ASIFA-Hollywood is encouraging its members to try popular open source software programs for themselves and to participate in the online communities. In particular, ASIFA is recommending Audacity, Blender, Gimp, Inkscape, Krita, Notepad ++, Open Broadcaster, and Synfig. The goal is to foster better tools and art for everyone.
The International Animated Film Society, ASIFA-Hollywood continues its commitment to open source animation technology this month with a special development sponsorship to Synfig, a 2D vector graphics animation program. The amount awarded was $2000. This grant will help keep their new developer employed full-time, working on bug-fixes and improving stability of the free and open source software. ASIFA members are encouraged to download and experiment with the software today at https://www.synfig.org/#download.
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Wednesday June 13 2018, @03:54PM (6 children)
Ardour is open source and I gave a good faith effort at giving it a shot - I'm not a fan. I think the thing I liked the least about Ardour was that it sent each of it's internal tracks out to JACK and then back in again paying the latency cost with it of a few milliseconds (this can be configured). I use a lot of tracks and process real time audio with the DAW in monitor mode (an unusual use case) and that latency started adding up for me and became annoying.
I also dislike the UI.
I would prefer to use Ardour over Audacity if I had to make an animation though, that's for sure.
(Score: 1) by oldmac31310 on Wednesday June 13 2018, @03:59PM (3 children)
It's a few years since I tried Ardour and I didn't like it at all. Not sure if they added midi functionality at some point in time, but back then there was none, so it was of little use to me having been a long time ProTools user. Using Logic Pro these days which I like, though I haven't been doing much recently.
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Wednesday June 13 2018, @04:29PM (2 children)
Ardour definitely handles MIDI now - I needed it in a reject project. I was using the sustain pedal on a keyboard to generate MIDI events that were being consumed by a Lua script I wrote that would open and close a noise gate. Aside from not being well documented the Lua scripting system in Ardour wasn't bad.
(Score: 1) by oldmac31310 on Thursday June 14 2018, @06:39PM (1 child)
Maybe it is time to take another look at Ardour then. Thanks!
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Friday June 15 2018, @05:27PM
No problem, glad to share some info. Personally I prefer Reaper over Ardour quite a bit and SURPRISE! Reaper targets Linux now in unofficial builds: https://www.landoleet.org/dev/ [landoleet.org]
I've been using Reaper on Linux now for a few months - it has some limitations but it is highly reliable. It has not ever crashed on me which I found amazing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 13 2018, @05:12PM (1 child)
Or there's non-tools [tuxfamily.org]
I don't see what the problem with audacity is, the .aud file format sucks but anything else is likely PEBKAC where people who didn't learn to record and edit on tape have hundreds of tracks because they can't bring themselves to commit / bounce.
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Wednesday June 13 2018, @08:55PM
Try setting up an auto-ducking system in Audacity - it would take a specific plugin. With a full DAW you can do something like auto-duck by arranging a signal processing chain and splitting the detector input from the input that will be processed on a dynamic range compressor. That's just the start.