Ardour DAW - Paul Davis - Evolution of the Open Source DAW - The Lorenzo's Music Podcast (Transcript)

Tom Ray: Hi, I’m Tom Ray and this is another Lorenzo’s Music podcast. And this is a show where I talk with musicians, but I also talk with people who make things for musicians. And today is one of those instances. So I have with me today Paul, the creator and person who runs Ardour. So why don’t you tell the people more about who you are and what it is you do.

Paul Davis: Sure. Hi Tom. Hi everybody listening. I’m Paul Davis. I’m the original developer of Ardour and I continue to be the person who normally runs the project, going forward. So I spend my time working full time doing development and support of Ardour.

Tom Ray: And here’s what I want to know. and this is a question I’ve written down, but I down the list of what I was going to do. But since you brought it up, I mean seriously, how do you manage all that? So you’re doing all kinds of updates and things like that to it. But also I know you’re very active of course in the discourse that you guys have answering tech questions. Plus you’re managing and documenting and all this stuff. I mean seriously, how do you, how do you manage your time? Like I’m working on one project right now that I can’t wait for it to get done in a week. And you, you do this constantly. Like is there something you do to manage yourself, to schedule this?

Paul Davis: I actually wish that there was. I think I’m not a very I’m not a very good time manager. it might look like that from the outside if you’re just watching the things that are going on with the project. But I think if you’re seeing it from my side, I mean I completely fail at maintaining any kind of coherent to do list. I often will be working on something one day that isn’t finished and I know it needs more work, but the next day I’ll get distracted into something else. And then it turns out three weeks or three months later, we discover oh yeah, I was working on that, I didn’t finish it. but I think one thing I would say gets it in my favor. I think I have an overall sense of responsibility toward the project and that just keeps me enough on track in terms of responding to users, whether it’s tech support or subscription questions, stuff like that, working on the code, generally being aware of what’s going on and where we’re trying to go in the future. But it definitely doesn’t come out of any kind of management, process. It’s just me trying to do what I can to keep the project moving in the way that I’d like to see it moving. And most of the time that seems to work out okay.

Tom Ray: And I will say, from my viewpoint, it does seem like you’re very active, you’re responsive, and you do tend to build updates and work on things that people ask for and maintain it. So, I mean, I’ll tell you. Yeah, I’ll tell you from an outsider’s perspective, I, thought maybe you had a secret that I could glean from this, that I could try to use.

Paul Davis: To manage my time. I mean, the one other thing I would mention that, I think is sometimes it’s important. I think at this moment, right now, it’s important. The collaboration that we have between Ardour and Harrison Mixboss, you know, those guys have a different kind of a release schedule and release process than we do for Ardour And that can really help drive setting up priorities and having an understanding of, you know, whether we need focus right now. And I think if we didn’t have that, I don’t think it’d be a disaster, but I think there are times when we might flounder a little bit in terms of, like, well, what are we actually doing? The other thing I would say is I’m, actually very dissatisfied at how well we are able to respond to feature requests. there have been times in the past, and I think there will be times in the future when I think we do a really good job of that and we can be super responsive. Somebody can just show up and say, hey, it’d be great if. And you look at their request, you’re like, oh, yeah, we should totally do that. Let’s just jump in and implement that. Sometimes it’s a couple hours and sometimes it might be two days or something and we get something good done. But I think ever since we released 8.12, which is the current release version that we’ve been working on nine, certainly for myself, I’ve been so caught up, in the development of 9.0 that, you know, there are lots of great ideas that existed prior to that and things that have come up during that process and I don’t even know they exist. I’m not even looking at the bug tracker, and seeing them. and I. I think it’s better that we do that because we do want to get 9.0 out. But I can also. I could easily understand somebody who had interacted with the project in that way, sort of stepping away from that experience and saying I don’t understand. Like I put in these feature requests, I describe what we wanted and how it should work and I didn’t even get a response. and that’s not because of how we generally want the project to be, it’s because we’ve been in a development process that means working on stuff like that is, it’s currently a secondary priority.

Tom Ray: Yeah. And so now you just mentioned that you’re working up towards release nine. Now that makes me think of the fact, I mean with it being in release nine, I mean what that means. It’s been around a while. I of course know that because I’ve been using it for quite a while and I still discover new stuff about it every day. Like I’m literally one of those people. Like I use it and then I use it wrong until finally I go, there’s gotta be a better way to do this part. And, and then I figure out like, oh, it was there all along. Anyway, I’ll get into that in a minute. My main question here is, so why did you start this project? You’ve been doing this for so long up to version 9. Like why did Ardor get started?

Paul Davis: it got started originally because I was thinking of making my own music and I wanted to work on Linux and I tried a few of the possible solutions for that existed back in 1999 and none of them were usable, in any real sense. I mean there was an interesting project called Multitrack at that time which looked a lot like some of the other doors that existed at that point. it just was not able to do what you think it should be able to do. I mean, I don’t think it could even do multi channel recording. so, I guess there’s a relatively famous story about me calling up digidesign who make Pro Tools, which at that time, and maybe even today is sort of the 800 pound gorilla of the digital audio workstation world, and asking them if I could get hold of the source code and I would port it to Linux for them. M and they of course laughed and said no. And I thought, well, I mean, how hard could it be to just write my own digital audio workstation? And the truth was most people would.

Tom Ray: Not have gone that direction.

Paul Davis: Well, but you know, most people are not programmers. right. I was already messing around with some other music related bits of software, mostly midi, MIDI compositional tools and things like that. Well, you know, how hard can it be and it turned out that actually writing a recorder, was really quite easy. I mean, I think within a month I was recording 24 channels off of a Mario Me card and streaming them to disk and playing the back. And it was all good except that it was totally useless because all you could do was record it and play it back. There was no editing. and then so it was like, I mean, that tape recorder. Yeah, it was a tape recorder. And there were actually a couple of other bits of software that existed at that time that you could pay a lot of money for that would only do that. But it was clear that that wasn’t very useful. And I was lucky that a couple of people, Tapin, Rotkin and Jesse, whose last name I’ve forgotten, sorry, Jesse, if you hear this, they got involved in the project quite early on. And when we sort of said, well, we have to have an editor, we all kind of said, well, how can that be? And all I can say is it’s roughly 25 years later and we’re still working on the editor. That’s how hard it is. it really is. It’s a super challenging project. on the one hand, digital audio workstations are kind of a well defined thing at this point. Some people will call them a commodity. Everybody knows what they’re supposed to do. And if you have a daw, it either does those things or it doesn’t do those things. If it doesn’t do those things, it’s useless. If it does them, then you can use it. But you know, the reality for a lot of people is a bit more nuanced than that. It depends an awful lot on what kind of musician you are and precisely what kind of workflow you want to use. And it might be that one daw works incredibly well for you and another one is almost useless. So anyway, that, that’s why I started writing it. I never, I realized relatively early on that I was a much better programmer than I was a musician. and I, I never did any of my own music, until I guess 2023. I spent quite a long time messing around with VCV Rack and yeah, ah, and I released a little short ambient album. But Ardour played almost no role in that. I, I think I just really. No, I mean I, it was all generative stuff and I just would plug VCV rack into order, record it, do some fade ins and fade out.

Tom Ray: And so it was more external the way that you did it rather than using Ardour to create. Okay, yeah, again Used it as you just.

Paul Davis: Yeah, the only thing where I really use any of his door functionality for that album was the, that there was a sample of some kids playing at a playground in some city in South Africa. And there was one part where they got really loud and I used some automation to drop out their voices at that point. But other than that, yeah, it was just a tape recorder. So that was the origin of it. Once I accepted that my role was going to be as a developer and not as a user, I just sort of carried on Initially when I worked on it, I wasn’t trying to make it a living from m it but as time went by I think when we got to about 2008, 2009, my circumstances dictated that I did need to make a living from at least some, some living at that point. And we, I, I’m not sure what, what’s the right pronoun to use this there, but we were lucky that Radiohead had just bought out their In Rainbow’s album and it’s sort of an. They released it with this pay tunnel model where you could download it at whatever price you wanted. And I thought it would be interesting to try that with open source software.

Tom Ray: I didn’t know that that was the influence for it was the Which is funny because I was just listening to that album yesterday.

Paul Davis: I have to confess, I’m actually not much of a Radiohead fan at. My favorite radio head is the easy All Stars cover album called Radio Dre. which is just freaking awesome. But yeah, but my son was a really big fan of it and so that’s how I got to hear about. Well I guess I heard about it just through the media and the culture at the time.

Tom Ray: Yeah, it was a big thing.

Paul Davis: Yeah, it was a big thing. I think they were the first band to do anything like that. so that, that was the inspiration and you know, initially we pulled in, I don’t know, thousand dollars a month or something. but over time that’s grown to a much larger level. and it’s been supporting me, you know, pleased me come to more middle class lifestyle and also now provides a lot of support to my friend and co developer Robin Garius who’s in Berlin, who I didn’t know and.

Tom Ray: This is a side tangent just because I found out the other day I didn’t know he built that drum, like the, the Black Pearl kit and the, the Red Zeppelin. I didn’t know that was him for some reason I Had no idea that I knew he did some of the other plugins, like his Equalizer is my favorite. That is a great equalizer.

Paul Davis: Yeah. Robin’s an incredibly productive person. Both, code develop well, both working on Ardour and then all the plugins he does and help he provides to other projects and so on. He’s just a really remarkable guy.

Tom Ray: Yeah. Now, so with, with you mentioning that in Rainbows, it’s really funny because this is where, my life and what you’re doing start to intersect. Around that time I discovered Creative Commons, I was getting into Linux because before that the way I was recording was with a cracked version of Vegas video. That way you could multi track on. You just didn’t use it for video, you used it for audio. Then I started feeling guilty. I hated going on the places or the ways to get the crack, you know, all of a sudden I was like, I. I feel like something’s going to go horribly wrong with my, you know, with my setup here. Anyway, so I got into Linux. There was all this stuff of like, you know, design tools and recording and stuff. And I started using art. No clue how to do it. I also used some of the other ones, but this was in the infancy. This is when I started getting into it. Now, during this time, while you’re building it, I mean, so you said you weren’t really doing music anymore, you were mostly writing, but you were adding all these features, doing the editing. How were you testing this stuff? What is your testing process and how has it grown since then?

Paul Davis: Well, I would still surround myself with, can we say, the accoutrements of electronic music making. I mean, I had some synths, I had some hardware synths, in fact, in the early days. and I have some microphones and I had some, I still have a bunch of hand percussion sitting on the shelf over there. and so, you know, I wouldn’t be testing things by actually being involved in a real creative process. I wouldn’t be working on songs or something like that. But you know, if I added something that was intended to let you, you know, to record some audio from something and then edit it in a specific way, I would, I’d record some audio and try to edit it in a specific way. But I mean, right from the beginning into the present day, we rely so much on a community of users. I mean, okay, without the people in that community who are willing to sit on the bleeding edge, try out the new stuff, keep trying the old stuff that we might have broken when we did the new stuff. I mean, we wouldn’t get anywhere. I mean, some, some of the other companies in the daw, space, if you like. I mean, I know for a fact that they have more testers than developers. and I mean, in some senses we, do that too. It’s just, you know, we now have a set of employees called testers. We have a set of users who function as testers. And because we don’t generate anything like the revenue of those other companies, that’s pretty much how it needs to be. But yeah, so in the early days, and even right now, I will still test things by doing, something vaguely like what I’m expecting a, user to do. It’s just I’m not actually making finished songs or even trying to make partial songs. I’m literally just, can I get the audio in and can I do the edit process or whatever it is that I was trying to do? yeah. But, yeah, user community is absolutely critical for, all of that stuff, particularly because I tend to be a little bit resistant to trying things out in other daws. you know, one model for figuring out how should we do this is let’s go fire up, you know, a bunch of other ones and see how they do it. Some of that is a leftover from a time when I was more concerned about patent violations and stuff like that. And I just didn’t want. I mean, it doesn’t free you from the legal liability. But say, I’ve never even touched this other thing. I had no idea how it works. You might be in a better position these days. I think it’s less to do with that and more to do with. I know I sort of can’t be bothered, really. You know, I think. I think the other thing is, you know, after 25 years, art has got its own vibe. And so the way that we’re gonna bring in this feature or augment this workflow needs to fit in with that vibe. And so going and have a. Having a look at how Fruity Loops does it in particular, because Fruity Loops is so wacky and different from the others. It’s great, but very different. It’s not really all that helpful. and so again, that’s where the community of users and that’s where the feature requests that I mentioned earlier are super important. I mean, it’s been a long time since I’ve had a really good idea for a new feature.

Tom Ray: Really?

Paul Davis: yeah, m. Myself. I mean, I’ve come across them But I don’t get. The last one I had was I had a short lived, it might get revived set of podcasts where I was chatting with other audio developers. and when I was c. When I came to edit those, and there was no video. It’s just audio. yeah, I wish. The editing flow I just found horrible. I mean, doing it in order, I couldn’t work the way I wanted to work. And so I introduced a new way of doing ripple editing that made it much easier to go through and chop out the ums, the ah’s. the background mumbles of the other person while somebody’s talking. And it was really great. So that does tend to be driven by me actually doing something substantive with Ardour. but I just don’t do that all that often, you know, as, as.

Tom Ray: A person who, First of all, I did start out with just an audio podcast and I did do editing in Ardor, and it took me the longest time to realize that it had ripple editing. So I did, I did go through that problem. And then I think I, when I first met you, I think I even mentioned that, like, no clue. Because even up until then, my band works very much in the daw. We write songs in the daw. And sometimes we’ll be like, you know, we need to get rid of this whole section. And there’s a section where it’s like 12 tracks or 15 tracks or like some of them, you know. And what I used to have to do was I had had to try and select them all, splice them and then try to move them over, make sure they fit and all this stuff. And then I discovered, oh, I could just delete an entire section and they all fold together. Yeah, it was a thing like when I found it, I’m like, again, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve been, do I do it the wrong way? Until I’m like, I can’t believe this is the way that you do it. And then discover the ripple editing.

Paul Davis: Yeah.

Tom Ray: So I was happy.

Paul Davis: As I mentioned, I mean, we had that ripple editing when I was doing the podcast editing and it would have worked great for the type of editing you’re just describing, where you go in, take out all 12 tracks and have them all move back. But I didn’t want that. There were. Sometimes I needed a ripple, and sometimes I need to just cut the, and errors that one person said. And so we added this variant of ripple editing that’s specifically targeting sort of podcast editing and would be less useful if you were doing multi track Band, you know, record editing. So yeah, but yeah that, I mean that’s the only place now where I’m ever going to, going to get new ideas from is if I actually sit down and do something substantive myself with it the rest of the time. The new ideas need to come from users who have workflow issues or specific new things that, that, that they want to be able to do.

Tom Ray: I mean going back to what I was asking too, I guess the perfect way to error test the software is to give it to people who are going to use it in a bunch of different environments, use it completely in a different way that you never thought of which will happen when you just let people use it. Everybody’s going to go like how did you do it this way? Like talk about like slamming a door 800 times to test the car. You know, it’s really that sort of thing.

Paul Davis: It’s absolutely true. It’s still the case however that because of the breadth that Ardour has developed as a daw. And the multiplicity of different workflows people could use and the different things they’re trying to do, things can lurk around that go unnoticed for a long time. Either yeah, good stuff or bad stuff. I just discovered a couple of days ago this really stupid era that I think has crept up in the last some probably in the last two years. it’s kind of an super annoying and could easily lose to driving somebody crazy and nobody. I’ve never seen anyone report it. Okay, I want to know if I say ah earlier. I did say earlier I haven’t been reading the bug tracker so it could be in there but you know we added something where if you double clicked on the region it was a super fast way to rename it so you could just double click and start typing and there’s no dialog or box or anything that shows up. And at the time we added it probably seemed like a pretty cool thing to be able to do. Recently as part of the 9.0 stuff we now have double click and it can pop up the region in a separate editor for you to work on. Well that’s okay too but if you start typing in the editor it’s now renaming the region. We didn’t get rid of the rename functionality so you’re now double clicking and you’re now instantly renaming and editing in the data different window. So you know it, it’s the way in which people that it’s just such a vast spread of functionality and possibilities that, you know, things can both be, in a positive sense, be overlooked until you find out where they are, as you were mentioning. and in a negative sense that you can have bugs that just go unnoticed for the longest time. And you’re like, how is this continue to exist? And nobody knows what. Nobody works that way, you know. Yeah.

Tom Ray: If nobody tells us, how are we supposed to know? You can’t catch everything is what it amounts to.

Paul Davis: Yeah.

Tom Ray: And so, all right, talking about new features. And then I. I can’t remember if I mentioned this on the show or if when we were setting up, but with my band, we’re all using Ubuntu Studio. And just so I don’t have to be the IT manager, every six months we use the LTS version versions. So we only update every two years. Now the current LTS that we’re on is using, Ardor 8.4, which is, you know, behind. So recently I’ve been, I mean, I’ve been watching the updates and seeing the things. The new midi, setup is one that I can’t wait till when we upgrade to see the new MIDI setup. Because I love that. I love the way that it looks. I love the velocity setups that you have in it and all that kind of stuff. I think it looks fantastic. Now, recently I’ve kind of become obsessed with the idea of. I talk to a lot of electronic musicians and a lot of them just do live streaming, daw like jams. And a lot of them use Ableton. And I’m like, God, I wish there was a way to do that in here. Well, then one of them that I spoke to, like, I think last week told me, he was like, well, have you tried the Clips library? And I’m like, no. What the hell is that? So I, I’ve been reading up on the Clips library. Does this exist? I haven’t tried it out yet. I don’t know if it exists in the version that I have. Could you tell me more about the Clips library, which is like, you can create loops, set up stages, like all that kind of stuff.

Paul Davis: There’s a couple of things that term could refer to. I think in 8.4 you were. Well, let me just back up one second. we had a really difficult time coming up with terminology when we started to add this functionality. we didn’t want to use clips. I don’t remember why.

Tom Ray: Oh, it says Cue I’m sorry, I wrote the wrong thing. Yeah, Cue

Paul Davis: Fine. We ended up using Cue But that term is Already completely overloaded as well. So sometimes when I talk about this I’m going to jump back and forth. And we have an internal term.

Tom Ray: I just did.

Paul Davis: Yeah, we have an internal term trigger, which is in the source code as well. So it gets even more complicated. But no, I think 8.4 that you have already has the ability for, to do playback with, arbitrary length chunks of audio and MIDI that you sort of drop. Each track has a bunch of slots. You, you can drop them in and you can make them far off. And when they’re done playing you can have. We did use some terminology from other systems. You have follow actions and after that has played, the follow action will say what happens next. It could be stopped, it could be played again, it could be jumped to the next one, it could be jumped to a random one. Jump to a random one of the following three. And so you can, I think in 8.4 I believe all of that stuff is there. It almost certainly works better in 8.12, which is the last release, but that was there. and I think it works relatively well. I think there’s a few odd glitches that can come up from time to time. We also added, our own set of loops or clips and a download manager for them, where we pulled in a bunch of stuff. I talked to a bunch of people, can’t remember what the website is. There’s this amazing website, freesound.org? no, it’s not Freesound. It’s one that really focuses on loops, rather than samples. beatstars, I might remember it at some point.

Tom Ray: Those are the only two I know, so I don’t know why I’m trying to guess.

Paul Davis: But I got in touch with a few of the people that had libraries there that I really liked and asked them if we could actually download them and redistribute them. And a few people said yes. all right. We haven’t done a lot more expanding that library. I guess we sort of hope that users might contribute a bunch of. Hasn’t happened. it still could, but it hasn’t happened yet. But we did do a manager, ah, where you can go in and see what’s available and download it and so on. so those things are there. What was missing in all the eight Point something releases is there is no way to record new loops if you like, or clips into these slots. You could record a region just like you normally do if you’re used to recording your band on the timeline and then you could bounce that region over into one of the slots and use it. So you could sit there on the timeline and just record some nice riff or whatever. Put that in the slot and have it play.

Tom Ray: But now when you’re creating it, does that mean like in the output nobody would be able to hear it. You just kind of like how a DJ sets up the turntable on the side before getting it ready to go. Like does it work in that sense?

Paul Davis: If you mess around with your monitoring options in the program, then you could have had it set up in a way that would work like that so that you are, you’re recording it, only you could hear it. And then you drop it in the slot and you. And you’d be able to hear it. But it was a really clunk. It’s a pretty clunky workflow. If you compare what people are doing with live or with bitwig, where they can just sit with the clip slots and record straight into them and. And then it starts playing right up. I mean if you look at people trying to think, I mean there’s this young woman on YouTube, Elise, I don’t know how you say her last name, And I’m not sure she’s necessarily technically the best person at that workflow, but she’s gotten really good at making videos and making music that completely works on this model where she’s playing drums and is just recording into a clip, slot and it starts playing and she switches over to another instrument and just, you know, builds up entire songs in this way. And she’s got quite a sophisticated setup for triggering things. Anyway, that was not present in the eight point something versions. That is one of the things that we’ve done for 9.0 so that you can now just be on what we call the queue page. You can record, enable a slot, you can just play something into it and when it’s done it’ll start playing back. or you can go into record another one. It’s up to you. And so you can build up ah, pieces, you know, as a live performance that is becoming this ever more sort of complex track, while you’re going. Which is something that I’ve always been impressed by watching people use live and bitwig, doing. I think we still have some wrinkles and there’s still some. One of the reasons 9.0 hasn’t actually come out yet is because although clip recording is in there, there’s still some clunkiness to it when it’s not working as well as we would like. And I really don’t want to release 9.0 until I feel very confident. Say, yeah, we have clip recording now. and at the moment it’s still not quite in that state. I think it will be really soon. I think all the basic stuff is there. there’s just some glitches and there’s one small part which is that when recording audio clips at the moment, you don’t get any feedback about what’s being recorded. It is working, but you can’t see anything on the screen that tells you that anything’s happening. And so we need to add something that gives you some kind of feedback that. Yeah, yeah, the stuff’s coming in and you know, I don’t know. I’m not quite sure what it will show yet. Yeah, so you will, with auto 9, you’ll be able to do the kinds of things that you can see all over YouTube and probably all over TikTok and everywhere else of people sitting there building up pieces from things that, that they create. With Ardour 8, you’re limited to things that you’ve already got in your sample library or in the session and putting those in slots and building it up in that way.

Tom Ray: Okay. Yeah, it really is much like watching those videos. And the person that I spoke with, they were doing it in Bitwig, was the thing that they were using and it was just. I am getting more intrigued by the idea of just trying to come up with something on the fly. Which it’s nice to do in the safety of the, you know, no one’s around and you just throw things into the daw and go, well, maybe if I chop this up or make it more perfect or whatever, but I’d love to be able to just try and see what can do if you’ve got a bunch of plates spinning in the air, you know, like, okay, I got this thing running over here now let’s go over here and do this other thing. And I’m, I’m just very intrigued with it and I like the idea of doing that in a live streaming environment. I’ve really been into the live stream performances lately. So it’s, that’s why I was like. I, would like to find, I would like to use it in the, the daw that I already know and like, you know,

Paul Davis: My son has released several albums and oh, the, the, the earlier ones, he, he now is mostly a acoustic performer, but the earlier ones were all being done with live. And one of the things I remember him telling me about Live was that he didn’t really love it for working on final mix downs and actual production of songs. But he said when you’re actually just goofing around trying to come up with, with ideas that it was just so much fun and so creative to, to do things, you know, try this beat. okay, drop the other beat in. No, no, drop the other beating. No, no, no. Let’s go in and just warp all that stuff up and do something else and just playing around and you know, obviously that you might guess that partly from the name Ableton Live, conveying that you’re doing all this stuff live.

Tom Ray: That’s a good point.

Paul Davis: But you know, it really has a very nice workflow for playing around and experimenting and coming up with things that maybe once you get the idea fully developed you actually, maybe you don’t want to work in Live, you know, maybe you want to switch to a more conventional timeline door with better mixing and stuff like that. Obviously lots of Live users do not do that. They just stay in live and do everything there. And that’s fine. but it really does have, have a really great set of tools for goofing around with samples. Goofing around with this idea that you, you just came up with for a little piano ostinato or a guitar riff or you know, stuff like that. I don’t, in longer term, I mean I don’t know how close 9.0 will get us to that. It certainly gets us a lot closer. But that’s something I’d really like to see Ardour supporting as well. Is that sort of experimenting, goofing around playing model where even if.

Tom Ray: That’s basically what I’m coming up to. Yeah, that’s where I’m going,

Paul Davis: where you know, even if that’s not the finished song, you know, even if it just ends up with this four track thing that you play to your band mates and say, you know, hey, you know, what do you think of this? ideas.

Tom Ray: Yeah, exactly. Now you brought up an interesting fact too when you were saying your son didn’t necessarily like it for Mix down. Now there’s another thing that you added which it’s funny, I don’t know if it was made because this kind of got instigated in the streaming community, but in the export of, of Ardor, now you have a export to LUFs specification feature. So that was one thing we ran into when we were going to release Our album in 2023, the album we were releasing then I went to go push it and it got rejected because it said it didn’t follow the LUFs configuration for a certain stream service. And I’m like, what the hell are you talking about? I don’t know what this is. I’d never heard of LUFs before. I didn’t know was a unit of measure for overall audio. Now we figured that out. I had to do research on it. Then, when we updated, that was built in. When I went to export, I saw that that was a drop down feature and I was like, well, holy hell. So how did you. How did you create something to specify? You have one for Spotify, you have one for YouTube, you have one for Amazon. So how did you. How did you create that?

Paul Davis: That work was all done by Robin.

Tom Ray: Oh, it was.

Paul Davis: My knowledge of the internals there is limited. But basically those services will all tell you what loss values they want to see. And we already had, Pretty sure we already had allowed this analyzer, in the software. So we already had code to do the analysis to come up with with the loss of numbers. and so really it was just, I say just I didn’t have to do, but it was just a matter of combining the fact we could do the analysis. We understood how to adjust the export parameters to change what the loss value would be and then combine that with the information from the streaming platforms on what you’re aiming for. one thing about that feature that I found myself, my. I say I’m not a musician, but I’m surrounded by musicians. My wife, just did a little EP last year as a duo. and when we’re trying to put that on streaming platforms, why was I looking at multiple streaming platforms? Because we only put it on Bandcamp. Anyway, I remember running into the issue that you still have to do multiple exports because the streaming platforms don’t all agree. And there’s something about that export process where if you pick the right combinations, you can do it all in one pass. If you pick the wrong combinations, there’s no way for us to do them all in one go. But yeah, so it was mostly gluing together some stuff. We already had to make what was becoming a more and more common thing for people to want, and make that easy for them. And also. And also because as you said, a lot of people will look at this and like LUFs. What on earth are these people even talking about? How do I do that?

Tom Ray: You have to do research to figure this stupid thing out. And it makes no sense.

Paul Davis: Yeah. And it’s also turn the master feeder down. Is that it? Is that all I have to do? And you know, and so automating that for people will. Will hopefully have made targeting streaming services, you know, that much easier. yeah. Personally, I tell everybody you should forget that. Export to a wav file, put it on Bandcamp, and forget the streaming services. But it’s a different discussion.

Tom Ray: So. Well, and so now I hated it. I didn’t understand it. I. When we do the, when we did the mastering feature, I would work with my guitarist Eric to do that. So he would help with that because he was a front of house mixer at a club here for many, many years. So he was, he was good at that. But when it came to that, I mean, I want to say. And it kind of became a good thing because I think people, especially people who grew up during the alternative era, of music, we all just kind of bricked our masters. We all just kind of did the Rick Rubin like, loud and clear as possible. But we realized after doing this and going through it, it’s like, oh, the nuance is there. The, the. You know, I didn’t mind it afterwards, but I hated it at first because we had this great miss, this great master that we were going to put out and then we had to redo the whole thing and it was quieter, but it’s like, that’s not a bad thing. We were just running it loud and that’s what they were trying to stop. They were trying to stop everybody from just, my mix is louder. No, my mix is louder. You know? Yeah, that sort of thing. So I didn’t mind it, but man, did it tick me off at first. And I still don’t. I can’t even remember what the acronym stands for anymore.

Paul Davis: But. But yeah, I’m not sure that I actually know. I know the L is loudness, but the, UFS part, I’m not sure.

Tom Ray: I think that’s what I mean.

Paul Davis: Yeah, I think the one big question for me is, okay, I get the idea. And I think trying to end the loudness wars was an excellent move on the part of those companies. But why do they all come up with different numbers?

Tom Ray: I know exactly. Yeah, like why?

Paul Davis: It seems great to me that they stepped in and said, no, no, no, we don’t want anything where the loss value is greater than this, but. Couldn’t you all have just agreed on what that level was? I don’t know.

Tom Ray: Yeah, And. But then, of course, then you get more into people regulating music. It’s bad enough that they’re all regulating it personally, and then all of a sudden one person’s going to be in control. Well, no, I guess maybe if it was more. Okay, now I’m just thinking of how the world should be run. Never mind. I’m gonna go down a rabbit hole there. But, yeah, it’s. I agree that, like, I. I still don’t even know. And then you have to remember which one is which. Then you have to have a list of how that goes. or you just use our export.

Paul Davis: Dialogue and then you’re done.

Tom Ray: Exactly. Yeah. And that’s good, too. And also it’s funny too, because it helps. I even use it just when I’m actually exporting demos to share with the guys, because it gives it a good boost. I like it. What I used to have to do is I’d export it, then I’d put it. Then I’d open up in, Audacity, run a limiter, then normalize it, then set a compressor just so I could have it running super loud so they wouldn’t have to turn it up really loud in their cars. So I would just do that. And now with the, with the LUFS export, I’m like, oh, good, that’s at a good level that I like, because normally I’m not mixing it until the end. anyway, so, yes, I wanted to ask about that, and I love that feature. Now, you had talked about with, your son and your wife and, just building this. In general, I’m curious, have you ever, ever done any engineering or producing work? I, mean, possibly with your family, but with any other projects, or have you ever worked on tracking something or producing something?

Paul Davis: I. I have not. and in fact, the only engineering stuff I did was for my wife’s one where they. Okay, we have a studio, amazing as it is. I mean, a tiny village in New Mexico, but the house right behind me has a recording studio, commercial recording studio in it.

Tom Ray: Really?

Paul Davis: Yeah. And so, my wife and her partner in this duo went over there to do the recordings. And then Danny just shipped me the stems and I did all the mixing. the one thing I would say where I really picked up a lot when I began working on art or I had a really good friend in Philadelphia who had a small recording studio, and his base and him, he was a professional drummer. But, you know, like, a lot of guys in that situation, they end up building recording studio for Stuff on the side. And, in the very beginning days of Order, I spent a lot of time just hanging at the studio so that I could pick up, like, what. What is actually happening? What’s the process of. Of recording people? What’s the process of mixing them? what’s the process of editing and how does the feedback with the people work? and I haven’t done that now in many, many years. But I think it worked really well for me because I think without that, I would have. I don’t know exactly where I would have gotten my ideas of what the recording process really is. and that really helped to sort of clarify, you know, what are the things that are important and how does it work. So that’s where I picked up most of that stuff from. And then when it comes to my, you know, engineering, my wife’s staff, a lot of that just comes from the fact that I listen to a awful lot of music, while I’m working, while I’m traveling. And, I don’t know, I feel I’m a Brit. I’m not supposed to blow my own hole, right? But a lot of people tell me that I have, you know, I have really good listening taste and I know how to listen to music and so on.

Tom Ray: Okay?

Paul Davis: So I think on the odd occasion, when I do get to do that, I generally have a pretty good idea of what I’m aiming for. Having worked on audio software for quarter century, now I have some idea of how to go about getting there. I have a suspicion if I sat down with somebody who is a professional mix engineer, I would be completely, completely embarrassed. Okay. I really don’t know. you know, compared to them, I don’t know. I don’t know anything. But I think compared to a lot of musicians who I want to undermine, but that they only performed, you know, they don’t do recording, they don’t do mixing, they don’t edit. Compared to them, I know a lot more. And I can often bring something useful to what they’re doing. Right?

Tom Ray: I mean, I use it every day. And I still have to jump into the discourse that you guys have and go, what’s this thing? Where did this go?

Paul Davis: Well, I. I wasn’t thinking so much of, like, how to use the door, but, like. No, no, no. I know what is good mixing.

Tom Ray: That’s, you know, that’s a good point. I. You’re right. I. My example was poor. but also, yeah, I don’t. I mean, I record something and I go, like, we usually end up using the first thing we use, like, we’ll go, oh, we’ll come up with this idea. And then once, we get it down, we’ll rerecord it. And then sometimes it’s one of those things, it’s the classic where like, oh, you just miss. You lose the magic of the demo. So I’ll end up editing that original thing to fit better rather than record it the right way. So I’m even worse in that category.

Paul Davis: The other person I would mention, he doesn’t have a lot of stuff on YouTube. There’s a guy called Gregory Kush K U S H and I think he has a plug in company. And, maybe at some point he had a HOB audio hardware company. And he’s done very few videos for the last few years. But I, I find his very intermittent videos on mixing to just be really a revelation. The way, really. Yeah, the way he just talks about how to listen to the sound and how to think about what you’re actually doing when you’re mixing. and even just not mixing, even just like song structure and composition and how mix can affect song structure and composition. And he used to, he used to do a lot more. And then two or three years ago, I don’t, I don’t really know what happened to him. I don’t know if he went through a divorce or had an accident or an illness or something, but he kind of vanished and he came back. But I think in the last year he’s only done a couple, but they’ve both been great. and he just brings a certain kind of insight that again, I mean, I don’t do this stuff an awful lot, but it definitely makes me think both about what I’m doing when I do do. It also makes me think about is this stuff where you need to or ought to do in order to make the kind of approach that he’s talking about easier or more obvious. you know, I think the most recent one he had was about, the idea of subtractive mixing, and thinking about, you know, instead of, you know, bringing things up, what, where should you take things out in the mix and have that be the overall, idea that’s driving some, some stage of it. So I, I always find that he, he has great insights and he also has a beautiful voice. It’s really just, just amazing to just listen to him. It’s sort of an asmr, you know, type of voice. So it’s, yeah, very pleasant to listen to.

Tom Ray: All right, now I got two things I Got to check out when we’re done with this. So, one last thing I wanted to ask you about. So we’ve talked about the build up to release, nine. Do you have any insight onto when you think it might be or is it still just really when you feel it’s right?

Paul Davis: Well there’s both. we’re definitely not going to do it until we feel it’s right. I’m mildly optimistic that it will happen before December. not totally certain of that. mostly because I don’t know how difficult the remaining details of clip recording are going to be and that’s the biggest thing that needs to get done. but I’m sort of optimistic it’ll happen before the beginning of December. If it doesn’t then it won’t be until sometime in January because both Robin and I have pretty busy Decembers and there’s not much point in thinking, well if we don’t get it out by the end of November, we can do it in December. It’s like, no, we’re not going to get it done in December. So. Right, that’s a rough goal. But again we won’t do it until we think it’s ready. that’s always been our, ah, our release process. one of the really great things about the financial model that supports Ardour is that the vast majority of our income comes from people who pay us monthly instead of people who are paying us for the new release. And partly because of collaboration, with Harrison, I’ve got to see what the other version looks like. And I am just eternally grateful to the, to the people that pay us monthly. Not just for making my lifestyle possible and not just making art possible, but for also freeing us from a model where it’s like, well damn, it’s been like six months since we did a release and the revenues dried up and nobody’s buying it and we have to get another version out there. And there may be some kinds of software where that sort of a release model is maybe a good thing, maybe it drives things forward or whatever, but given the way we develop Ardour limited resources, it’s already a big legacy program with lots of old code sitting around in it. not being pressured into doing releases because we don’t have the revenue, just feels like an enormous gift. and occasionally we’ve made many mistakes. There have been a few releases that we’ve done in the past where it wasn’t ready and we misjudged it and we bought it out We’ve had to catch up on that. But I think in general, Robin and I feel pretty good that when we do finally decide that 9.0 is ready, it will be. It will be ready. And if you haven’t been trying it out along the way, you’ve just been using 8 point something. We hope that you’re going to get, like a really positive, experience from trying it.

Tom Ray: Yeah, I can’t wait to upgrade even just my eight point version.

Paul Davis: Yeah.

Tom Ray: But I’m looking forward to the 9.1 for sure.

Paul Davis: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there was some great changes between 8.4 and 8.12, so even that will be right.

Tom Ray: No, that’s what I mean. I’ve even been watching those like. And you guys have been along with that. The video updates you’ve been doing, where I’m watching it going, ah, damn it. But, but. And I’m excited to try it. And I also want to thank you very much for talking with today. It was great to see you again.

Paul Davis: You’re welcome. It’s great to talk to you, Tom, and to see you again. For those who haven’t been following, Tom and I first met at, Ubuntu summit in Prague, which was three. Three years ago.

Tom Ray: It was in 2022.

Paul Davis: Yeah, yeah. So three years ago. Yeah, yeah.

Tom Ray: I know. And it was. It was. We thought we were just going to. I was going to say hi to you and it’d be like, we love your studio. Or we love your studio, we love your daw. And then we ended up hanging out, us and the band, hanging out with Robin. It was awesome. Yeah.

Paul Davis: All right, Tom, great to chat.

Tom Ray: Yep. Great to talk to you too.