Cairo v1.4.6 is released and it’s got a “particularly juicy performance fix, (working around an X server performance bug), as well as native PDF gradients with alpha”. In other interesting open source releases, the powerful audio application Ardour v2.0 was released (with Mac OS X support).
Cairo v1.4.6; Ardour 2.0 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I wish people would use cairo alot more, it’s got so much goodness to it, you only ned to look what Macslow does with cairo.
http://macslow.thepimp.net/
Great work on this and Behdad we love you.
The next version of Firefox (3) will use Cairo as its graphics engine on all platforms.
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3/Gecko_Feature_List
So do I.
Nothing more to add other than these are both great projects and it’s wonderful to see them making progress.
I look forward to the many improvements cairo will help with pdf export in Inkscape.
If you are on Win32, the latest Inkscape “nightly” is using Cairo 1.4.6 here:
http://inkscape.modevia.com/win32
Edited 2007-05-02 09:21
That’s a great release of Ardour2.0! Now there’s also professional digital audio workstation software available in the FLOSS world.
This is not like the Gimp to Photoshop, this is a really powerful product wich compares well to the likes of ProTools and Nuendo. It’s also got some advantages of it’s own.
Thanks to all the developers for creating Ardour2.0!
Sorry, it’s not that great for the professionnal sound designer for a simple reason : no drivers support on linux (through alsa or oss non free) for so called professionnal sound card devices, the ones you’ll pay at least 1000 euros and which are able to record simultaneously more than 16 tracks in stereo in 96 khz at the same time. I know it’s not ardour’s fault of course, but still.
As long as it can’t match Cubase VST on a feature 2 feature basis, it’ll stay a toy, a nice one, still, but a toy.
Djamé
Edited 2007-05-02 23:59
I’m sorry, but given the quality of the majority of music people even try to record, chances are for most people the tool is not the limiting factor in how good the music sounds.
How many of the arguably greatest albums of all time came from four tracks?
Besides, there are a few fairly high end cards (like those from RME) which are very well supported by alsa.
I agree, but for different reasons. I just finished recording a full-length chamber-pop album with over 30 tracks in the mix. We used Pro Tools for MacOSX on a G5 with outboard DSP and a fortune’s worth of VST and TDM plugins.
The availability of driver support for professional-quality recording interfaces was not the primary issue preventing us from considering Ardour on Linux. For example, the FreeBoB driver for JACK provides support for excellent digital recording interfaces such as the Presonus FirePod and FireStudio. In most cases, JACK provides routing capabilities that exceed those of the manufacturer’s drivers. Ardour now supports motorized control surfaces based on the Mackie Control Protocol.
Where Ardour falls flat is its imperfect and fiddly support for VST plugins, no VST support outside of 32-bit x86, and no support for plugin formats that utilize outboard DSP hardware. Otherwise we could have seriously considered Ardour for our project. Steinberg and Yamaha have licensed the VST plugin framework as freeware, but they don’t allow redistribution, and they don’t provide source code. Steinberg said about a year ago that an open source release is not out of the question, but nothing has happened since.
While Ardour isn’t what you might consider production quality at this point in time, neither are the proprietary solutions, in all honesty. We experienced a number of Pro Tools crashes over the course of the project, one of which caused data loss. I look forward to the possibility of recording our next album with Ardour. With the addition of solid VST support on a powerful 64-bit SMP system, it would be ready for a serious evaluation.
Well, actually Linux supports quite a good range of sound cards, some of them of professional quality. Ardour, I suspect, was more or less designed to work with these:
http://www.rme-audio.de/en_products_overview_pci.php#intern
AFAIK you can hardly get any more professional soundcards than that. And once you have the ADAT interface you can choose from a vast range of high end A/D converters.
Me I use the M-Audio Delta66, inexpensive but actually quite good. It works 110% in Linux, in some occations even better than in Windows.
You mentioned Cubase VST. Well, I’ve used it’s brother Nuendo2.0 for three months at a professional production facility, and I can safely tell you I wouldn’t exchange it for Ardour. If you want I can make you a F2F comparison, cause I know both programs pretty darned well. One example where Ardour will win is for example the limited number of “slots” for plugins on each track in Nuendo. Ardour does not have this limitation. It’s also not possible to copy/paste plugins in Nuendo, making it tricky to move one plugin/parameters from one place/track to another. And don’t get me started on the routing possibilities, not to mention the speed. Only place Nuendo has a small advantage is in stability, even though I’ve had both system lockups and corrupted sessionfiles in it.
Now only if wxWidget could get “enhanced” support for Cairo it would be awesome.
I use wxWidgets for cross-platform development and I think about using Cairo to draw custom widgets.
Keep up with the good work!
Does QT support Cairo?
I’m looking into getting into some C / C++ cross-platform development. The only “cross-platform” stuff I have done so far is in Java.
Edited 2007-05-02 20:29
Does QT support Cairo?
No, it has its own library called Arthur which does pretty much the same things.
Although technically, I’m sure you could call Cairo if you really needed to.
wow what a coincidence, I just downloaded and compiled the source yesterday to check out the new UI. Trust me it makes a huge difference, the move to gtk2 and cairo has meade the application dramatically better in terms of looks. It looked dated before, due to the really old widgets, now I have to say that its one of the better looking gtk-based apps I have used. I’m still confused on how to use it at this point since there is a bit of a non-standard layout. I was expecting something more along the lines of cubase but its more like Pro-tools at this point.
The OS X binary (Universal) of Ardour can be downloaded from:
http://ardour.org/
I ‘ve had a chance to peruse the Ardour Manual and play with the Program. Combined with Jack and Alsa it is really a very capable system with a good future. Please appreciate that it is an Audio workstation. They state that full Midi is in the works. If their Midi implementation is as good as their Audio work, I am smiling.
Oh yea, one still has to study a bit and learn some stuff. But I like to tinker.
For me its’ future is bright because of the development environment that is Linux. Music Software for the general market is being written or adapted for distributed computing (multi cores and over the network)…The Home turf of Linux… and maybe.. the open router project. Oh, there I go, smiling again.
Ardour is definately in the game at the top levels- in my opinion. Just gonna take some patience and support.
I only became aware of RME’s support of ALSA with the above post. I am so-o-o glad to hear that as they make really top of the line eqipment. A real endorsement for ALSA.