Software Alternatives & Reviews

Ardour VS LMMS

Compare Ardour VS LMMS and see what are their differences

Ardour logo Ardour

Record, edit, and mix on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

LMMS logo LMMS

Make music with a free, cross-platform tool
  • Ardour Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-12-13
  • LMMS Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-06

Ardour

Categories
  • Audio & Music
  • Audio
  • Audio Recording
  • Music
Website ardour.org
Details $

LMMS

Categories
  • Audio & Music
  • Music
  • Music Tools
  • Audio Recording
Website lmms.io
Details $

Ardour videos

What is Ardour?

More videos:

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

LMMS videos

Review LMMS 2020 - BEST or WORST for beginners?? Free DAW

More videos:

  • Review - I Tried Making a Beat in LMMS !
  • Review - LMMS 1.2 is FINALLY HERE!

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Ardour and LMMS)
Audio
54 54%
46% 46
Audio & Music
44 44%
56% 56
Audio Recording
54 54%
46% 46
Music
31 31%
69% 69

User comments

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Reviews

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

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.

LMMS Reviews

Best FL Studio Alternatives In 2022
If you’re someone who is looking for a free option and you are familiar with FL Studio, I highly recommend checking out LMMS. While it LMMS doesn’t have every feature FL Studio does, it does offer many of the traditional features.
Top 10 LMMS Alternatives and Similar Software
The software LMMS is for those who are musically inclined. It helps you create music. We share with you brief details of LMMS alternatives. You can try them out for a new experience of creating music. Coming back to LMMS, the best thing about it is that it’s completely free. Hosted on GitHub, it’s an open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) that works on several operating...
Best LMMS Alternatives 2017
Alternatives to LMMS 2017: LMMS is a free cross-platform alternative to profit making programs like Minor FL Studio icon FLStudio, which permit you to harvest music with your computer. This comprises the creation of tunes and beats, the synthesis and involvement of sounds, and positioning of samples. You can consume fun with your MIDI-keyboard and much extra, all in a...

Social recommendations and mentions

Ardour might be a bit more popular than LMMS. We know about 110 links to it since March 2021 and only 96 links to LMMS. 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.

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 1 month 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: 9 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

LMMS mentions (96)

  • Ask HN: Getting Started with DAW?
    So, I saw the other day the release of the ep-133, and it happens that I want to get started doing that kind of stuff (e.g., creating simple beats). I have zero knowledge about DAW/sampling and music in general (my background is in soft. engineering), so the first thing that I searched on Google is "open source daw" and I found LMMS (https://lmms.io/). I'm going through the documentation right now. Do you know... - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • Midi I/O vs USB
    Of course, you need some kind of DAW software in your PC that receives MIDI (from LPK), creates the audio data and sends them to Volt. If you have zero experience with this, start with some kind of simple and self-contained DAW, like e.g. "LMMS" (free download). Later you can graduate to more complex (and expensive) DAWs and separate VST plugins. Source: 10 months ago
  • Linux for Video Editing and Photo Editing and Music DJ: Some idea?
    For music making, it kind of depends on what you use normally but LMMS is a decent free DAW. Source: 11 months ago
  • My dual boot with windows 11 won't boot past intro screen or even into bios after failed attempt to fix frequent Kerbal panic.
    Give a try to Ardour, LMMS, MusE and Rosegarden. Source: 11 months ago
  • Looking for some editing software
    Take a look at: Shotcut for video. Paint.NET for image editing. LMMS for your soundtrack. All free. Source: about 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

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

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.

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.

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.