Ardour: Anyone using it for a real projects?

L

lexridge

New member
I've been reading up on Ardour (http://ardour.org). It's an open source multitrack recording package for OSX and Linux. It looks very interesting, and love the fact that it's open source. There are hundreds of plugins available for it, and under Linux, it may be possible to use some Windows VST plugins, via WINE.

Apparently it does not yet record MIDI tracks, which I might be able to live with, as long as RoseGarden (http://www.rosegardenmusic.com) can fill the gap.

If anyone is using it, I'd love to hear of your experiences with it, such as how hard was it to get working? Lacency concerns, control surface support, and so on.
 
I should be using it on a paying gig soon. I reciently dumped windoze and Ardour is a pretty nice upgrade from my previous SONAR 2.2XL. I just use the DeMuDi distro ... but I had to finagle FreeBoB to get my new Edirol FA-66 working... but it's running very nice now.

I'm I drummer... so I'm not much of a "producer" (never learned notes) but I generally:

start jack and jack connect
route the midi things (RoseGarden, AMS) into Ardour
"real" audio goes into Ardour
then have the main outs go into JamIN for mastering
then back into ardour....

It was an odd change being able to send audio where ever without having to save/export/close/open apps all the time...

The only thing I am missing/can't find is a way to do drum replacement like the "Extract MIDI timing" in SONAR.
 
I tried it about a year back.. didn't give it too much time.. but I wasn't able to get it to work right. I'm a unix/linux guy, so I prefer to do my day to day computer stuff in linux, but for recording I've found that I'm just better off to have the dedicated windows box.
 
go for it, i plan ion checking it out too. i Just reinstalled windows so i could partition a section of my harddrive for linux. so tell us what you think.
 
Played a bit with it in the beginning of my linux adventure. But it is far to much for my needs. So I use Rezound now. Should check it out again and see if a few points that irritated me then are gone.

It was an odd change being able to send audio where ever without having to save/export/close/open apps all the time...
Click to expand...

Great isn't it? When you go then back to windows, it looks as dated as when you went from windows back to dos. Check out qjackctl as well.
 
I just got Ardour installed today. I've not tracked in it yet, as I'm still having problems getting RoseGarden4 to start correctly. It cannot connect to Jack for some reason. Ardour connects to Jack just fine. Any ideas?

Redhat 9 w/CCRMA distrubution.
Should I update to FC3?
 
I am still new to midi in general but what I do is manually connect the synth in the "Manage MIDI Devices" menu in rosegarden... which is accessed by clicking the toolbar icon that looks like a keyboard fading into a PCI card.

so with ams started I simply make a new connection in that menu and click the dropdown menu and select the proper instance of ams...and then in the track pain right click on the track and select the correct "midi device" which I assigned to the instance of ams.

the sound is then imported into a track in ardour by selecting the correct instance of ams as the track input

...man I need to get to work on those tutorials...
 
...also to sync it with the jack transport you need to (in rosegarden) click settings->configure rosegarden4->sequencer (on the left) -> synchronosation tab-> set jack transport mode to sync.
 
Any more luck with this? I just bought a new drive to dedicate to it, and I'm actually going to follow the directions and see how that works for me.. I'm not really a redhat fan, but I'll suck it up and use the recommended software.

I'll post what I learn on this thread.

I would love to ditch windows entirely.
But I'm afraid I'll get ready to go MS free... and vista will just be really cool.
 
I would suggest getting a media distrobution... like DeMuDi, CCRMA or Dyne:Bolic... let the hackers deal with making things work :)

I use DeMuDi ... and I'm doing a clean reinstall today to take better notes for a tutorial... I also just got Cinelerra working on it :)
 
Its up.

Well.. I followed the instructions kinda... It was reccommended to go with Fedora Core 2 or 3... but I went with 4.. I followed the instructions on the ardour website for installing the Planet CCRMA stuff over it.. Basically.. like zeke said, Planet CCRMA hacked all this stuff to optimize it for audio. All of the audio applications are made to work together... Ardour, Hydrogen (drum machine), Rosegarden... etc.

It took the better part of the day to do the installations.. But there wasn't much headache involved.. Once I was able to get ardour up.. I started playing with JACK to get my audio working right.. Its a little confusing...I'm not entirely of the order in which the audio stuff is handled.. theres a whole bunch of different mixers, and in the end, I just made sure everything was turned up until I got sound out of my Delta44.

Then I followed the instructions on getting the BCF2000 to work... It works much cleaner in ardour than it did in Audition... and I'm also able to record drum patterns in hydrogen with it.. It just needs a little more tweaking.

As for the actual recording in Ardour... Its working.. I tested recording from Audio In 1 and 2 of my Delta44... and both tracks recorded great. I didn't experience latency problems, there were no weird little things to worry about... like choppy level meters... Its clean and professional.

I ran into a problem though that I'm working on now when overdubbing a 3rd track..
Monitoring.. I was able to hear the output of the first 2 recorded tracks, but not the one I was recording.. It recorded fine, but I couldnt hear what I was singing.. I'm sure it won't be too hard to fix...

The plugins I've tried suck pretty bad.. Some of the reverbs crashed and I wasn't able to get any of them to sound... good. I tried some of the compressors and they do the job ok.. After I tackle the monitoring problem I'll go out and look for some worthy reverb plugs.

All in all, my impression is... its usable. Its good.

I'll keep updating the thread as I learn more.

- Luke.
 
I figured it out.. I had both hardware and software monitoring checked in the ardour options.. I unchecked the software monitoring and now its working great..

Just got to find some reverbs that don't suck now.. Any one have any luck? Should I post a new thread for it?
 
glad to hear you could get it working1 for some reason everytime I tried Fedora i'd download a corrupt ISO... glad I didn't have that problem with dialup :)

I havn't really messed with the effects yet... I just bought a secoind harddrive today... so tomarrow I'll be doing an awful lot of testing I hope...


... I think Ardour supports VST's too... I don't have any myself though...
 
I'm glad to see folks making good progress with this. I admit I've not had the time to get back to it yet, but hopefully this week. Last night, I lost, not one, but TWO hard drives in my Linux system. I've already got the O.S. re-installed, but not much else so far. Still running apt-get to get all the updates presently.
 
zekthedeadcow said:
glad to hear you could get it working1 for some reason everytime I tried Fedora i'd download a corrupt ISO... glad I didn't have that problem with dialup :)
Click to expand...

I had the same problem with Fedora on DVD.. Go to your local bookstore and buy a Linux magazine.. I got Fedora this way.. Good luck
 
I didn't have any problems with the Fedora ISOs...

Anyway.. I've done some more playing with this...
It is REALLY cool.
I'm glad this thread happened and gave me the ambition to try it again..
The thing thats different is that the plugins seem to work best by send/inserts.... Which is fine.. thats the way its supposed to be right? I'm just so used to using Cool Edit/Auditions real time effects.. I never learned the correct way to use those sends/returns. I was piping a vocal track through some reverb this morning.. Its not the waves bundle.. but it worked..

I also followed a tutorial to add a drum track via insert.. with hydrogen...
Really... Really cool.

I'm impressed with the package.. and excited, as soon as an Itunes clone comes out I'll ditch my windows box entirely and just soupe up this linux box.. I might even just give up on itunes entirely.. The licensing deal pisses me off anyway.

If your a linux person.. definatly try this..
 
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