Ardour Book Sprint

Yesterday I joined in with the Ardour book sprint hosted at moddr in Rotterdam.

The idea is to learn about the Ardour DAW through the process of contributing to a manual that explains how to carry out common tasks.

The manual is hosted on FLOSS Manuals, a site which is "a collection of manuals about free and open source software together with the tools used to create them and the community that uses those tools."

Participants loosely coordinate between themselves which chapters each person will be creating. Proofreading of new chapters was delegated in a similar way. Unlike a wiki, the organisation of work isn't entirely non-hierarchical. Each FLOSS manual has a maintainer with special permissions related to publishing completed chapters.

The clearly defined goal and deadline inherent in the book sprint format work very well as motivational factors, as does the sense of a 'team' that inevitably emerges through working in the same physical space as other participants.

The sprint goes on until friday, and is well worth a look if you're interested in learning about Ardour, powerful and free music software.

Ardour

Ardour seems like a very respectable DAW, particularly for people looking for software to function like a digital multitrack.

Inevitably, I'm comparing it with Ableton Live. There are irritations here. I was disappointed at the number of steps required to duplicate a phrase (made of multiple clips/regions, with space between those regions). In Live this is a two step process;

1. Drag select a box around the phrase you want to duplicate,
2. Press apple+D to duplicate the range on the timeline. The newly created range is selected so that subsequent apple+D presses create further copies.

This is how it looks:

At least according to the findings of our group, duplicating a phrase in an equivalent way in Ardour needs a good deal more explanation.

Ardour offers region duplication or range duplication. But neither seem to give the result I expected.

In case any Ardour users are reading, is there something I'm overlooking here?

Update: I spoke to an Ardour developer who confirmed that there was a bug in the way Duplicate Range currently works, so hopefully this will get better in the near future.

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