Documentation & support

Who you gonna call if the manual isn’t enough?

Qtractor hosts a wiki with dedicated manuals on different topics, such as introduction, learning its usage with an example session, a run-through of the different menus, and others. There are also how to’s on MIDI composition workflow and a couple of others. The wiki serves as a single hub for all documentation on Qtractor and also features a user manual.

As well as a Getting Started guide and a wiki-hosted user manual that you can download as a PDF file, LMMS also provides a list of video tutorials hosted on Youtube. These include an introduction to Piano Roll, the basics of FX Mixer, using the Automation Editor, creating different genres of music such as dubstep, house, trance, and tutorials on music theory. You can also ask for help on a feature using the forums that host additional user-contributed tutorials.

You can engage with Audacity’s user community using the forum boards and mailing lists. The Audacity user manual is home to tutorials, tips and also provides a detailed introduction to the GUI. The manual is split into different sections, such as Getting Started, this explains important operations such as recording, importing and editing. You’ll also find dedicated forums for different special-interest groups, such as making music, podcasting, audiobook production, etc.

Although there is a reference manual that discusses the complete working of Ardour, it’s not aimed at complete novices. Also available is a somewhat dated tutorial-style book, which was last updated in 2013-15. You’ll also find several video tutorials on Youtube contributed by the user community, which is quite active in the forum boards.