[ardour-dev] ultra-preliminary alpha ardour2 tarball release available

[Thomas Vecchione]

Just because I am an idiot and cant remember to hit REPLY-ALL...  Here 
it is again, I apologize to Chris and Paul who will be getting doubles 
of these....

Well I downloaded and tried the alpha1 build, I thought I had remembered 
reading somewhere a newer tarball was going to be rolled so I wasnt sure 
if I should be grabbing the ardour2 CVS tarball or not.

At any rate it is built and installed into my /opt and running.

Unfortunatly I dont tihnk this will be to helpful but a couple of things 
i noticed...

I opened a new session with a different samplerate than the one I was 
working, and got a brief error that was cut off but I believe it was 
something to the effect of frame_rate() called when jack is not running 
and ardour crashed afterwards not opening the other project.

Clicking on the strips dialog in the mixer window will only leave one 
strip open and there is no feedback in the dialog itself anymore telling 
you if that strip is open or not.  Not sure if it is intentional, as 
shift clicking down lower will act like you would expect and open all 
strips located inbetween the initial and wherever you clicked, but still 
no feedback in the dialog itself that they are open.

The varispeed control in the mixer has no feedback at all as to 
location, though it is rather fun to sit there and have bittersweet 
symphony playing in stereo and line up by ear the audio due to the 
sudden shift in quality you get when it is lined up, some feedback might 
definitly be useful.

If I open ardour without starting jack, it starts up jack properly(Not 
sure if it is on launch or project open, I would reccomend project open 
and here is why..) but when opening up a 96kHz project I determined that 
jack had opened at I believe 44.1 with nice fun results that sounded 
really bad on the tracks I was opening;)  If starting jack is done at 
the start of the project open so that the samplerate is matched it might 
make things very much easier, and possibly add an option to close jack, 
or restart upon closing of a project if no other programs are connected, 
so that if we switch between different samplerate projects it would 
appear seemless and nice and easy?  Possibly eventually allowing for 
qjackctl to be taken out of the loop, which I wouldnt complain about, I 
prefer to do the routing in ardour if I could.

The input and output buttons in the mixer window list physical inputs 
and outputs, again not sure if intended, but it would be nice IMO if 
possibly the ability to route directly to other tracks were added in at 
these locations.

Moving faders in the mixer window seems to kill the metering in the 
window, even if playback continues.  Also the current level of the fader 
does not show up in the display like it would in ardour .99

In the mixer window it might be nice if we could click on one track and 
use the left and right arrow keys to move between tracks, especially for 
those of us with GUI problems, that may or may not be ardour related(Ill 
get to those later, I think it is likely my WM but I want to post them 
just in case)

I added a new track to an existing project, the track shows up in the 
session view, but the mixer window does not update completly.  The track 
also shows up in the track dialog in the mixer window, but the channel 
strip never appears, nor does selecting it in the track strip dialog 
cause it to appear at any time that I have found.

I have noticed ardour 2 seems to have a tendency to go just beyond the 
bounds of my screen(1024x768)  This happens both horizontally and 
vertically.  This may have something to do with my WM as well as it 
partially happened in ardour1(Currently e17) however I cant resize 
ardour2 to fit in either direction which I could in ardour 1.  Also 
fullscreen remains just over the screen boundries.  And on top of that 
if I do resize and add in the editor mixer in the session, the window 
will automatically undo the resizing I did to make sure the editor mixer 
will fit, which it doesnt unfortunatly causing my window to hang back 
off the bottom of the screen.  Again I think some of these are WM 
problems, some though may be ardour issues as well, I am not sure.

In the panel on the right hand side of the session view, on occasion the 
tabs will cover up the arrows to tab from left to right.  Not a major 
deal as clicking on the tab to that side will make it shift to the next 
tab in that direction, but I didnt realise at first there was more there.

Definitly though I am liking the new layout as I get used to it, I am 
curious if the menus will redisplay correct keybindings if they are 
edited in the ardour.ui file(Or whatever it is now) as I havent gotten 
that far.  Hope this helps.

Err I forgot to mention, Box is a 64-Bit Gentoo Distro running on a 
single opteron chip, will be switching to dual chip in the same box very 
soon and be willing to test that out if it is needed.  Kernel is 2.6.14

     Seablade