 Hey, it's Anfa. We need to talk about Ardor MIDI. Ardor 1.0 was released in 2005. Ardor 3.0, which introduced MIDI tracks, MIDI recording and editing, was released in 2010. And now it's 2020. Ardor 6.0 has been just released last month. So how is MIDI in Ardor after a decade since its first appearance? This is gonna be a rant video. I've started testing Ardor's MIDI as soon as it dropped in 2010. I've been making music with LMMs before and I was starting to feel limited by it. So around 7 years later I've decided Ardor's MIDI is major enough for serious work and I've decided I'm leaving LMMs behind. Suppressed was my last album to be made in LMMs, with Ardor only being used for vocals, extra processing and editing and for mastering. I've already started making tracks in Ardor before I released that album, but I've completed my work for it in LMMs, being eager to start using Ardor a lot more. I've made quite a few tracks in these three years, as you could hear in my 2020's April Fools video. Still, I haven't released the album yet. Now the reason I'm making this video is that Ardor's MIDI implementation is flawed. For a long time you could hear that MIDI is a relatively new feature set in Ardor, so it's normal that it has some bugs and it's not as polished as the audio side of things. But it's already been with us for two thirds of Ardor's life. And if you've just got MIDI and Ardor 6 bug out again hindering your creative work the same way it did in Ardor 3 and you're angry about it, you could say that it's no longer a valid excuse for it to suck. And you would be right. Unfortunately I think that the real reason is Ardor developers never seemed to be particularly interested in developing the MIDI side. In a recent interview with Paul Davis about the core rewrite of Ardor, if you search the word MIDI you will get one result and it's not about Ardor at all. Now this could be purely coincidental, but it feeds my confirmation bias that the Ardor team treats MIDI and automation as second-class citizens while audio being their main focus. And I do want to say that I think Ardor's audio editing and processing workflow is really nice. I've used some other DAWs in my life like Pro Tools which I even have a minor certificate in, Cubase and Reaper, a little Logic at school etc. But I would still prefer Ardor for any audio work. Maybe I'm just used to it. However I think the tools Ardor gives us here are great. Which makes me really yearn for MIDI and automation to get the same amount of attention because they're really lagging behind. And for electronic music production these tools are essential. I am confident that there's a lot more kids making sequenced beats and fiddling with plugins nowadays than the ones noodling on their guitars. So making Ardor work better with electronic workflows is, in my opinion, future-proofing the project. You might say we're focused on serious musicians recording bands, not on some kids making bleeping noises with synthesizers. But you're not gonna make the old industry veterans drop their Pro Tools even if it's so far behind the competition. Because they're just too old to learn anything new. They are so used to the way it sucks they can't use anything else. They will die using Pro Tools. Unless it dies first. Wow, I'm gonna get some angry comments about this. Electronic aspects of music production are everywhere. And the most popular music nowadays is probably like 90% sequenced and synthesized in a DAW. The only thing that isn't are the vocals, which are still tuned to MIDI tracks and tweaked with automation. Rap, pop, EDM. The way music is made has changed and software needs to follow if it wants to stay relevant. Of course this whole thing is a strawman argument. Ardor developers never said anything like that and I honestly don't think they would agree with such a statement. But I think they subconsciously think that MIDI is not that important. Certainly not as important as audio is. And I disagree. Look at LMS. LMS, as flawed and weird as it is, has a huge community of users. Of course among the free software programs. And that program can't even record audio. But that confirms my theory. The kids nowadays are playing with computer programs making music, not guitars. And Ardor appears as weird and flawed to them. Because LMS, being so clunky and antiquated in its UI design, doesn't forget notes you put in or make the first note of a region disappear. In Ardor, you still have to make your notes shorter so they don't touch head to tail. Or one of them will just not play randomly. It's the same bug I've been fighting against in Ardor 3. The devs might say that they don't want kids using their software because that'll only mean more bug reports, more feature requests and more trouble. But you know, I was a kid also at some point. And now I'm doing audio with free software on Linux for living. Dealing with kids using your software is like being a parent. It can be really daunting at times, but it can also pay off in the long run. Now, a glimpse of light is that Ardor 6 marks the completion of a huge core rewrite. And a whole slew of MIDI related bugs are a result of the flawed way Ardor internally converts MIDI note positions and lengths between musical and real time. There are slight errors in these conversions. They create situations where, for example, when you have one note ending with another one starting right after it, sometimes Ardor thinks that the second note starts before the first one ends. And when it stops the first note, it also stops the second one because it started it before it should. Or sometimes the two notes just blend together into one long note. I don't know. The same issue causes first note in a MIDI region disappear because Ardor thinks it starts before the region starts. So then if you just grab the region start and drag it left, you will reveal that the note is really there. I've probably spent a few days of my life working around these issues for the past decade. And it's just second nature to me at this point, but it shouldn't be like that. Sometimes if you reload your Ardor session, the first MIDI region from a series of duplicates will be empty. We'll have no notes inside. If it's something you can copy from a different place, okay, I can live with that. And I usually add a single letter to the region name after I fix that to prevent it from happening again. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't. I don't know. Maybe I'm just crazy. But Ardor made me this way. Now, if that region was an epic synth solo and it was unique, you don't have anywhere to copy it from. So you better have good memory because I have no idea how to get that back. Now it's probably somewhere on the disk. There's this MIDI interchange folder and you have hundreds of MIDI files in there. It's probably one of them. I don't know. Now it might sound like MIDI in Ardor is just unusable, but that's not the case. If you're frequenting my monthly live streams, you probably heard some amazing tunes made with Ardor, electronic tunes. So I'm not the only person using it with success. Really, I'm not. But it is buggy, it's weird and really annoying at times. For example, why is there no separate piano roll? And why do I need to keep resizing my tracks to edit notes? Why is there no lollipop velocity editor? So I need to use my mouse wheel or manually type in velocity values by hand. Why sometimes when I try to copy a MIDI region, the duplicates are always empty? I need to confess, I am really hopeful towards zero of them. It's a new liberal music production program written in C. I've dedicated one of the more recent monthly live streams to test drive it and see if I can make a simple track in 90 minutes. Not yet, but I was pleasantly surprised how well the MIDI side works so far. Audio recording was really bugged and it crashed the program constantly. So the main developer recently said that these audio bugs were fixed now and he's closing in on a better release. I think Z-Rhythm might be the best of both LMS and Ardor. Now, this video is not about Z-Rhythm, but the painful stagnation and persistence of bugs in Ardor's MIDI implementation makes me look around for alternatives. Just like the lack of LV2 plugin support, audio recording and editing, and the need for removing every single region one by one instead of in bulk, drove me away from LMS. Now, don't get me wrong, I love the Libre Audio community and I love all the projects and all the software developers working in it, but it doesn't mean I can't be critical of it. If you really love someone, you're gonna tell them when you're worried about their future. Thanks for watching. I hope this video was interesting and maybe inspiring, hopefully not a downer. I am looking forward to see improvements in Ardor's MIDI and I will get on it and let you know once I see them. Now, I want to give big thanks to all the people who support my work financially. By the time of recording this video, there is 63 amazing people collectively donating over $230 every month through Patreon, so I can keep making these videos. Thank you. And if you, dear viewer, would like to join them, please go to patreon.com slash ANFA or liberapay.com slash ANFA. Also, I have my own Discord server, my own rocket chat in infancy, but still, and I have some t-shirts. All of the links are in the video description. Now go and make some music.