Hobbyist game dev here. Getting into audio and music effects has been fun but I constantly feel overwhelmed. I chose Ardour as my DAW (digital audio workstation) and have been excitedly working on learning. I also bought the book “ Writing Interactive Music for Video Games: A Composer's Guide” which has been very helpful at understanding high level vocabulary.
It’s a lot of work. I slightly enjoy it but boooooy is getting into audio and music pretty challenging. It’ll be good if I ever need to know what I’m talking about when working with others… in the future where I can dedicate myself full time to game dev… One day one day…
I don’t really have a point here. If anyone has any resources, tips, or recommendations on this subject let me know.
Ardour's great. I've been donating $4/month for enough months that I probably could've bought one of the fancier “professional” DAWs, but why bother when Ardour does it all?
A couple friends and I started a band a couple months ago and we've started to use Ardour + a Behringer UMC1820 for some basic recording work; it's wild how quick we've been able to get up and running with it (to the point where our only limitation right now is scrounging up enough cables to hook up all our instruments to the UMC1820). Create tracks, pick each track's input, arm tracks for recording, hit record, hit play, and make noises. Our lead guitarist is more familiar with Cubase, but I had him try out Ardour and he's already putting together recordings; just had to point him to a couple manual pages and he was off to the races with it.
Curious to see how quick 9.0 will hit Ubuntu Studio (which is what we're using in our practice room). Cool to see Ardour finally get a dedicated piano roll window (presumably ported over from MixBus?); even though it's neat to be able to do MIDI editing directly from the main editor window, having the option to focus on a specific snippet will be handy. And the continued improvements with the new cue-based flow will be cool to play around with (and maybe work into live performances once we've got enough material down solid for shows?).
Ardour is very good and needs more attentions. My respects to the developers, I use it every day, and I am very happy with it and its community. I also like the paying / open source model, and I wouldn’t change it for a proprietary DAW 99% of the musicians use.
Is this similar to Ableton? Wanted to "create" music as a hobby, but don't really wanna pay for Ableton. I tried once https://lmms.io/ but didn't stick. Never heard of Ardour.
Ardour is top tier software. I've been _so_ excited for the "Cue Recording" feature. Until now I've had to resort to other software for live looping. Can't wait to give it a shot / use Ardour for "everything"!
I just setup my first little Linux home studio and Ardour is a large part of that. It's a great piece of software with an admittedly high learning curve for a novice like myself, but it's been incredibly fun learning.
Not familiar with the software, clicked the link, thought the pianoroll screen was a Gantt chart. Thinking "not another project management solution ..." until I realized I was wrong lol.
Ardour 9.0
(ardour.org)298 points by PaulDavisThe1st 5 February 2026 | 67 comments
Comments
It’s a lot of work. I slightly enjoy it but boooooy is getting into audio and music pretty challenging. It’ll be good if I ever need to know what I’m talking about when working with others… in the future where I can dedicate myself full time to game dev… One day one day…
I don’t really have a point here. If anyone has any resources, tips, or recommendations on this subject let me know.
Edit: Congrats on the new 9.0 release!
A couple friends and I started a band a couple months ago and we've started to use Ardour + a Behringer UMC1820 for some basic recording work; it's wild how quick we've been able to get up and running with it (to the point where our only limitation right now is scrounging up enough cables to hook up all our instruments to the UMC1820). Create tracks, pick each track's input, arm tracks for recording, hit record, hit play, and make noises. Our lead guitarist is more familiar with Cubase, but I had him try out Ardour and he's already putting together recordings; just had to point him to a couple manual pages and he was off to the races with it.
Curious to see how quick 9.0 will hit Ubuntu Studio (which is what we're using in our practice room). Cool to see Ardour finally get a dedicated piano roll window (presumably ported over from MixBus?); even though it's neat to be able to do MIDI editing directly from the main editor window, having the option to focus on a specific snippet will be handy. And the continued improvements with the new cue-based flow will be cool to play around with (and maybe work into live performances once we've got enough material down solid for shows?).
Off topic but is there a linux DAW which focuses on live loop recording? Something like what the LoopyPro app does on iOS ?
[1] https://github.com/Ardour/ardour/tree/9.0/libs/tk/ytk
[2] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-list/2002-March/msg00136...