Jeffrey Concepcion wrote: ...
To justin: Can ardour be customized as a performance tool (which is abletons key feature IMO)
No need for customization to use it that way, actually. It does not have the range of features that ableton live has, but I have used it successfuly as a source of realtime tweaked automations / a virtual mixing board / loop recorder and player.
One thing it has that in my knowledge actually exceeds what ableton offers is the versatility of the way buses / tracks can be inter-routed. Any number of tracks and buses can be mixed into the input of any others (each track and bus of course having configurable pre / post effects), without the artificial limits that I have seen with ableton live.
I made a set of ladspa plugins a while back to allow controling puredata parameters from ardour automations, it has some definite limitations usability wise but it is available from http://code.google.com/p/noisesmith-linux-audio/ or direct download my last (but not very recent) version from http://noisesmith-linux-audio.googlecode.com/files/ladosc.tar.bz2
It uses osc to send the parameter data so the ardour and pd processes can be running on two different machines.