Recording

Ardour's recording abilities are limited by only the hardware it is run on; there are no built-in limits in its capabilities.^{[clarification needed]} When recording on top of existing media, it can perform latency compensation, positioning recorded material where it was intended to be when recording it. Monitoring options include self-monitoring, external hardware support (dependent on sound card support), and specialized hardware support (e.g. JACK Audio Connection Kit). Self-monitoring makes it possible to apply plug-in effects while recording. Using the JACK audio, Ardour can record concurrently from both the audio card and compatible software.^{[citation needed]}

Mixing

Ardour supports an arbitrary number of tracks and buses through an "anything to anywhere" routing system. All gain, panning and plug-in parameters can be automated. All sample data is mixed and maintained internally in 32-bit floating point format.^[3]

Editing

Ardour supports dragging, trimming, splitting and time-stretching recorded regions with sample-level resolution, and supports layer regions. It includes a crossfade editor and beat detection, unlimited undo/redo, and a "snapshot" feature for saving the current state of a session to a file.^{[citation needed]}

Mastering

Ardour can be used as an audio mastering environment. Its integration with the JACK Audio Connection Kit makes it possible to use mastering tools such as JAMin. Its mixer's output can be sent to third-party audio processing software for processing and/or recording. It can also export TOC and CUE files for creating audio CDs.^{[citation needed]}

Plug-ins

Ardour relies on plug-ins for many features, from audio effects processing to dynamic control. It supports the following plugin format and platform combinations:^[6] LV2 on Linux, FreeBSD, macOS and Windows; Audio Units on macOS; Steinberg's VST2 on Linux, macOS and Windows; LADSPA on Linux, FreeBSD, macOS and Windows. It is theoretically possible to use plugins created for Windows in the VST2 format on Linux with the help of Wine, but the project team does not recommend it.^[7] Since version 6.5, it also supports VST3 plugins on all supported platforms.^[8] Unlike most modern 64-bit DAW's, Ardour does not run 32bit VST's natively.^[9]

Import and export

Ardour can import audio clips into sessions from many common audio file formats, including WAV, FLAC, Ogg/Vorbis, Ogg/Opus, AIFF, AIFC, CAF, W64, BWF and MP3; SMF files are supported for MIDI import.^[10]

Ardour can export whole sessions or parts of sessions, and import audio clips into sessions,^{[citation needed]} using its built-in audio file database manager, or directly from an ordinary file browser.^{[citation needed]}