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

[Russell Hanaghan]

On Tue, 2004-08-24 at 08:24, josh wrote:
> 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.

Just a word to the wise; If you are in full creativity mode and don't
want to spend a bunch of time fiddling with software installs, I'd hang
on the vst thing for a bit. Freeverb is available in the CMT LADSPA
plugin set and works very well. I use it more than any other reverb. If
you add TAP, SWH and the multitude of other LADSPA plugins out there,
you will have a suite of comprehensive _workhorse_ effects. SOme good
compressors, eq's, reverb and delay's and a few other fancy bit's and
pieces.

I have been thru the mill on the vst thing. I finally got it to work but
it has it's issues and _can_ take a LOT of time to get working.

If you can't live without vst support, be sure to go with the version of
wine on Kjetil's site. I could not get other versions to work and from
all reports jack_fst, vsti and vstserver are all VERY "wine" sensitive.

R~
> 
> 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.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> ardour-users-ardour.org mailing list
> ardour-users at lists.ardour.org
> http://lists.ardour.org/listinfo.cgi/ardour-users-ardour.org