Ardour is a cool project to port Pro Tools to the open source community, and it’s amazing how good they’ve made it despite being a micro business. You can download the latest upgrades for just £1, though being open source if you can use unix you can compile it for free, it’s also included free in some distros.

Two things that Ardour does better IMHO than Pro Tools is the midi file playback seems more human and the overall quality (16 or 24 bit, 48khz) of the audio has a more pleasing sound.

There’s still no Windows support as far as I know, as it relies heavily on the Jack system which is a lot more capable than Rewire. Sorting this would likely need new ASIO-style drivers for the Jack system, though it could be feasible to have Jack running ASIO directly and the other apps tapping into that using virtual drivers.

I use PT on Windows because of it’s similarity to Ardour, which I spent a good while learning, ans as PT is pretty much industry standard we’ve a compatibility need.

Ardour 3 lacked decent midi editing, you could change notes and their volumes but that was about it, though the quantize feature is very nice.

I’m hoping to get a Linux system running soon and I’ll keep you posted.