[ardour-dev] issues with plugin in/out counts

[gerard van dongen]

On Wed, 24 Nov 2004 10:12:42 -0600, Josh Karnes <jkarnes1 at austin.rr.com>  
wrote:
> IMHO-
>
> Most people using Ardour today probably match many of these criteria:
>
> - are used to using a regular hardware mixer
> - are working in stereo with stereo sources and mono sources combined
>

this may be seem true at the moment. But it is only because the most heavy  
beta testing goes on in a "regular" studio for track laying and editing of  
band recordings.
DAW's in general have a much broader use than this. they are also  
composition tools for musicians working in electronic music. that can vary  
 from academic composed tape music to commercial dance music to soundfx for  
commercials.


> This is why this whole thing is confusing to many users, imho, because it
> doesn't work like we're used to working (whether those limitations are
> valuable or not is another point).

IMHO it is no more confusing that switching to cubase or protools after  
working on real mixing desks.
The functionality is so much bigger that there will be confusion and it  
does have a learning curve.
But for user coming from cubase and protools there will be a lot less  
confusion.



> A regular mixing desk usually has mono inserts (and if you have "stereo"
> channels, it's a pair of mono channels each with a mono insert), the  
> panner
> is the final piece after the bus assign switch.
>
> The big thing Ardour is obviously missing is a channel send.  I know it
> *can* be done but it's not intuitive and doesn't work like we're used to
> working.
>

There is a regular send, but it is prepan, it follows the assigment of the  
streams present
So on a stereobus, you can add a stereo send and it will send channel 1  
one the first output of the send, and channel 2 on the second. I think it  
will send nothing on the extra channels though if you add more outputs  
than there are streams at that point in the strip.

At the moment you can't pan, although a little panner square is drawn in  
the controls.
But I agree that a automatable postpan prefader send would be nice, but  
how many mixing desks have these?
Mainly because it saves screen real estate. I can't think of anything that  
can't be done with a sufficient number of busses.
And the mix-groups don't affect the panning, so some kind of midi routing  
is necesary to set that up correctly.
Other wise you could hide all the busses in the group made by the track  
and all its busses.
This is one of the most powerfull features of ardour, you can have a  
multitude of independent busses for each track, so instead of only using  
them for (sub)mixes, you can use them to distribute the signal over many  
destinations.
It takes a mindshift when you are used to limited routing, but it is very  
powerful.


cheers
Gerard