Introduction

A long time ago I used GarageBand to record music on a 2012 Mac Mini. I forget the audio interface I used, but it was not fancy at all, but I was able to get pretty damn good results from the combo. For a variety of reasons, I haven't done much recording since those GarageBand days. But I did recently get access to a ProTools license, and thought it would be fun to get back to recording musci.
Unfortunately, that old Mini finally went belly up, which ended my Mac days. I was tiring of Macs already and using ProTools would have been the last reason to continue in the Apple world.

The replacement has been a Linux laptop spec'd out for CGI and mahine Learning applications. Not optimized for audio at all, but with plenty of relevant horse power in terms of CPU and RAM for what my needs will be.

Because of the shift back to Linux as my only OS, I'm having to find a replacement for the ProTools and GarageBand options that will never be ported to Linux.

My search brought me to Ardour, which looks like a very capable option.

Why Ardour?

Well, honestly, I didn't do that much research before settling on Ardour. It quickly jumped to the top of the FOSS list for my high level requirements:

1. Recording and mixing at least a few channels at a time.
2. Support for a variety of devices/inputs
3. Highly capable mixing and editing features
4. Active development
5. Community support

Why Docker?

Simple answer: containerization. You know, the thing Docker does. My laptop needs to support a wide variety of capabilities. The reason I shelled out the money was to explore CGI and ML applications. Recording music is a hobby. I want my laptop to do both without becoming a mess of mangled Debian packages, configurations spread over the file system, conflicting libraries likewise spread all of the the file system, Python versions/envs/etc.

Unfortunately, setting up a Linux laptop for audio recording conflicts with all of the above. It is not uncommon to have to try dozens of combinations before figuring out what works. In the process you wind up hosing your system 2 ways to Sunday.

Enter Docker. I can screw up things to my hearts content in a container and not make a mess of the host system.

It involves a installing a huge number of dependencies, even if you don't compile the application from source, which is what we'll be doing here.

Challenges of Coantinerization

So, great, I can contain all of the various dependencies. I can add all of the compile time dependencies, compile from source and then remove those dependencies them from the final container.
Basically, I can wrap this really complex application up into a nice neat package. And that is all true.

That package still has to run in the host operating system, however. And for applications like audio recording that means application components having access to low level hardware features that are not always easily accessible from containers.

Each device can be different. Each specific implementation of the same device interface can be different. Some may be restricted by SE linux rules. Some by other means. The vagaries of possible inputs and outputs for audio recording/mixing software is vast. Dealing with these vagaries is hard enough in the host OS. Containers very often add additional layers of complexity on top of those faced by the host OS.

Finally, Ardour is a graphical application. The container will have to deal with
integrating it into the host desktop GUI environment as well.

Purpose of This Project

Despite the challenges of containerizing an application like Ardour, the payoffs of doing so are huge. Solving the challenges described about will help improve the understanding of the dependencies for the larger community and perhaps point to ways to improvement on a variety of fronts.

This is a fork of what is a very good start on identifying the dependencies to build and run Ardour. I'd like to move it forward and create a container that will fit into existing Desktop environments in as natural a way from a user experience standpoint, but with minimal impact on the host OS.

Goals:

1. Desktop integration. To the greatest degree the container should look, to the Desktop environment, like a normal application.
2. Files created by the containerized application have to be stored in host OS file system in "normal" places (e.g. $HOME/Music).

Related

This is early stuff for me, but https://github.com/mviereck/x11docker looks like a great compliment to this. My intial efforts will certainly attempt to leverage the project to deploy Ardour as a normal looking desktop/X11 application.