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!
Awesome! Thanks for the walkthrough!
No problem, the difference between 2.0.5 and 2.3.1 is night and day! Happy editing.
Despite the fact that the libjack.so is where it should be scons fails repeatedly with
scons: *** Source `/usr/local/lib/libjack.so’ not found, needed by target `gtk2_ardour/ardour-2.3′. Stop.
scons: building terminated because of errors.
r
Any ideas?
jay, double check and make sure you have libjack-dev installed. We went to great lengths and tested this guide on a fresh untouched install of Gutsy, so we’re rather confident in its abilities
also, be sure you have jackd installed as well. You could try uninstalling and reinstalling jackd and libjack-dev as well. Thanks!
Furthermore, we just noticed a slight error as youll probably need to run ’scons install’ as root to extract files to various protected folders. We have updated the tutorial itself above by changing the ’scons install’ command to ‘ sudo scons install ‘
All is well now. Thanks
Hi there,
I just compiled Ardour 2.3 (because Kubuntu Ardour 2.0.5 wouldn’t let me open my last session again, core dump, segmentation fault, grrr…) the way described above and it seems like everything’s fine, but:
bash: /usr/bin/ardour2: No such file or directory
Any idea where that binary is?
thx,
Steve
@Ubustu:
You may delete this entry and my former one, I just found out that /usr/local/bin/ardour2 is the binary to use. Perhaps you may add this as a note to your tutorial, but I don’t know if this will happen also in Ubuntu Studio (I’m using Kubuntu Gutsy.).
Best regards and thank you for your great tutorial (I didn’t know “scons” before!),
Steve
Steve, we may be wrong, but we are guessing that if you install a program using apt-get or Synaptic the program will likely be installed to /usr/bin/
But, if you are compiling and installing something on your own outside of the repositories, a more organized/logical/personalized placement would be /usr/local/bin/… a bit like separating “default repo” programs from “user compiled” programs. If anyone can shed some more light on this please do.
Of course, using compile options you can install anything anywhere.
scons is great, it aims to be easier for both developer and user than the classic ./configure && make option
Has Ubuntu Studio been updated so if i went and got a fresh copy of it, would Ardour 2.3 be in there so i wouldn’t have to compile all of this?
KreaturesofKaos, it looks like Hardy will ship with Ardour 2.3 as the default : http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/sound/
The way we see it, thats more than two months away as it is, and who knows when the Ardour team will put out the next release. These guys never rest! We want the latest and greatest and we want it right away. Who doesn’t?
Don’t be afraid of compiling! It only takes 20 minutes and gives you a great sense of power. You can compile Ardour any way you like, remove features, add features etc.
It’s the only way to get VST support in Ardour for instance. We also noticed a 20-30% speed increase after compiling (whether that increase in speed was due to changes made between 2.0.5 and 2.3 is up in the air)
For instance, you may notice that the fonts are a little bigger in the latest versions of Ardour. If you prefer the original sizes, you can always compile with the OLD-FONTS option set to 1.
Great, I just compiled and installed with success Ardour-2.3. Is it possible to change the font size to the size of the old version without compiling the code again?
Thks
The version in Gutsy is actually 2.1-1. Its in backports. This is where all updates will appear. A simple backport request on Launchpad would get this updated to 2.3.
Thanks, thanks!
I just successfully compiled and installed Ardour 2.3. Thanks to Yahoo for letting me find this solution. And thank you of course.
When I tried to install Ardour through Ubuntu, I noticed I couldn`t select it in the Add/Remove screen. So this is a comfortable way of getting it the ‘hard’ way. I needed the 20 minutes to find out what the input text was meant for!
Thanks, a lot!
Luciën
I have not yet used Ardour, but when I read this post I decided I ought to get the new version before I even started learning how to use it.
So I followed all the directions, and everything went fine, but now I find myself with both versions on my computer, and when I use the menu link under “Applications” it takes me to the old one.
How can I get rid of Ardour 2.0.5 and redirect the icon to the correct application?
I’d appreciate any guidance along these lines; I’m relatively new to Ubuntu.
Thank you very much… It worked… and now I am in Ardour 2.3…
Yeppeeeee…