A quick look at the website or wikipedia article would have immediately told you that this is completely wrong. Besides, "MIDI format sound file" is an oxymoron: you either have a MIDI file or a sound file.
It is a DAW, and honestly working with real live audio (compared to electronic music) is where it felt the most natural fit.
I used it a decade+ ago to learn to record and mix tracks, manage a huge mess of Jackd connections, run plugins, mix drums (DrumGizmo), release final audio files.
It worked great with external usb controllers and piano keyboards and gave me abilities and clarity I did not realize opensource tools could provide at the time.
Some other daws felt much better for electronic music, but didn't work that well on Linux.
Great software with some interesting history and relation to it's fully commercial flavour.
It had a bit of mixed reviews in the past, as binary releases were only provided from author for paid subscription (which I did, as you could do a really low monthly one). Thus what was included in most popular Linux distros was VERY old and much worse than the actual state of development.
Err, wat? No serious distro is going to use upstream binaries anyway.
According to Repology[0], most up-to-date distros package at least 8.6 (which is a bit old, but far from ancient). If you use an LTS distro, well, you get what you asked for.
I think Ardour is a tool for sound manipulation. Possibly only for MIDI format sound files.
> Possibly only for MIDI format sound files.
A quick look at the website or wikipedia article would have immediately told you that this is completely wrong. Besides, "MIDI format sound file" is an oxymoron: you either have a MIDI file or a sound file.
I'm not sure why you commented to tell the world what you thought when you could have gone to the website and confirmed it's a DAW for yourself.
It is a DAW, and honestly working with real live audio (compared to electronic music) is where it felt the most natural fit.
I used it a decade+ ago to learn to record and mix tracks, manage a huge mess of Jackd connections, run plugins, mix drums (DrumGizmo), release final audio files.
It worked great with external usb controllers and piano keyboards and gave me abilities and clarity I did not realize opensource tools could provide at the time.
Some other daws felt much better for electronic music, but didn't work that well on Linux.
Great software with some interesting history and relation to it's fully commercial flavour.
It had a bit of mixed reviews in the past, as binary releases were only provided from author for paid subscription (which I did, as you could do a really low monthly one). Thus what was included in most popular Linux distros was VERY old and much worse than the actual state of development.
Err, wat? No serious distro is going to use upstream binaries anyway.
According to Repology[0], most up-to-date distros package at least 8.6 (which is a bit old, but far from ancient). If you use an LTS distro, well, you get what you asked for.
[0]: https://repology.org/project/ardour/versions
I'm talking about times 10+ years ago. And yes, they didn't use that binaries, but they also didn't had the capacity to update their own.
So users got a very, very old app in some major distros. Even music-specific repositories were lagging.
I thing that impacted Ardour's "public image" for many people, while Ardour itself was really to blame.
I'm just happy it's still around and doing fine.
I'd classify it more as a digital audio workstation. Very similar to Cubase or Pro logic.