Ardour Plugins: Tone adjustments?

[arpegadream]

I haven't yet had a chance to deep dive into Ardour, I've played with it some, but I wanted to ask about plugins for it and other DAW softwares.

How do these plug ins work, are they installed from inisde the DAW program and are the opened in the program, or separately?

Are there plugins that will adjust tone?

What other DAWs are there on par with Ardour for Linux use?

[lilith]

Plugins are typically located as e.g. .so files in your (hidden) /home/user/.vst or /.lv2 folder if it's a vst plugin or lv2 plugin. Most if not all plugins can just be copied and pasted into these folder. Some come with an installer which basically is doing this for you. Ardour (and all other DAWs) scans these folder at start and you can load them onto the Ardour tracks.

Most important for "tone" are EQ plugins and compressor plugins. Both come with Ardour. But there are also commercial versions e.g. from U-he, Overtone, free version from LSP, the free reverb Dragonfly etc. etc.

Similar to Ardour, but more complex and powerful is REAPER. There's also Qtractor, which can basically do most things Ardour is doing. If your focus is on audio I suggest to start with Ardour. If your focus is VST midi based maybe try Qtractor at the beginning or directly Reaper.

There's also LMMS, Renoise, Wavefrom, Bitwig and some more: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=20362&p=109744&hilit=DAWS#p109744

[arpegadream]

thank you!