Paul DavisInterview
Developer (Ardour, JACK)
Adapted from Paul Davis's interview on Uses This, published 6 February 2020. The kit is drawn from their answers and each reason is an excerpt, lightly edited. Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full interview ↗
Is this you? Claim this kit →Hardware
My current machine is a self-built system based on an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950X (16 cores).
I use a Logitech K800 wireless keyboard for input, which I'm mostly ambivalent about - I can't be bothered to do more research.
Performance Mouse MX+ 9 others
The mouse is a Logitech Performance MX, which is almost the best pointing/input device ever created.
I also have a Lenovo Y700 "gaming" laptop which I use for mobile computing.
First up is the MOTU UltraLite AVB audio interface, which is connected via USB and gives me 24 channels of audio I/O along with a completely portable web-based configuration system.
I use a pair of Sony MDR-7506 headphones which are absolutely superlative, particularly in the low end.
These will soon be joined by a Roli Seaboard.
Communication
My family uses Telegram to keep in touch, and the Ardour project uses IRC, so I run a Quassel server on ardour.org and connect to it use the graphical Quassel client.
Productivity
Browser
Coding & Development
Ardour is written almost entirely in C++, with bits of assembler (that we rarely touch) and Lua as a builtin scripting environment.
On git.ardour.org we use an ancient version of GitLab as a self-hosted git server.
Media
I'm Paul Davis, the original developer and benign dictator of Ardour, an open source digital audio workstation used for recording, editing and mixing music (or more generally sound).
I don't use the TV screen for normal work, but I do like to run things like VCV Rack (an open source modular synthesizer system) there because of the sheer size of the screen.
Other
Sometimes I have to deal with Drupal and web stuff too, but I try to avoid it if possible.
The Ryzen currently runs Debian Buster.
tracker.ardour.org uses Mantis as our bug tracker.
discourse.ardour.org uses Discourse to run our web forums.