Software Alternatives & Reviews

Ableton Live VS Ardour

Compare Ableton Live VS Ardour and see what are their differences

Ableton Live logo Ableton Live

Ableton makes Push and Live, hardware and software for music production, creation and performance. Ableton´s products are made to inspire creative music-making.

Ardour logo Ardour

Record, edit, and mix on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
  • Ableton Live Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-13
  • Ardour Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-12-13

Ableton Live videos

Ableton Live 10 Review - The Best DAW For DJ/Producers?

More videos:

  • Review - Ableton Live 10: Intro vs. Standard vs. Suite vs. Lite - Which Should You Buy?
  • Review - ABLETON LIVE 10!!!!

Ardour videos

What is Ardour?

More videos:

  • Review - Ardour Review ENDED
  • Tutorial - Ardour Tutorial - Digital Audio Workstation for Linux

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Ableton Live and Ardour)
Audio & Music
35 35%
65% 65
Audio
32 32%
68% 68
Audio Recording
33 33%
67% 67
Music
34 34%
66% 66

User comments

Share your experience with using Ableton Live and Ardour. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Ableton Live and Ardour

Ableton Live Reviews

  1. Sounds good

    Crafting music in Ableton Live has been an exciting and efficient experience. The software's powerful features and intuitive layout truly stand out. Loading samples and loops onto the interface is as easy as drag-and-drop, allowing for quick and easy experimentation. The session view is perfect for improvisation, and the arrangement view is ideal for fine-tuning. The automation feature is a gem, enabling the creation of dynamic soundscapes. Exporting the final track is straightforward, too. All in all, Ableton Live has revolutionized my music-making process. A top-notch tool for any music creator!

    🏁 Competitors: Reason

Top 18 Free Music Making Software for Beginners [2023]
Ableton Live 11 Lite is a lightweight DAW with all the basic workflows, effects, and instruments you need to thrive with music production at the entry level. It is the free version of Ableton Live 11. However, the developers are fairly generous with its built-in features.
Expand Your Arsenal of Music Creation Tools With BandLab Alternatives
Ableton Live is a popular digital audio workstation (DAW) for creating music and soundscapes on Mac and Windows PCs. It has an intuitive user interface that makes it easy to create professional-sounding projects quickly. With its extensive library of samples, built-in effects, and support for MIDI controllers, Ableton Live is one of the most powerful DAWs available today.
Source: bandlabwin.com
9 Adobe Audition Alternatives That Do More Than Cleaning
Do you often edit live performances? If so, you need Ableton Live. This DAW adjusts tempo based on your audio in real-time.
Best FL Studio Alternatives In 2022
Ableton Live is one of my personal favorite DAWs. My band used this extensively on two different laptops each and every night. Ableton Live is built for those who desire to perform their songs live to their true form.
Top 12 Audacity Alternatives You Could Use
For the audio editors who are looking for a powerful yet highly intuitive substitute for Audacity, Ableton Live could be the right answer. Designed for live use, the software features a clean and snappier user-interface that is a bit easier to get a hang of. As it’s fully customizable, you can fine-tune the whole UI to keep everything in sync with your workflow. That aside,...
Source: beebom.com

Ardour Reviews

  1. Great for the poor man. Still needs A LOT of improvements, specially on midi editing.

    Copy Yes, you can start a project from scratch and end up with a great sounding track using Ardour. Specially if you use mostly audio. For those like me who use both audio and midi editing, it may easily drive you to a real nightmare. The DAW doesn't behave as you would expect. The "share regions" will get you good as you edit one region and it "magically" ruins the original one. Oh, just use copy instead of share, like they say right? Nope. It still bugs you to the bone. So you have to go manually "unlinking" every single region. Some regions may be a single note, for example, and you can miss that. Oh, so I will consolidate all regions before unlinking! Nope, there is not such thing here. Another example: You want to keep only a certain midi note on your midi track, the C3 that is you Drum Kick. You cannot do it, unless if you go deleting every single other note, one by one! Terrible isn't it? No, you cannot copy a single note through the entire track. Sometimes I managed to select a note through the track and delete it. So I took note how I did it and... Next time it's a negative! With so many different selections of tools, smart, playhead, etc, it appears the DAW confuses itself and do not respond appropriately. So... my advice to you is not to fall for what I did, which is believing Ardour can do everything it says it does, cause it doesn't. Keep simple with audio recording and editing. Do your midi stuff elsewhere and run from the nightmare I got myself into. Nevertheless, it is great cost/benefit DAW. Worthy a try. Yes, you can start a project from scratch and end up with a great sounding track using Ardour. Specially if you use mostly audio. For those like me who use both audio and MIDI editing, it may easily drive you into a real nightmare. The DAW doesn't behave as you would expect. The "share regions" will get you good as you edit one region and it "magically" ruins the original one. Oh, just use copy instead of share, like they say right? Nope. It still bugs you to the bone. So you have to go manually "unlinking" every single region. Some regions may be a single note, for example, and you can miss that. Oh, so I will consolidate all regions before unlinking! Nope, there is not such thing here. Another example: You want to keep only a certain midi note on your midi track, the C3 that is you Drum Kick. You cannot do it, unless if you go deleting every single other note, one by one! Terrible isn't it? No, you cannot copy a single note through the entire track. Sometimes I managed to select a note through the track and delete it. So I took note how I did it and... Next time it's a negative! With so many different selections of tools, smart, playhead, etc, it appears the DAW confuses itself and do not respond appropriately. So... my advice to you is not to fall for what I did, which is believing Ardour can do everything it says it does, cause it doesn't. Keep simple with audio recording and editing. Do your midi stuff elsewhere and run from the nightmare I got myself into. Nevertheless, it is great cost/benefit DAW. Worthy a try.


Top 18 Free Music Making Software for Beginners [2023]
Ardour is an open-source DAW designed to help music-makers make pro-level music by offering robust tools for recording, editing, and mixing songs on Windows, macOS, or Linux PCs.
5 PRO TOOLS ALTERNATIVES FOR RECORDING AND MIXING AUDIO
Ardour is a free and open-source DAW with capabilities similar to Pro Tools. It was designed for audio professionals, but it can be used by any musician or producer who wants to create professional-quality recordings. Ardour has a traditional track recorder layout with timecode and multi-track editing. It also includes a powerful mixer, effects processors, and recording tools.
10 Best Audacity Alternatives for Audio Recording and Editing
It offers a feature to see your recording wave while letting you adjust and monitor the input gains for clear and clean recordings. Ardour presents a huge editing platform with editing tools like trim, cut, swing and transpose, etc. so that you can easily mix your tracks with the tools like a fader, mute and automate, etc.
Top 10 LMMS Alternatives and Similar Software
Ardour is a very capable alternative for LMMS. Ardour is a bit complicated to use. That’s why it’s recommended only for those who have prior professional experience of editing and mixing music. If you’re an audio engineer, you’ll love Ardour for recording a piece of music and then editing and mixing it. It comes with some recently added features-
Best LMMS Alternatives 2017
This LMMS alternative is a hard disk recorder as well as digital audio workplace application. It turns on GNU/Linux and Mac OS X. Ardour’s purpose is to provide digital audio workplace software suitable for proficient use. Ardour source code is freely accessible but pre-built binaries are profitable free-libre software.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Ardour should be more popular than Ableton Live. It has been mentiond 110 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Ableton Live mentions (39)

  • Anyone know the system requirements (macOS) for Live 12?
    I'm considering pre-ordering the Live 12 upgrade from 11, but I can't find any info on ableton.com that lists Live 12's system requirements. The pre-order page for Live 12 lists Live 11's system requirements. Source: 5 months ago
  • Push 3 Expressive Choir
    Open Live, go to Help/User account and licences/authorize at ableton.com. Source: 11 months ago
  • Free Ableton live lite 11 and lite 10 license
    Hi, I'd like to giveaway Ableton live lite (10+11) license for free. The license is currently linked to my account, so I need to transfer ownership to someone who has an account on ableton.com . You can dm me your email address you have an account with. I can give it to only one person first come first serve basis. Source: 12 months ago
  • I just purchased Ableton Live suite and never received a license.
    Did you order direct from ableton.com, or from somewhere else? Source: about 1 year ago
  • I'm using a cracked ableton live 11, where can I get the plugins that it supposed to have?
    You're not going to get access to most of the packs, as you need an account with a product key on ableton.com in order to download them. As for plugins, I'm not sure what you mean. If you're talking about Max for Live, you might be able to find a separate crack for that but again, many of the devices are on the Ableton website and require you to be holding a product key. Source: about 1 year ago
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Ardour mentions (110)

  • Ask HN: Is There a Blender for Music?
    Effects you can hear. [0] https://ardour.org/ [1[ https://cybershow.uk/. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
  • What Is the Future of the DAW?
    I'm the lead author of Ardour [0], and I'd very much like to hear more about your frustrations, since over the next 1-2 years, paying attention to non-European musical culture is one of the things I hope to focus on during development. You can reach me via the email address in my profile, or maybe use our forums at discourse.ardour.org. Thanks. [0] https://ardour.org/ <= a cross-platform open source DAW that has... - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago
  • Red Blob Games: Interactive visual explanations of math and algorithms
    One extra detail, something I've learned from 20 years of working on dragging all kinds of objects around the GUI of Ardour [0]: handle ALL button press and release events as drag events where there is no movement. [0] https://ardour.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago
  • Absolute beginner seeking advice
    I am aware of the 'Real Tone Cable' however I am curious if this is what I should be buying if I also intend on recording my playing in a software such as 'Ardour'. Source: 10 months ago
  • How to map multiple samples with linux-sampler?
    I just loaded an instance of samplv https://samplv1.sourceforge.io/ into the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), Ardour https://ardour.org/ . Source: 10 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Ableton Live and Ardour, you can also consider the following products

Reaper - Reaper is a focused digital audio workstation (DAW) developed by Cockos. In the creation of the software, the digital audio technology company intended to make audio editing accessible to the masses.

Audacity - Audacity is a free and open-source audio production software suite that includes a surprising array of editing tools and recording systems.

LMMS - Make music with a free, cross-platform tool

FL Studio - Image-Line's FL Studio, now on it's 12th version, is a well-known music production suite and the most popular beat processor on the market, due no doubt to its longevity. Read more about FL Studio.

GarageBand - GarageBand is a fully equipped music creation studio for Mac

Cubase - Cubase is one of the world’s most powerful music creation software packages. From first idea to finished recording, Cubase helps you to make outstanding music.