About Ardour flatpak

Some notes about this Flatpak, for developers / maintainer.

Dependencies

The dependencies for Ardour are non standard. We try to use what is listed at https://nightly.ardour.org/list.php#build_deps

This is to provide the closest from upstream binary builds.

Plugins support

The package supports LV2, LADSPA, and Linux VST/VST3 plugins built for Flatpak.

Before upgrading the runtime used, please consider that the plugins need to be upgraded first. Provision is made for plugins to live in branches as to be available for different runtimes.

User installed plugins

Plugins in ~/.vst3, ~/.vst and ~/.lv2 may work if they are built properly. There is no universal solution if they depend on .so that are not available or incompatible.

There is no support for Win32 emulated VST.

Network access

Starting Ardour 7, network access is granted for the loop library.

The Media library of MIDI files is installed at build time.

Jack audio support

You need to install the package pipewire-jack-audio-connection-kit or equivalent in your distro. This might mean that you have to uninstall JACK if you had it installed.

Then, just open Ardour and it will work with the Pipewire implementation of JACK, out of the box.

ALSA Device reservation

Ardour requires exclusive use of the ALSA sound device. To that effect it supports the device reservation D-Bus interface, hence the --own-name=org.freedesktop.ReserveDevice1.* permission.