Just working on a somewhat failed project.

A couple months ago, I made a hand-carved meat tenderizing mallet. Click-through for some stages of the process.

Sadly, there are some things about Ardour that make it not possible for me to continue the whole month with it. In fact, I’ve been cheating and using DP mostly lately. I just haven’t had time to write about it.

So let’s go through some dealbreakers for me with Ardour currently. Be sure to read the conclusion at the end however!

It’s shop maintenance day. Where I align fences, wax tables and tighten bolts.

As part of that, I go through and also tune up all my planes, including the 20”(51cm) jointer plane that I made. It’s all tuned up now and taking wispy, thin, gossamer shavings. Hard maple is the wood, and the blade is A2 steel.

So let’s quickly cover some relatively unique and cool features in Ardour 5.

So a quick update on the Ardour adventure. I’ve become rather distracted and done absolutely zero music tasks. Why?

• In OS X, many windows are always on top of everything. So I’ve been investigating this and discussing with the lead developer.

• Figuring out why the preferences pane sometimes doesn’t draw at all… and only finding how to reproduce it, not how to fix it.

• Trying to figure out why various windows don’t correctly place themselves with dual monitors.

• Writing some lua-scripts to replace functionality that I’m used to in DP (or liked in Cubase).

  Subsequently, I’ve ended up testing some new additions to the lua-api over the last few days.

• Performance on my machine is unusually poor with more than 1 processor selected. I’ve spent a good deal of time trying to figure that out.

• Learning to build/package the OS X version, which I have working nicely now.

• Figuring out why some tooltips show shortcuts, and some don’t.

Now you may think that this will reflect poorly on my ‘ratings’, but I’ve actually had quite a lot of fun. For a “normal” user that just wants things to work, Ardour would have been somewhat unpleasant so far. For me… it’s fun.

Just opening up Ardour and starting a basic session, I’ve noticed quite a few things. So here’s my first impressions, both positive and negative.

Note that I am using the nightly OS X version, built locally.

Well, Ardour 5.0 has been released and honestly it looks pretty good. So for this next month, I will be using Ardour as much as possible.

It will be added to my DAW Comparison chart and I will blog my evaluation of various aspects as I experience it.

Here we go!

UPDATE: Please see the new DAW Feature Chart for more up-to-date information and a way cooler chart.

So I’ve been schooled in some Cubase things. Thusly I’ve updated my DAW Comparison chart rating, and what follows is some reasoning behind the changes.

What does this new scoring mean? Well… I don’t know. DP is pretty cool, yo.

A quick little tip for mixing epoxy in the shop. Just stick some tape on the edge of your work bench, and make sure to leave a bit of a tag hanging off.

I save most of my thin cutoffs for things like spacers, shims, inlays and mixing 2-part adhesives.

Easy, quick and little waste.