If you are someone who has used other audio software, particularly software generally referred to as a Digital Audio Workstation (or "DAW"), then there will be a number of things about Ardour that may puzzle you on your initial and early encounters with the program.

You must explicitly create a Session before you can do anything else, and if you choose not to use one of the provided session templates , you will also have to create tracks and busses in order to record and/or edit existing audio material.

Ardour doesn't have any fixed number of "slots" for plugins, or sends, or inserts : you can have as many per-track as your system has the horsepower handle. The two black boxes above and below the mixer strip's gain fader are redirect lists where you can add, reorder, remove and generally control plugins, sends, and inserts, both pre- and post-fader.

Most people don't think much of the EQ's built into other DAWs. Moreover, you cannot meaningfully do equalization with 3 knobs marked "Lo", "Mid" and "Hi". Since good-quality EQ plugins are available for no-cost on Linux, Ardour prefers to allow you to choose one which you prefer. Of course, you can save your session configurations as templates, so if you have a particular EQ that you prefer, you only need do this once.

Although Ardour supports sends, there is no way to control them directly from the mixer interface - you don't get a dedicated knob on the mixer strip. However, if you bring up the send's own editor (for example, by double-clicking on its name in the redirect list), you will find a richer set of functionality than most other DAWs offer for controlling the behaviour of a send.

Most DAWs have evolved towards providing the so-called "smart tool" which allows you to use the mouse for several different kinds of operations without changing to a different tool. Ardour has taken this approach from the beginning, so that the "Object" tool actually allows you to carry out many different operations depending on how and where the mouse is used. Ardour does not provide a destructive "pencil" tool as some other DAWs do, for some fairly deep technical reasons. Needing to use a "pencil" tool for waveform repair nearly always indicates a problem with the setup of your session and/or recording hardware. The different tools that ardour does offer include the "Object" tool which has many different uses including region trimming/moving/copying, automation editing, and more; a "Range" tool for defining ranges of time; a "TimeFX" tool for timestretching; a "Gain" tool used exclusively for editing region gain envelopes; and a "Zoom" tool to manipulate temporal zoom. Many other operations are accessible via context menus or keyboard bindings .

Tracks and busses in ardour do not come in pre-determined configurations. You can create a mono track, and convert it to a stereo track at any time. You can convert it to a track with 3 inputs and 7 outputs if you want, because Ardour also doesn't restrict track I/O configurations to a fixed set of mono/stereo/5.1/7.1 etc. In addition, because of Ardour's use of JACK , a track with one input can actually receive data from many different locations. You can also connect any track to any number of other tracks and busses. In Ardour, the only difference between a track and a bus is that a track plays back pre-recorded material from your disk drives and can record to them. Both tracks and busses can have plugins, sends, inserts, automation data and more.

Because Ardour uses JACK , your session isn't limited to receiving and sending audio to and from your audio interface. It can freely send and receive audio signals to any other JACK application, in some cases even JACK applications running on other computers. On the one hand, this makes understanding the I/O options for a track or bus a little more complex than in a conventional program, but it also adds incredible power to Ardour, as you will see later.