ARDOUR README Paul Davis June 2003 Welcome to Ardour. This program is still very much under development, but has now reached the stage where it will be productive and useful to have other people testing it out and perhaps (hopefully!) fixing bugs and adding features. **** SECURITY ******************************************************* To run Ardour with the lowest latencies, it's necessary to use POSIX Real-Time Scheduling as well as locking all the memory it uses into physical RAM. These requirements can only be met if Ardour is run with root priviledges. On the other hand, things are not so bad. If you don't attempt to install it setuid root (which actually won't work anyway), then someone needs to have gained root access in order to run it like this. If they already have root access, Ardour is the least of your problems. So relax. We'll use capabilities once Linux kernels start arriving with them enabled, though this won't help too much with security, since the relevant capabilities would still allow a wiley cracker to do anything at all. Alternatively, you can choose to run Ardour without RT scheduling, and then there's no concern at all. It just won't be useful in low latency situations, which are desirable in most studio environments. Note that this is not so important if you have audio hardware that is capable of doing "hardware monitoring" - in this case, a lack of low latency will simply make response to Ardour's UI controls a little sluggish, but monitoring during capture will be excellent. **** HARDWARE COMPATIBILITY ***************************************** Ardour uses JACK for all its audio I/O, thus providing seamless connections to both audio hardware and other applications. Its really not the right place to discuss JACK, but in case you are wondering: Although JACK uses the ALSA 0.9.0 API, it exercises this API in a way that no other application to date has done, and it also tries to use certain hardware features that again, no other existing applications use. As a result, although complete portability to all ALSA supported h/w is an eventual and very achievable goal, there may be issues surrounding h/w compatibility. Please remember that my primary goal with JACK is to build a professional audio system, and with Ardour, a professional digital audio workstation. If they happen to be useful for people with 2/4 channel cards, then great, but it's not my own primary focus. One other important issue is that your audio interface must support full duplex i/o with the same sample format for both capture and playback. This means, for example, that the SoundBlaster AWE cannot be used with JACK in full duplex mode - it only supports full duplex i/o if one of the two directions (capture or playback) is 8 bit and the other is 16. Very few cards have this kind of limitation, and if they do, they typically are not suitable for use with applications like JACK or Ardour for other reasons. To date, JACK has been run with: RME Hammerfall (Digi9652) (26 channels in, 26 channels out) RME Hammerfall DSP (hdsp) (26 channels in, 26 channels out) RME Hammerfall Light (Digi9636) (18 channels in, 18 channels out) Midiman Delta series (ice1712 chipset) (12 channels in, 10 channels out) Various consumer grade audio interfaces, typically with 2 channels in, 2/4 channels out, including: Hoontech 4Dwave-NX (Trident chipset) Ensoniq 5880 Soundblaster 32 Soundblaster 64 Creative SBLive64 and many more. So, basically, it appears to work for just about all ALSA supported cards, which is the goal. ********************************************************************** BUG REPORTING ------------- Bugs should be reported to http://ardour.org/mantis/ . They are more likely to be remembered and dealt with there. Please check the existing bugs to make sure it has not already been reported and/or fixed in CVS. COMPILING ARDOUR ---------------- Please see the file "BUILD". RUNNING ARDOUR -------------- NOTE: You must have a running JACK server before starting Ardour. ----------------------------------------------------------- Typing "ardour" will hopefully have some effect. "ardour --help" lists available options.