Ardour Overview
Ardour is a professional digital workstation for working with audio and MIDI.
Ardour is meant for…
Audio Engineers
Ardour's core user group: people who want to record, edit, mix and master audio and MIDI projects. When you need complete control over your tools, when the limitations of other designs get in the way, when you plan to spend hours or days working on a session, Ardour is there to make things work the way you want them to.
Musicians
Being the best tool to record talented performers on actual instruments has always been a top priority for Ardour. Rather than being focused on electronic and pop music idioms, Ardour steps out of the way to encourage the creative process to remain where it always has been: a musician playing a carefully designed and well built instrument.
Soundtrack Editors
Sample accurate sync and shared transport control with video playback tools allows Ardour to provide a fast and natural environment for creating and editing soundtracks for film and video projects.
Composers
Arrange audio and MIDI using the same tools and same workflow. Use external hardware synthesizers or software instruments as sound sources. From sound design to electro-acoustic composition to dense multitrack MIDI editing, Ardour can help.
Ardour features…
Audio and MIDI Multi-Track Recording and Editing
Any number of tracks and busses. Non-linear editing. Non-destructive (and destructive!) recording. Any bit depth, any sample rate. Dozens of file formats.
Plugins with Full Sample Accurate Automation
AudioUnit, LV2, LinuxVST and LADSPA formats. FX plugins. Software instruments. MIDI processors. Automate any parameters. Physically manipulate them via control surfaces. Distribute processing across as many (or as few) cores as you want.
Transport Sync and External Control Surfaces
Best-in-industry sync to MIDI timecode and LTC. Send and receive MIDI Machine Control. Sync with JACK transport and MIDI clock. Dedicated Mackie Control protocol support, pre-defined mappings for many MIDI controllers plus dynamic MIDI learn. Use OSC to drive almost any operation in Ardour.
Powerful Anywhere-to-Anywhere Signal Routing
Complex signal flows are simple and elegant. Inputs and outputs connect to your hardware and/or other applications. Use sends, inserts and returns freely. Connections can be one-to-many, many-to-one or many-to-many. Tap signal flows at any point. If you can't connect in the way you want with Ardour, it probably can't be done.
Video Timeline
Import a single video and optionally extract the soundtrack from it. Display a frame-by-frame (thumbnail) timeline of the video. Use a Video-monitor window, or full-screen display, of the imported video in sync with any of the available ardour timecode sources. Lock audio-regions to the video: Move audio-regions with the video at video-frame granularity. Export the video, cut start/end, add blank frames and/or mux it with the soundtrack of the current-session.