sending you down a giant rabbit hole, the book Designing Sound is all about making programmatic sounds with Pure Data, and open source low-code programming environment available for all platforms. From what I've read, the book is considered a classic in the video game sound world. It's really good. Combine that with the Cipriani book on PD and learning Ardour would give you a very good learning path.

I recently dated someone in her 30s with a DMA, and she she told me how proud she was to know me because I was the first non-musician friend she's ever had. It's a very deep and insular world.

Pablo Casals famously replied when asked why he was still practicing in his 70s that he "felt like we was making progress", so don't let yourself feel inadequate.

A light weight journaling of your learnings as you go along would probably be real beneficial to many (such as myself who has zero knowledge on the subject of DAWs and creating music effects for games). And since you said it’s very challenging maybe writing about it in small bite-sized learnings might make the process easier? Going from “I must learn all this stuff!!” to “let’s see what audio gems we pick up in our adventure today”.

Stuff like that sends me down rabbit holes and when I finally come up for air, I say, "Gee, now I see how people can build their entire career around this!"

Congratulations on the new release! I've seen some forum discussions on this in the past, and I'd imagine it's a frequently debated topic. However, I'd like to ask about the technical feasibility of implementing a feature similar to Ableton's 'Warp' within Ardour. I understand that Ardour and Ableton have fundamentally different architectures and that different DAWs can prioritize different workflows. Given the current state of the codebase and the development roadmap, I'm curious how realistic the implementation of BPM-synced time-stretching actually is or if it remains significantly outside the project's scope.

Every set of release notes that's intended to double as a press release needs to involve the judicious inclusion of a blurb that immediately explains what the hell the thing actually is.

    document.querySelector("#content .section-header + p").className = "date"

    document.querySelector("#content .date + p").outerHTML = (`
      <p>
        We are pleased to announce the release of Ardour 9.0.
      </p>

        <p style="font-style:italic; font-size:smaller; margin:2em
        4em">Ardour is a free and open-source digital audio workstation
        app that works cross-platform on Linux desktops, Mac OS, and
        Windows.  Get Ardour or get involved with the community at <a
        href="https://ardour.org/">Ardour.org</a>.</p>

      <p>
        Ardour 9.0 is a major release for the project, seeing several
        substantive new features that users have asked for over a long
        period of time. Region FX, clip recording, a touch-sensitive
        GUI, pianoroll windows, clip editing and more, not to mention
        dozens of bug fixes, new MIDI binding maps, improved GUI
        performance on macOS (for most)...
      </p>
    `)

Just wanting to say thanks to the whole team for creating such an inspiring and useful creative tool!

I'm most excited to try the perceptual analizer, which was something I found always had disappointing performance in plugins.

Which of the new features would you say posed the most interesting engineering challenge?

Hi! I have been happily using Ardour as a hobbyist since version 5. At the same time I also started learning Pure Data. I was wondering how difficult it would be to implement a feature similar to "The Grid" from Bitwig. I’m not sure whether this could be done as a simple plugin, or if it would require much deeper integration with Ardour.

Do you test on different kernel preemption models? If so, do you feel PREEMPT_RT really gives an advantage over full preemption with threadirqs?

(Cyclictest gives me between a 3x and 5x worst-case latency improvement depending on the background load, but I'm not nearly musically skilled enough to try a real-world test.)

Hi! I recently (2 weeks) chose this software to invest time into in order to make music/sfx for video games. Do you personally use this software to create music yourself? Just curious!

if you mean you just want to make music and arent too bothered about recording then Cardinal is a free modular eurorack synth you could mess around with

or you use a VST host like Kushview's Element and load up on all the free VST instruments and effects that are out there. you would just need a midi keyboard hooked to it then or use Cardinal to generate note patterns

https://cardinal.kx.studio

https://kushview.net/element

or something like Orca if you want to go off the deep end!

https://github.com/hundredrabbits/Orca

Ardour is not as focused on "in the box composition" (i.e. making music entirely on your computer) as Live or Bitwig are. It originated as something closer to ProTools or Logic or Digital Performer in the sense that it was focused on recording people doing stuff (blowing,hitting,singing,speaker,scraping etc. etc).

However, in recent years, we've added a lot of the stuff you need for "in the box composition" and many people do use it that way. There's (always) more to do, but it's fairly capable in this sort of workflow now too and will continue to improve over time.

Ardour has been around for more than 25 years.

Please be aware that almost any fully-capable DAW (everything named here except lmms) has a steep, challenging learning curve. Don't jump in thinking it will be easy.

Similar but not quite. One of the problems that you might face is a lot of tutorials are for Ableton, Logic, Cubase etc. It shouldn't actually matter, but you might find it confusing what you can and cant do if you are following what someone else is doing in another program. It’s like learning C# from a Java course. Once you understand the fundamentals it does not matter what you use within reason.

But I’ve used Ardour a long time ago and I don’t see why you couldn’t release music with it. Another alternative is Reaper.

You might wanna give Bitwig a try, it’s one of the best commercial DAWs available on Linux. You can record live loops, similar to Ableton (it was originally built by ex-Ableton developers)