Ardour

A professional digital audio workstation.

Ardour is a professional digital audio workstation aimed at musicians and audio engineers: multi-track recording, MIDI sequencing, plugin hosting (LV2, VST3, AU), automation, busses, sends, and mixing-console-style routing. It is in the same league as Pro Tools, Logic, and Reaper for the use cases it covers.

The project has been in active development since 1999. Paul Davis is the lead developer and runs ardour.org, which sells binary builds on a "pay what you can" model; the source is GPL and freely buildable. Mixbus, a commercial Ardour fork by Harrison Consoles, ships an analog-console-style mixer atop the same core engine.

Ardour is the leading open-source DAW on Linux and is used by a mix of hobbyist and professional musicians. It pairs with JACK or Pipewire for low-latency audio routing, and integrates with the broader Linux audio plugin ecosystem (Calf, Distrho, ZynAddSubFX, GxPlugins, and many more).

License: GPL-2.0-or-later

Category: Media

Website: https://ardour.org/

Install

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install ardour
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install ardour
Arch:          sudo pacman -S ardour
macOS:         download from https://ardour.org/

Authors

Paul Davis (creator)
Ardour developers

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