			    ARDOUR README

	  Paul Davis <paul@linuxaudiosystems.com> June 2003

Welcome to Ardour.  This program is still very much under development,
but has now reached the stage where it will be productive and useful
to have other people testing it out and perhaps (hopefully!) fixing
bugs and adding features.

**** SECURITY *******************************************************

To run Ardour with the lowest latencies, it's necessary to use POSIX
Real-Time Scheduling as well as locking all the memory it uses into
physical RAM.  These requirements can only be met if Ardour is run with
root priviledges. 

On the other hand, things are not so bad.  If you don't attempt to
install it setuid root (which actually won't work anyway), then
someone needs to have gained root access in order to run it like this.
If they already have root access, Ardour is the least of your
problems.  So relax.  We'll use capabilities once Linux kernels start
arriving with them enabled, though this won't help too much with
security, since the relevant capabilities would still allow a wiley
cracker to do anything at all.

Alternatively, you can choose to run Ardour without RT scheduling, and
then there's no concern at all.  It just won't be useful in low latency
situations, which are desirable in most studio environments. Note that
this is not so important if you have audio hardware that is capable of 
doing "hardware monitoring" - in this case, a lack of low latency will
simply make response to Ardour's UI controls a little sluggish, but
monitoring during capture will be excellent.

**** HARDWARE COMPATIBILITY *****************************************

Although Ardour uses the ALSA 0.9.0 API, it exercises this API in a
way that no other application to date has done, and it also tries to
use certain hardware features that again, no other existing
applications use.  As a result, although complete portability to all
ALSA supported h/w is an eventual and very achievable goal, there may
be issues surrounding h/w compatibility.  Please remember that my
primary goal with Ardour is to build a professional quality HDR
system.  If it happens to be useful for people with 2/4 channel cards,
then great, but it's not my own primary focus.

One other important issue is that your audio interface must support
full duplex i/o with the same sample format for both capture and
playback.  This means, for example, that the SoundBlaster AWE cannot be
used with Ardour - it only supports full duplex i/o if one of the two
directions (capture or playback) is 8 bit and the other is 16.  Very
few cards have this kind of limitation, and if they do, they typically
are not suitable for use with applications like Ardour for other
reasons.

To date, Ardour has been run with:

   RME Hammerfall (Digi9652)              (26 channels in, 26 channels out)
   RME Hammerfall Light (Digi9636)        (18 channels in, 18 channels out)
   Midiman Delta series (ice1712 chipset) (12 channels in, 10 channels out)
  
   Various consumer grade audio interfaces, typically with 2 channels
   in, 2/4 channels out, including:
   
   Hoontech 4Dwave-NX (Trident chipset)
   Ensoniq 5880
   Soundblaster 32
   Soundblaster 64
   Creative SBLive64

So, basically, it appears to work for just about all ALSA supported
cards, which is the goal.
  
**********************************************************************

BUG REPORTING
-------------

Bug reports will only be given any attention when sent to the
ardour-dev mailing list.  Please read the file "TODO" before sending a
bug report, to ensure that it's not a known bug.

COMPILING ARDOUR
----------------
Please see the file "BUILD".

RUNNING ARDOUR
--------------

NOTE: You must have a running JACK server before starting Ardour.
      ----------------------------------------------------------- 

If you ran "make install", then then typing "ardour" at this point
will hopefully have some effect. "ardour --help" lists available
options.
