i checked out Ardour, & i cant shake this scummy feeling i get from it. Theyve posted their revenue on their home page & theyre pulling in nearly 100k yearly (surpassed their most recent monthly goal by $4k) but say in various places that they cant be bothered to offer support for any windows versions. they insist its free, & theres no paywall, but there literally is (a minimum $1 paywall is still a paywall, but they insist its not because you could sit & learn to build it yourself for free). A variation can be compiled for free on Github, but how many musicians want to bother learning that. ive actually built programs in linux before but ive never had to source 80 scattered dependencies for it (its usually like a dozen at most), & youd have to recompile new & delete old manually every time theres an update (and from what i read about their latest update, there was a pretty serious bug until very recently, so who knows what else is in there). I mean, what if you went to a toyota dealership because they were offering free cars, but then they said you had to build it yourself from a bunch of unassembled parts, or you could buy it. just kind of obnoxious. theres a demo that you can only use for a few minutes, as opposed to like at least a day or a week or something.
I still managed to find a pre-compiled build version 8.12 (i wont link where since its probably illegal or something), but it took me like 15 minutes to even find where the vsts are listed in Ardour gui. just a headache all around, (no offense Kimyo, i appreciate the suggestion, & maybe its the perfect program for other folks).
it would be amazing to find an old portable or r2r of cakewalk before bandlab, if anyone has a lead on that please reply here. even version 29 still wants supscription activation.
i was going through my old daw files for cakewalk & found this .txt guide i wrote for myself to run mg2 in it, maybe itll be useful to someone here:
Using MG2 to record guitar as midi events in
Cakewalk Sonar:
scan the folder containing MIDIGuitar2-64bit.dll
(found in the Steinberg/VSTPlugins location, NOT in
Cakewalk program folder location.)
Drag the âMIDI Guitar 2â plugin from the âFx Audio FXâ
column under the âPluginsâ tab to an open Audio track,
NOT a MIDI track (not allowed).
Once attached, click on the MIDI Guitar 2 label in that
trackâs FX container.
In the MG2 GUI, click on the gear symbol at the top to
open settings.
ENABLE MIDI OUTPUT & select desired instrument settings.
In Cakewalk, activate INPUT ECHO for the Audio & MIDI
tracks.
Audio track input should be
Audio track output should be MASTER bus.
MIDI track input should be
MIDI track ouput should be 1-MIDI Guitar 2 1.
MASTER bus ouput should be <speakers/moniter of choice>
Press the âArm all tracksâ button to the left of the
INPUT ECHO button that looks like headphones.
Record when ready. MIDI events should appear on the MIDI
track in sync with the Waveforms appearing in the Audio
track above it.
