 Hey, it's Anfa and you're watching Anfa rambling indefinitely. I was stuck in a traffic jam, so I thought maybe I'll record a video while I'm at it. And I was thinking about a topic and I thought I can tell you about differences between Ardor and LMMS. Before I begin, I want to say that I have written a spreadsheet with a detailed comparison between Ardor and LMMS. So everything that I say in this video is covered there and also much more. Please go to the link in the description. You can download the file and just read through. Hopefully it's gonna be a good supplement for this video. I've had people ask me questions and comments and stuff like that. Should they learn Ardor or LMMS? What is the best one? And of course, as they always, the answer is there's not a best one per se. There's the best one for your needs and for your actual situation. So let's talk about this. I was using LMMS since about 2008, I guess. And I made multiple long plays with LMMS five. Some of that and some singles. So I have quite a lot of experience. On the other hand, I was also using Ardor all the time, however, not for making electronic music because electronic music requires MIDI sequencing and Ardor only supports that from version 3. And when I was using it back then, it was Ardor 2. And for many years, there was not a new version. However, then Ardor 3 came with initial MIDI tracks, supports, and you could finally sequence synth parts in Ardor. And now we're at Ardor 5 and Ardor 6 is being developed. And Ardor has MIDI functionality for quite a while. It's not super polished yet, but it's perfectly functional and for about a year or a year and a half, I was making synthesized electronic music with Ardor to kind of familiarize myself with it and I decided to switch all my music production to Ardor. So I am not going to start a new project with LMMS. I'm going to use Ardor for that. Also as a proof of concept that Ardor is perfectly capable of doing that, but for some different reasons too. Which is why you might choose Ardor over LMMS if you always also have similar needs as I do. For example, in LMMS, you have no way of recording audio directly. All you can do is record it in some other program like Ardor All Audacity and import that audio and place it on your timeline. LMMS does not support that. Also LMMS doesn't support LV2 plugin format, which is the newer superior standard for LATSPA. So LATSPA or LADSPA as you might say was the first plugin type for Linux, the open source audio plugin format. LV2 is LATSPA version 2, basically that's the name. It's the second one. And the big difference between the two, the most important one for the users is that LV2 plugins, unlike LATSPA plugins, can have custom user interfaces. Which is all the rage and have been about VSTs and you know. And it's not like you need plugins that support custom user interfaces to have, I don't know, good sounding plugins and be able to do music. No you don't. You can do audio stuff perfectly fine with LATSPA plugins, just like I did it for many, many years using LMMS because it doesn't support LV2. It however has some built-in plugins that have custom GUIs. For example, the new version of LMMS has a nice equalizer plugin that has a custom GUI and it has some spectrum analysis in built-in. So it's pretty nice, pretty usable and I use it all the time since it is, if I'm using LMMS. However, with Ardor you can use any EQ plugin with a custom UI you want. For example, EQ 10Q plugins which are great or Calv Equalizer which is also very nice. And you know, you don't have that VRT variety and you don't have that choice with LMMS. You just have to use LV2 or you just have to use LATSPA which has no GUI so I was using, I don't know, I was using some multi-band, I wasn't hardly using parametric EQ because it's hard to figure out without GUI. Like it's not super hard but it's a bit difficult. I was using graphic EQ in LMMS for the most part, a 10-band EQ with you know just, and it was doing everything I needed and if I needed something very surgical to just cut out something or boost something I was, I used a single parametric, that's the name of the plugin. And it's just one parametric filter so it's a peak filter. Okay, so back to the differences between LMMS and Ardor. So, in LMMS sequencing meeting is much easier and faster I would say. Or at least I got used to it very much and I can use it very quick. Ardor is a bit slower in that regard and it's different in approach. In LMMS you have a single piano roll window that you open all your regions in to be edited. While in Ardor you have a small piano roll in every track. Every MIDI track has its own piano roll. It has its downsides and its upsides. At first I was pretty perplexed by this in Ardor and I asked if there is a way to just have maybe optional separate piano roll editor for doing MIDI work. However, I found out it's actually like it's not going to happen, it's outside of the scope and I understand that. And I grew to like what Ardor does and I learned to use it and right now I'm feeling quite fine with it and I can use it pretty quick. Not as fast as I use LMMS yet because I've been using LMMS for, I don't know, 90 years. I can't believe, I don't know, maybe I'm lying, maybe I'm not as much, I don't know, maybe. Anyway, so Ardor is perfectly capable, in my opinion, in doing MIDI work and because it supports more plugins and it has better support for the plugins. It also handles multiple channels very well. You can configure pin configurations, you can change how the audio is rooted in and out of plugins that don't support stereo for example. You can run multiple instances of the same plugin in parallel with a different channel configuration. So we can, for example, configure it to use three different processors and you can use a crossover plugin before and a mixer plugin after to just build your multi-band compressor if you want or build a multi-band flanger if you want. You can do that in Ardor and you don't need a specialized plugin for that. You just need to learn the workflow of using pin configurations and basically doing your own multi-band processing configurations within a single track with not using buses or something like that. Before I would have to do it with buses because in Ardor 4 there was no pin connections, you couldn't do this kind of stuff. But now in Ardor 5 we have pin connections and this is absolutely outrageously brilliant. You can just do... it's amazing. So I prefer Ardor for sound design and music composition. It also, I think, LMS handles automation a little bit strangely in my perception. I learned to use it and once you understand that automation in LMS works like a tape machine and you have to place the regions where you want them to be and unless you specify what is going to happen, which automation value is to be executed at any given point in your timeline, you might end up with random situations. Excuse me. Ardor is kind of handling this for you because there is no situation when the automation value is undefined. In Ardor in each point of time on your timeline the automation value is defined and it is visible. So you always know what automation will be executed no matter if you jump around with the playhead around your session. In LMS this stuff can happen so you kind of have to understand it and hack your way around it to avoid unexpected results. Actually I just checked it and they fixed it. LMS has no undefined regions on the timeline with automation right now. So this complaint is no more. That is really cool because it takes out a whole lot of problems so you don't realize why is my session sounding different now? Because you played some automation somewhere and then you jumped and that automation still was in effect and the values were not updated to automation and it was in other places where you would expect them to be. Now it works okay, so no worries. I would say LMS is better if you are starting out. It's simpler, it doesn't have many advanced tools that Ardor will give you but at the start you don't need that. And it is actually beneficial if you have a limited arsenal because you are forced to understand what you have. And to begin making music you need to start having fun and you need to start understanding what you're doing. That's my advice. Have fun and try to understand as much as you can and fiddle with stuff until you understand what it does. Try to understand it as deep as you can. LMS is perfectly fine for doing serious production. However, you would need to get used to using plugins that have no fancy GUI and it might be a bit tricky. It is good to that regard that forces you to use your ears because sometimes we just rely on the beautiful graphical interfaces of the plugins to tell us if it's going to sound good or not. It doesn't have anything to do with that. A fancy GUI plugin can sound as bad as an ugly plugin so we sometimes just tell ourselves that if it looks good it has to sound good, right? And we can lie to our ears, you know, just think that we hear something different when we don't. So not having beautiful GUIs for plugins helps you get around that. Can I get there? On the other hand, well, Arturo gives you this whole amazing arsenal of great plugins that you can easily use in LMS. Well, you can use VST and LV2 instruments in LMS by using Karla Rack instrument, which is basically running Karla inside LMS as an instrument plugin. So you, for example, can use Helm or Zinfusion or whatever, whatever you want inside LMS, but only as an instrument and you have no way of passing automation, automation data to this plugin. So it's a bit limited. In Arturo you can automate everything. And, for example, with Zinfusion you can do pretty crazy things because you have 16 channels of automation and you can route anything to that. So there's print, you just, I don't know, you can... It's pretty crazy and you can use this in Arturo, you can't use it in LMS, unfortunately. And I don't see LV2 support coming anytime soon in LMS. I don't know what is the state because I haven't been following the development very tightly recently because I focus on Arturo. And this is on the to-do list for years. I don't know if it's gonna come in any round soon because it's a very difficult thing. If they can do it, that's great and LMS is gonna jump on a whole new level. But well, right now we can use LV2 instruments with no automation. You can't use LV2 effect plugins, so you can't use CULV plugins with their GUIs. You can use the LATS perversions. And also, you know, in Arturo you can use the pin connections to use sidechain plugins. In LMS you don't really have this option. You, in theory, can use sidechaining for everything, which is something cool that Arturo doesn't have, because you have peak controller and you can basically plug it somewhere in your audio path and it will generate a control signal based on an envelope follower, like in a compressor. Actually they extended this in the last version and it has more features and it works very much like a compressor. However, this is not sample accurate, so unfortunately it introduces some zipping, zipper noise, so called. It's basically a low time resolution signal which produces just, you know, a stair step function. So, for example, if you want to do sidechain compression with this, with an amplifier plug-in, which I was doing for a long time, you have the problem that if you're doing this to a bass sound, you're going to have clicks, because the bass frequencies will produce bad clicks with this zipper noise artifacts. High frequencies are not so much affected because there's not much meat of the waveform to be chopped up with this zipper noise, but low frequencies will be affected, so it's not no good for doing bass sidechaining. I mean, you can do it, but it's tricky and it might sound bad. However, there is a custom CULF sidechain compressor that basically exposes a sidechain knob that you can route to the peak controller and use that and then you have no problem. Maybe you could actually do the same thing with any compressor just using the peak controller to drive a threshold knob on a compressor. Maybe that would also work without the zipper noise artifacts. I'm not sure. I haven't tried this. So you can do good sounding, well sounding sidechain compression in LMS thanks to Cubition. Thanks to Cubition for teaching me that. I learned this trick from his video. I didn't know it before and I was doing it wrong. Actually, I couldn't find the video by Cubition. I have found the video by Umkarouye. Yeah, I don't know if I was wrong and he explains how to use the peak controller and the CULF sidechain compressor with it to achieve proper sidechaining in LMS so you can watch his video if you want to learn that. However, if you are brave and you want to do more, especially if you want to record guitar vocals, I advise you to try and learn Ardor instead because Ardor at first Ardor was a audio editing program only like a hard disk recorder. It has no MIDI support as I told you already. And the editing workflow for audio is sublime. It's gorgeous. It's so fast, so efficient and so reliable. I've recorded and edited multiple audio books. I have also mixed and edited audio for two full-length documentary movies with Ardor because it has video support. It has a video timeline and video playback synced with the audio. LMS has none of that, unfortunately. Dozens of hours of podcasts with Ardor, it's fantastic for audio. So if you are going to record bands or yourself or you're a single or singer-songwriter type of person and you want to play or guitar and record your vocals, Ardor is the way to go if you want to go open source. In my opinion, maybe you would also be well served by Q Tractor. Hey, I never recorded anything in Q Tractor before. But I haven't used Q Tractor and I don't know it, so I can't really tell you. There are other people on YouTube who can teach you Q Tractor. There is a person who is making Q Tractor tutorials on YouTube. My name is Y Phil and you can check out his videos. He teaches Q Tractor. Y Phil! Hello everyone, welcome to the first episode of Y Phil. Today we are going to make a song in Q Tractor. So yeah, I think that's it. If you have any more questions about differences between Ardor and LMS, let me know in the comments. I hope you've learned something. Thanks for watching. Great thanks to all my Patreon supporters. The Patreon support has been growing enormously. In the recent weeks, I am just stunned. If this rate of development is going to be a thing, I guess I'm soon going to be able to take a few days off every month to just work on videos. And maybe in one, two, maybe three years, I will be able to probably do this as my halftime job. Which will be fabulous. Yeah, thank you so much. Just go make some music. I'll see you in the next video. Bye! Now let's pick up my new network router. And the switch. Gotta do some cables. Gotta do some home networking stuff. Because I needed a dual-band Wi-Fi router so I can pull video files from this smartphone fast. Because I could use it as a secondary camera for ANFA Vlog or something else. But my home network is so slow that, oh my goodness, it's taking ages. And this is the only device I have that records in 4K. I don't know if it's any good. It actually records in 4K. Maybe with good lighting it could be useful. I don't know, maybe I'll use it for other guide. I don't know. We'll see. What are you doing, man? Are you going to turn left or not? Why are you standing here? You don't have the yellow flashing light, no? Oh shit, Sherlock, we're stuck. Is he reading a message or what? Or is he writing a message? I don't know. Are you still here? Have I taken the right? Oh man, maybe I took the wrong turn. Can I go here? I should be able to. Shish. Knowing today, it wasn't snowing for like two weeks. I thought the spring is already here. It looks like it's not. Where can I stop, man? I can stop here. Am I gonna blow? I need you now. Actually, I checked and I parked right under a sign that just forbids that. So no good.