Downloading Ardour
Downloading Source Code
Ardour is available in source code form. The current release is 2.4.1. The tarball builds (on a properly configured system) on both Linux and OS X.
Compiling the source
You may want to find out more about how to build Ardour from source.
SVN/Bleeding Edge access
Ardour uses Subversion ("SVN") as its distributed development repository tool. Public read access is available to all, but only specific developers have write access.
Browsing the source code
You can use your web browser to read the source code directly from the repository.
Public read-only SVN access
Once you have subversion installed, you can checkout the source code to Ardour with this command:
svn co http://subversion.ardour.org/svn/ardour2/branches/2.0-ongoingNote that this will fetch the branch corresponding to the current release in the 2.X series, rather then the bleeding-edge development version.
If you are an active developer of Ardour, or a beta tester who can live with random crashes while testing out cool new functionality, you can get the development version using this command:
svn co http://subversion.ardour.org/svn/ardour2/branches/3.0
Developer (write) access to SVN
For developers that have been granted write access and have supplied a public SSH key, this command will checkout Ardour so that you can work on the software and commit your changes:svn co svn+ssh://ardoursvn@ardour.org/ardour2/branches/3.0
Downloading for Linux
A word about distributions
New Linux users may not be aware that Linux is typically installed using a "distribution", which collects together the Linux kernel, all system utilities, a huge stack of applications and a set of conventions about system administration. Each distribution has a name like "Fedora" or "Ubuntu" or "Slackware"; they are not really so very different from each other at a deep level, but they differ enough that a new user's initial experience of each might be quite different. More importantly, perhaps: binary versions of an application built for one distribution generally cannot be used on another.
In the future, we may offer binary releases of Ardour directly from ardour.org. These will be distribution neutral, in the same way that Firefox and Thunderbird are. At the present time, we are relying on the excellent work done by the package maintainers for various distributions.