The Ardour Community

Who Did This?

Paul Davis (Philadelphia, PA).

After shuttling back and forth between commercial, academic and research programming jobs (EMBL, Schlumberger, Rabbit Software, ScenicSoft, University of Washington CS&E) for 12 years, being the 2nd employee at Amazon.com (and then quitting) gave me the chance to finally start writing the kind of software I wanted to write. I am now a tireless advocate for Linux in the audio world, and work essentially full time writing free (as in beer and talk) software for electronic music composition and recording. You can send Paul email. If you wish, you can read more about him.

Although Paul was and is the primary author of Ardour, many other people have contributed to it.

Jesse Chappell (Washington, DC)
Jesse is probably Ardour's god-parent, and keeps on making major contributions to Ardour. His hands are all over the place, and it's Jesse we rely on to clean up when Paul does something wrong. Before being so deeply involved in the project, Jesse was responsible for Ardour being able to handle multichannel tracks, a major change in the program's design and capabilities. He also made many additions/improvements to the GTK GUI, including mouse zoom mode and the route params editor. He was the first person to just "walk in" and understand the Ardour codebase, and was also responsible for Paul spending way too much time on IRC. Meanwhile, he also wrote the amazing live looping tool SooperLooper and the incredible frequency-based effects unit FreqTweak.
Taybin Rutkin (New York, NY)
Taybin has been involved with Ardour for a long long time. He has contributed lots of code, and was particularly responsible for the use of XML in the state persistence aspect of the program. He also (re)wrote the soundfile library code to use LRDF. In addition he was responsible for the integration of the gettext system and the compose() templates that make Ardour's internationalization possible. He has consistently made suggestions that resulted in significantly more elegant code and design. Taybin also set up and oversees our Drupal CMS and Mantis bug reporting system. Along with Jesse, he also manages the OS X version of Ardour.
Marcus Andersson (Karlstad, Sweden)
Marcus contributed a number of useful patches and worked on the dB-related issues in the gain stages and metering, other numeric computations, and much useful debugging, bug reporting and analysis.
Jeremy Hall (Sterling, VA)
Jeremy contributed several patches and worked intensively on ksi_ardour, the keystroke-based-interface to libardour designed for sight-impaired and GUI-averse users.
Steve Harris (Southampton, UK)
Steve contributed code to handle speed-based interpolation, an area I did not want to get my head around, as well as dithering, panning, metering and other DSP-centric issues. He also wrote the LRDF library used by Ardour's soundfile library code, not to mention dozens of LADSPA plugins that make Ardour a truly useful tool.
Tim Mayberry (Brisbane, Australia)
Tim did lots and lots and lots of work on mouse-driven editing.
Nick Mainsbridge (Australia)
Nick is responsible for many improvements to the rulers.
Colin Law (the Center for Music Technology, Glasgow, Scotland)
Colin wrote the code that supports Ardour's integration with the CMT Animatics engine. He was also very involved in refactoring the GUI code design to support different kinds of tracks.
Gerard van Dongen (Rotterdam, Netherlands)
Gerard did a set of scattered but critical work with a vague focus on the mouse, and made some particularly important fixes to the incredibly hairy code that draws automation curves. Gerard also helped out with a workshop on Ardour held at the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, Rotterdam, in November 2004. Tragically, he died aged 39 on March 4th 2006, survived by his wife and two young children. His spirit lives on not only in his family but also in his music and his contributions to Ardour and other free software.
Sampo Savolainen (Helsinki, Finland)
Sampo became a major contributor of minor patches as Paul began working full time for a while. He fixed numerous bugs, some on mantis and some not, fairly continuously for several months. He then moved on to write SSE assembler routines to handle the CPU-hungry metering and mixing routines.

Smaller (but not necessarily minor) patches were received from the following people:

  • Mark Stewart
  • Sam Chessman
  • Jack O'Quin
  • Matt Krai
  • Ben Bell
  • Thomas Charbonnel
  • Robert Jordens
  • Christopher George
  • Rob Holland
  • Joshua Leachman
  • Per Sigmond
  • Petter Sundlof
  • John Rigg

The GTK2 Port

Porting Ardour to GTK2 was a substantial effort. It was made possible by the work of:

  • Paul Davis
  • Taybin Rutkin
  • Stefan Kersten
  • Nick Mainsbridge
  • Tim Mayberry
  • Doug McClain
  • Sampo Savolainen
  • Dave Robillard
  • Brian Ahr
  • Carl Hetherington

Thorsten Wilms was reponsible for many icons, graphics and GUI design in Ardour 2, as well as the Ardour logo.

(If your name should be present, send email to ardour at-sign ardour.org)

Contributors

We would particularly like to recognize:

Frank Carmickle
first financial supporter of Ardour, instigator of ardour/ksi.
Ron Parker/Mirror Image Studios (Minneapolis, MN)
first user of Ardour in a commercial studio, financial contributor, major initiator of MTC and MMC functionality.
Harrison Consoles
In addition to significant financial support, Harrison contributes bug fixes and testing to support the use of Ardour in the post-production realm. Harrison was the first company to visit major film institutions around the world and do face-to-face demonstrations of Ardour with industry-leading mixers and engineers.
Solid State Logic
SSL employed Paul to work full time on Ardour during the development of Ardour 2.0. This generous act on the part of SSL helped Ardour moved forward in several significant ways.

In addition to those listed above, the following people are among those who offered financial support, design insights and ideas, encouragement, feedback, bug reports and much more during Ardour's pre-release development. They generally suffered from days of frustration, and withstood hundreds of CVS revisions without complaint. No thanks or praise is sufficient for their collective contributions to Ardour.

(in no particular order)

  • Joe Hartley
  • Ryan Gallagher
  • Rob Holland
  • Jan Depner
  • Bryan Koschmann
  • Patrick Shirkey
  • Rob Fell
  • Ant <avan aT uwm dOt edu>
  • Chris Ross
  • Joshua Pritikin
  • Rohan Drape
  • Johan De Groote
  • Bob Ham
  • Ben Loftis

We would also like to recognize:

Havoc Pennington & Owen Taylor
provided much assistance in understanding, diagnosing and cajoling GTK+.
Tom Pincince (Shasta, CA)
provided continuous, excellent design insights and rationalizations, as well as info on the operation of some existing DAW's.
Marek Peteraj
withstood all of my arrogance and spent a month convincing me to change some basic aspects of the editor's GUI, for the better, of course!
DuWayne Holsbeck
initial sponsorship of linuxaudiosystems.com domain, and more.

I would also like to thank Jim Hamilton of Rittenhouse Recording, Philadelphia, for the partnership, friendship and foresight he showed in allowing me to use the studio as the development basis for Ardour. I met Jim playing a jazz drumkit at a fundraiser to celebrate the 30th anniversary of our children's nursery school. Since then, he has continued to open my eyes to both music itself, the process of making music, and the life of a working musician. Jim's the best and most inventive percussionist I have ever seen, and one of the best I've ever heard. He has always believed in the social and philosphical implications of Ardour, and his support and interest have been vital in Ardour's development. Although as of this writing, Rittenhouse Recording is not running Ardour, it's only a matter of time!