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by PaulDavisThe1st 968 days ago
... and you could of course use a libre open source DAW like ardour to gain even more control over your signal path, interactions with the hardware and more. But that might not be necessary, depending on your actual goals. There are also smaller projects like Carla, which would allow you to host plugins as part of the signal processing chain (up to and including things like PlugData or Rack/Cardinal), but that make no attempt at "DAW-like" features.

Disclaimer: I'm the lead author of Ardour.

3 comments

I actually encountered just this sort of setup recently: a Linux PC with a real-time kernel running JACK and Ardour, connected to an 18x20 USB interface. It was part of a live translation setup that was routing English audio to up to four translators, receiving their foreign language audio, sending it to IR headsets, and recording everything with Ardour.

Unfortunately, it didn't work very well; I tentatively put the blame on JACK but some other part of the system could have been interfering, or maybe the PC itself just wasn't powerful enough. I didn't have time to troubleshoot properly so I just substituted in my MBA running Reaper, ironically.

I've used ardour in the past and enjoyed it but I initially chose reaper because I'm more familiar with it. I've been fighting some routing issues in reaper, I'll give ardour a try this week and see how it fits. Appreciate the work you do!
Ardour may well turn out to be less immediately well suited to whatever you're doing than Reaper is. But the point is that you could tune Ardour however you need to, something that even with its "endless" scriptability and tunability, you can't do with Reaper.

Don't be afraid to reach out for help/advice on our forums or IRC (the latter is best during daytime US mountain, in general).

Ardour is epic. I'd love to start building something as solid as it for web-based audio tooling purposes on https://linuxontheweb.github.io/.
You port our build stack[0] to wasm, we'll port Ardour.

[0] https://nightly.ardour.org/list.php#build_deps