Recently we were shoked to find the version of Ardour currently available in the official Ubuntu repository was more than six months old. Since August 8th of 2007 (the release date of Ardour 2.0.5) many goodies have been added, existing features have been upgraded and improved, and entire tools have been redesigned. Long story short, if you’re still using 2.0.5, you really need to check out Ardour 2.3
Some of the most notable features include mouse scrubbing, an improved JACK control dialog, time stretching via Rubber Band, the beatslicing tool RhythmFerret, LV2 support, not to mention several interface improvements. Here are the official feature lists for 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3.
Downloading the source code
Luckily, compiling Ardour 2.3 in Gutsy is rather straightforward. First things first, you’ll want to download the Ardour 2.3 tarball into your Home folder.
You can also achieve the same results by using the terminal command wget. Just remember that you must use Shift+Ctrl+C and Shift+Ctrl+V to copy and paste from within the terminal to install:
Now, extract the contents of the source code:
Finally, change directories into the newly created ardour-2.3 folder:
Fetching dependicies and compiling
Before we can compile, we must download a few libraries and compiling tools. Simply paste this list into the terminal:
Now that all the dependicies are met, we can get down to business. The next command could take anywhere from 10-20 minutes to complete, a perfect time to steep some tea or have a smoke:
If you’ve made it this far without any errors, you are now ready to install:
Remember, Ardour requires JACK to run, so if you don’t have it already :
qjackctl is a simple GUI interface for JACK. So load it up, configure it, and then fire up Ardour 2.3 :
You can add a shortcut to Ardour 2.3 to the panel by using the Custom Application Launcher. The Ardour icons can be found in /usr/local/share/ardour2/icons
How to uninstall
You might want keep the ardour-2.3 source code folder around. We created a unique folder called sourcecode to store such things in. Whatever you do, it can be useful for uninstalling Ardour later. Simply change into the source code directory:
And run this command to uninstall:
Please leave any questions, suggestions, hints, or tips in the comments below. Thank you!