[ardour-users] A hundred tracks and counting...

[josh]

Well, I'm in full-swing recording a rock/pop record on Ardour. The 
system is running FC1 with the ccrma patched kernel, running as root for 
realtime, and I'm running fluxbox and Ardour with a M-Audio Delta 1010. 
The rest of the hardware is an AMD Athlon 1400+ with some motherboard 
that doesn't conflict with the sound hardware, coupla big hard disks and 
a DVD/CD burner. It's really a pretty generic system that was fast maybe 
2-3 years ago.

So... I've recorded basic tracks for about 13 songs (4-5 drum tracks, 
bass, scratch vocals and scratch guitars) amounting to about 100-150 
tracks for those basic tracks, many edited together versions using 
multiple takes and "punch-ins". Two songs are nearly complete with 
20-30+ tracks including heavily doubled electric guitars, hand 
percussion, etc., and that number is growing every day. We're averaging 
about 1-3 takes for drum tracks, 8 takes or so for guitar & bass tracks, 
and one take on percussion and the like. So this is a pretty big track 
count including all of the overdubs, punch-ins and alternate takes. I 
expect to "complete" about 11 songs for this project (already putting 
one on the chopping block) and have an average of about 35 edited linear 
audio tracks per song.

With Ardour I have experienced a couple of nuisances, like for example 
you can't open a project after you have worked on another without first 
closing Ardour and restarting it, but since Ardour loads in about 5 
seconds it's not a big deal. I have experienced two real crashes 
yesterday, one where Ardour&Jack (dunno which one) caused the whole 
X-window session to freeze for a few minutes and then suddenly returned 
me to a text login screen, but Jack, envy24, etc., kept running. Second 
time was working on the same song, similar situation, and Ardour seemed 
to get into some kind of infinite loop and CTRL+ALT+BKSP killed fluxbox 
but only after about 5 minutes of waiting. Seems to be if I do things 
too fast, things get funky. The better I get at using Ardour, the more 
often I upset it.

So far I haven't gotten into fades or detailed editing, but will 
probably begin getting serious about editing later this week. I have not 
really used effects much because I can't really figure out the busses 
yet but I just need a touch of reverb occasionally and delay & 
compressor plugins per-track at this point to continue tracking. Once I 
get serious about mixing then I will have to get serious about effects 
routing/bussing etc. and will probably try the version of Ardour that 
supports vst so I can use blockfish and freeverb. I haven't been able to 
figure out how to use submix groups either but it's just because I 
haven't committed a lot of time to it.

In all, Ardour has been more stable, generally speaking and with the one 
known common work-aroundable quirk, than Nuendo that I used on Win98SE 
before. Linux is certainly a lot faster and more stable than Win98SE but 
frankly I rarely had trouble with Win98SE, my rebellion is mostly due to 
the high cost of Windows software, or in other words, I wanted to be 
able to run the same software on multiple computers used by our label in 
home studios and on laptops without coughing up $1200/ea for licenses.

Provided I can figure out the bussing, effects routing, submixes, and 
automation in Ardour for mixdown, and I can get VST effects working well 
enough to use blockfish at a minimum, then I think Ardour is a real 
winner. As I write this, I am reminded I need to figure out how to burn 
a DVD on Linux and make some backups real quick...

This is not just a "trial" or "hobby" project... we're making a record 
to release on the Prophets & Poets record label and expect it to be a 
success. I don't know how many others on this list are really making a 
serious album on Ardour yet, so I wanted to post. It's been pretty 
smooth sailing. Can't wait for 1.0. Maybe it'll be around by the time I 
mix. In fact maybe 2.0 will be out by then. Here's hoping I can move my 
projects to 1.0 or 2.0 by then. If all goes as it has been then I intend 
to stick with Ardour for a long time.