understandable. and glad you found suitable alternatives!

Roughly when was your Ardour experience? Maybe things have change since then? But hey, if you’re happy with Reaper, why not stick with it, right?

I think it comes down to how much you want to live in your DAW. If you work with MIDI too and want eye candy, Reaper probably has the edge. Plus their stock plugins are great. I also think the tutorials for Reaper are excellent! My use case is mixing & mastering only, so I don’t need a lot of what Reaper has to offer. The fact that Ardour is open software plays a big role for me too.

Regarding LSP plugins: I was blown away! Very deep, clean UI, okay documentation, LV2 and for free??? I use their stereo EQ, m/s EQ, and compressor. Plus, still being developed. They just released new plugins and fixed bugs. I am 100 % happy with them.

I really like it! When I started out in Reaper I watched lots of tutorials because I felt overwhelmed by all the stuff you can tweak. In Ardour everything feels much more down to earth, less polished, very straight forward. I didn’t miss anything and will definitely keep working there. Maybe switch over to Reaper in a few months or so…

This track is my first result in Ardour:

https://dontoverthinklife.bandcamp.com/track/infin8y

Thank you. Will do.

Valuable insights. Thank you.

I gave Ardour an hour today. It doesn’t come across as polished looking as Reaper but has everything layed out in a very straight forward fashion. I like that a lot. I will mix my next project there and see…