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Blender+Ardour: A truly powerful combination
29 Comments Published by Bart on September 9th, 2009 in Toolbox
Ardour is an ‘Open Source Digital Audio Workstation’. Juan Pablo Bouza explains how to hook it up to Blender.
Juan Pablo writes:
Well, I guess many people out there still don´t know that you can already connect Blender with Ardour through Jack for Video and Audio Editing in Linux. Even before 2.5 comes out!
This connection enables you to work with Blender for video editing and Ardour for Audio editing as if the two programs were a single application, as their cursors are synchronized through Jack.
This is possible thanks to IL’dar AKHmetgaleev, who developed the script. A couple of days ago I decided to put all the info together and make a little tutorial on how to do this. You can find it at my site.
Here is a video from IL’dar showing the script in action:
Now all that would be left would be to have some nice node editing capabilities in a per strip basis in the Sequencer Editor, but that is just for the wishlist!!
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That is great, I was searching for such a solution!!
WOW This could be HUGE for blender! The only problem is that it would only work in Linux. Would there be a way to do a similar thing with Audacity and Blender in windows?
Actually it will work in Linux and OS X.
Audacity doesn’t have Jack Transport support to my memory, so no this wouldn’t work with Audacity on any platform.
Should be noted that if you just need video sync for audio editing, Jadeo is probably a better match. If you need video editing though then yes Blender is useful.
Seablade
Nice ;-)
I had a look over the script and it isn’t to accurate about time syncronisation, I wouldn’t be sattisfied with that for 2.5. However we’ll need some animation system changes concerning time, that’s still the weak point of blender’s animation system, even with animato.
Nevertheless it seems to be accurate enough to be usable, so it’s a good solution for meanwhile ;)
EagleWing: Jack is also available for Windows, so this should work on windows too. (Not sure about Ardour though, but I’m sure there are other jack capable apps for Windows).
Regards
Ardour is not availiable on Windows. Sorry;)
Seablade
I used this technique about a year and a half ago to edit a moive for a 48 hour short film contest, and it worked great. The only problem was at the time blender didn’t support 29.97 frame rate, but it does now..:)… This would be even better if both blenders sounds could play for keeping audio locked to the video tracks and ardour could play to add music, effects, and then be used for the final mixdown. The furture is indead bright for video in blender…
@Jeromew
If full Jack support is availiable(Haven’t looked) then that is more than possible. Just route both Blender and Ardour to the interface, or route blender through a bus in Ardour if you prefer.
Seablade
That is awesome work! IL’dar AKHmetgaleev had made RIBKit and SLer, which were instrumental for Blender to Renderman in the early days, now he has worked with this, very very cool! This is a bright guy for sure!
Yeah neXyon, we wish to have some serious audio system in Blender! Thank you for your work so far though!
Now this is what I need.
Just got myself a 61 key keyboard and am in the market for a 88 key keyboard.
Audio is the always the finishing touch.
@Thomas Vecchione
Audacity does have some limited support for jack, but admittedly nothing of much use.
@JamesMRaymond
Last I checked it didn’t have support for Jack Transport(Seperate from Jack Audio Support) which is what would be needed by this, has that changed at all?
Seablade
Very interesting!
Being a synth- and MIDI- freak, I’ll be keeping an eye on this, and Ardour 3.0 (which promises improved MIDI capability), and how this all works out.
Thanks, IL’Dar and Juan Pablo!
Well, there is no windows build, so it is pretty worthless.
Blender only comunicates with the jack transport through a python script as far as I know. So blender can sync it’s transport, but can’t send it’s audio output back through the jack mixer. Maybe in the future blender will fully support jack. Which would be amazing if any developers are listening. :D
Brian@SMH:
I disagree with the term “worthless” in this context. While Blender for windows has the majority of the marketshare, Linux has a vast amount of Blender users because (on average) the Linux builds use less resources and come out with a faster end product. This can vary based on workflow and other variables, but it’s a good rule of thumb. Additionally, most artist distros of Linux are free (this in terms of cost) and easy to acquire/install/setup so that you can achieve the same as what Juan Pablo Bouza just explained.
Perhaps “diminished worth” is a better description of the state Windows users experience.
I have both a Windows system and a Linux one so I can use this as is, but I am testing a program called AndLinux to see if I could get this to run in Windows. Alternatively for people who would like to run Both linux and Windows you should try Wubi. It will automatically set up a dual boot system on your computer that is as easy to eliminate as uninstalling a program should you want and requires no partition. Why limit yourself to using only windows when you can run both and at no cost to yourself? Versatility is always a good thing. Here are those links:
http://www.andlinux.org/
http://wubi-installer.org/
Not only does Ardour have no windows build, but (last I checked) It is very difficult to get it running in linux, unless you have a distro bre-built for it like Ubuntu Studio. I think that the main issue holding Ardour back is lack of compatibility.
Yeah, Jack is a pain to get working if you aren’t a genius with it. I don’t much care for Jack, but after seeing this, I may just give it another go…
The next thing to do is to start working on maybe integrating Ardour-like audio editing quality into blender’s feature-set. Guess I should look into maybe trying to do that…
Brian, it’s not going to cost you anything except time to try it. And in the end it might end up saving you the time you would have spent elsewhere without using all your options. Your computer is linux compatible and dual booting is about as hard as installing linux after windows. It’s not like getting a linux OS is going to cost you 100-300$, unlike some other OS’es I know.
distrowatch.com
Man… there’s something I’ve never though it was possible. Amazing… :)
Hot damn! I can’t wait to try it out!
Blender 2.5 has already Jack support (nexYon works on that). Any new Blender 2.5 build with everything enabled has Jack support. For Windows any build of a revision after r22563 (http://rm.letworyinteractive.com/repositories/revision/3/22563)
@EagleWing
Nope, Audacity doesn’t work with JACK reliably yet.
@Alex Blank
On which platform is it pain to get JACK working? It’s quite straightforward on Linux.
@prokoudine:
For some reason, after setting up jack in various distros (ranging from Debian to my own LinuxfromScratch-based custom distro) I ran into major headaches with stability and proper integration with Rosegarden, Ardour, and Blender (Rosegarden sync’d Ardour then sync’d to Blender). Even quality distros like Musix (where JACK is already masterfully configured) were too shakey to really integrate effectively. Maybe its me, my hardware, or a really bad string of luck of many months, but I haven’t really been greatly impressed by the JACK framework.
Hmm, editing features aren’t working for me right now (blasted javascript)…
Addendum to my last post:
I haven’t played around with Jack too recently though, so I guess when I get a bit more free time, I’ll try again.
if only there was a possibility for windows users
@Alex Blank
Sorry I am late coming back to this. The problem stems not from Jack, and you shouldn’t be having stability issues.
The problem comes from setting up realtime permissions in most distros is still something that has to be done manually, and getting the consumer audio layers to play well with Jack is troublesome at best.
@Brian@SMH
To be honest this is far from useless. If nothing else it should work fine on OS X for example, where Ardour is perfectly capable as a recording, editing, and up to stereo mixdown tool(Multichannel if you aren’t expecting the ’standard’ surround configs like 5.1, 7.1, etc.). So both on OS X and Linux this is a great possibility. Of course actual full Jack support in Blender is something I am looking forward to as it will only make this more useful.
@Everyone
Jack is intended as a professional audio daemon. It isn’t intended to replace the point of consumer audio daemons. So really you should only be doing this if you need the features of Jack or are intending to do professional audio. You shouldn’t be trying this if that is not your intent, it will only give unecessary headaches. I can probably say that 95% (If not more) of the problems people have with setting up Ardour is in their Jack and Realtime setups.
Seablade
Cool thing!
We used it to aminate a new short of SlonStudio.org!
Manual for russians with a lot of screenshots you can find here:
http://blog.nntc.nnov.ru/?p=560