Rosegarden vs Ardour

briwood · Post by **briwood** » Mon Apr 07, 2008 5:01 pm

Links:

http://ardour.org/
http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/

I've started learning Rosegarden but have recently noticed that Ardour might be more actively under development (a new release just came out). Perhaps this thread could be a place to talk about how the two match up.

My goals with these applications are:

* input music
* experiment with arrangements e.g. horn harmonies and harmonic or metric modulations
* print out nicely formatted charts transposed for each instrument.
* create play-along tracks for rehearsing

Post by **nathan** » Mon Apr 07, 2008 5:55 pm

Rosegarden will be your best bet, I think. As far as I know Ardour doesn't do any kind of midi sequencing, and has no notation capabilities.

NoteEdit might also fulfill some of your needs...I love that little app.

Tim · Post by **Tim** » Mon Apr 07, 2008 7:03 pm

http://lilypond.org/web/ can do notation afaik, don't have any experience with it though.

Post by **nathan** » Mon Apr 07, 2008 7:39 pm

Straight Lily has a big learning curve. I'd start with a frontend like NoteEdit or Denemo.

heLeN · Post by **heLeN** » Thu Apr 10, 2008 7:04 pm

I'm much more in ease with Ardour than with Rosegarden. I find Ardour perfect for audio recording, the mixer is great, the edition is easy... It doesn't currently do any MIDI, but the feature is planned and you can see screenshots on ardour's web page with a nice piano-roll.
Ardour does also VSTs and AUs

studio32 · Post by **studio32** » Fri Apr 11, 2008 9:55 am

heLeN wrote:I'm much more in ease with Ardour than with Rosegarden. I find Ardour perfect for audio recording, the mixer is great, the edition is easy... It doesn't currently do any MIDI, but the feature is planned and you can see screenshots on ardour's web page with a nice piano-roll.
Ardour does also VSTs and AUs :D

heLeN, welcome at the forum ;)

love to see the midi feature in ardour!
Keep sending money and praise to the developers of linux software :)

thorgal · Post by **thorgal** » Fri Apr 11, 2008 10:13 am

I never did audio in rosegarden, so I cannot compare both. A long time ago (5 years maybe), I was using audacity and ecasound because ardour required jack, which, on my poor little laptop, was more of a "chinese-like" torture to get up and running right ... But I did not do any serious work, just fiddled around with what would become really good for production a few years after.

I started using rosegarden not long ago because I grew a bit tired of spending an outrageous amount of time in drum sequencing with hydrogen or other soft which are OK for electro music but not for acoustic sounding rock music. I sort of discovered the "joy" of MIDI at the same time (a friend gave me her digital piano around the same time). Rosegarden is very easy to use (although it tries to outsmart you sometimes with how things are routed, etc).
When ardour is mature with MIDI support, we'll see. But rosegarden syncs nicely with jack transport and ardour. I also really like the tempo ramping, so easy to use and convincing enough to my ears. I tried tempo change in ardour and that was not so convincing (I submitted a bug report related to a tempo marker issue).

studio32 · Post by **studio32** » Fri Apr 11, 2008 10:26 am

There is a new tutorial on the rosegarden site to work with Hydrogen

http://rosegarden.sourceforge.net/tutor ... /hydrogen/

thorgal · Post by **thorgal** » Fri Apr 11, 2008 10:34 am

don't get me wrong. Hydrogen is really cool, very versatile, understands MIDI, etc. But it has major flaws : the DRUMKITS! And not only that, but if you browse the hydrogen forums, you will see a few posts between me, DrG and wolke about design problems, especially for those who want to use the instrument track outputs instead of the main outputs. We had to patch it and it kinda worked as we wanted but again, without descent drumkits and velocity range + other things like overhead and room mic'ing, etc, it will never provide real sounding drumming, despite the humanization option, etc. You will have to spend a lot of time in the mixing, whether in hydrogen itself or ardour, to get a half descent sound. Again, for electro, that's really cool. But to my ears, every piece of music I could hear made with HG so far did not provide the quality I expected (including my own stuff). This soft needs to mature and expand. The problem is that it was sort of given up by its main author a year ago or so. The current development is not transparent at all, even though someone said recently that it will resume more actively. Let's see.

metasymbol · Post by **metasymbol** » Mon Apr 14, 2008 3:31 pm

Ardour and Rosegarden aren't comparable - Arodur is perfect for recording (and mixing, but only with the Mac version, which supports AU) and Rosegarden is nice for notation and other midi stuff. Rosegardens audio part is not so nice, and Ardour have no midisequencer (I hear since 3 years: the next version will have but it never happens).

Together they go well via jack transport sync - but I have no hardware sampler and synths and the DSSI plugins doesn't fits my needs, I need no notation, so I never use Rosegarden and Ardour, instead I have with REAPER a perfect solution for midi and audio (and hundreds of freebee VST instrument plugins) and I can save my creation with one click.

metasymbol · Post by **metasymbol** » Mon Apr 14, 2008 3:33 pm

thorgal wrote:don't get me wrong. Hydrogen is really cool, very versatile, understands MIDI, etc. But it has major flaws : the DRUMKITS!

Another big prob is IMHO that H2 doesn't synchronize the BPM in jack transport modus.

zettberlin · Post by **zettberlin** » Sun Apr 20, 2008 9:39 pm

For your needs Rosegarden is the way to go. It is quite actively developed btw, there where 2 major releases in the last 12 months and quite a lot of bugfixing.
The audiotracks in RG will do exactly what you describe: playing simple wavetracks to accompany your compositions on the MIDI-tracks. But dont expect more from RGs audio-tracks even the simplest arranging/editing operations are crude at best.

RG can whatsoever be synced with any jack-transport aware hd-recorder/arranger. This works great with Ardour but also with Traverso. Traverso does not have the feature-set of A but is much leaner and has a smart usage-concept based on mouse plus keyboard-strokes. For the beginner Traverso has right-click menues.

@metasymbol
Ardour3(SVN) has working MIDI-tracks already, Yet it is quite demanding in the field of dependencies so it is hard to build it on mainstream-distros like UBUNTU or SUSE. And it is sure not production-stable.
Nevertheless: as long as you don`t need the MIDI-tracks Ardour 2.4x is perfect for audio-production. I use the LADSPA-plugins and Jamin on 64Studio with it and I do not feel like "Oh no, this is unusable! Give me better plugins or I cannot use this."

Ichthyo · Post by **Ichthyo** » Tue Apr 26, 2016 12:28 am

Hello all,

several years have passed, and now I'm facing the exact same question....

I am very familiar with Ardour, but up to now, I only did audio, recording, editing and mastering.
Now I need to get up to speed with MIDI, since I'll probably get to do tasks along the lines of "arranging and instrumentation".

Just from looking at a feature comparison, it seems that meanwhile Ardour outsmarts Rosegarden by a wide margin. With the sole exception that Rosegarden seems to have some notation capabilities (but is not a really dedicated notation centric work environment, correct?).

Now my question to the experienced users: would you recommend spending some time on learning Rosegarden, is that worth the effort? Or is it safe just to stick to Ardour and familiarise myself with the MIDI part of Adour-4 ? Would I miss some killer feature when I just ignore Rosegarden?

Regarding the stability & performance, I have quite good experiences with Ardour (that is, once you have enough RAM to offer); Ardour was quite reliably for me even on several hour long multitrack monster sessions with well over thousand individual clips, just with some slowdown for scrolling over the whole session. How does Rosegarden compare to that? Is it able to handle really huge Arrangements? And, to ask the question the other way around, has Ardour known limitations when it comes to very large MIDI Arrangements?

spamatica · Post by **spamatica** » Tue Apr 26, 2016 12:43 pm

Wow, 8 year since the last reply in this thread

---
I think you should spend some time examining the options. Maybe it wasn't 8 years since you personally checked but there are several more players than Rosegarden and Ardour that are actively developed and supported.

Atleast Qtractor and MusE among open source DAWs and Tracktion, Bitwig, Renoise etc, among commercial DAWs.

Now, this is hearsay on my part, but I believe the Ardour midi support still needs some work to be viable, seems to be usable for some though.

Regards,
Robert

Luc · Post by **Luc** » Tue Apr 26, 2016 5:17 pm

IIRC, Ardour can record MIDI input in real time, but doesn't have any kind of step sequencer.

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