manual/_manual/01_welcome-to-ardour.html

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title: Welcome to Ardour!
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<p>
<dfn>Ardour</dfn> is a professional digital workstation for working with
audio and MIDI.
</p>

<h2>Ardour is meant for...</h2>

<h3>Audio Engineers</h3>
<p>
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.
</p>

<h3>Musicians</h3>
<p>
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.
</p>

<h3>Soundtrack Editors</h3>
<p>
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.
</p>

<h3>Composers</h3>
<p>
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.
</p>

<h2>Ardour features...</h2>

<h3>Audio and MIDI Multi-Track Recording and Editing</h3>
<p>
Any number of tracks and busses. Non-linear editing. Non-destructive (and
destructive!) recording. Any bit depth, any sample rate. Dozens of file
formats.
</p>

<h3>Plugins with Full Sample Accurate Automation</h3>
<p>
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.
</p>

<h3>Transport Sync and External Control Surfaces</h3>
<p>
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.
</p>

<h3>Powerful Anywhere-to-Anywhere Signal Routing</h3>
<p>
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.
</p>

<h3>Video Timeline</h3>
<p>
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.
</p>

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