[ardour-users] Re: Here's the setup, more questions...

[Doug McLain]

> Wow, thanks for all your responses.  This is gonna help tremendously.  
> Now....
> 
> I don't have the money to drop into a SCSI drive, so...  That's probably 
> not gonna work.  Another IDE drive could be an option, and we'll see if 
> we can get one.  I initally tried using my SATA drives to record with 
> and ACK.  I couldn't get *anything* but xruns.  If there's a way to use 
> SATA, I'd love to - but I don't have enough experience to have a clue.
> 
> Recording specifics:  Yesterday we recorded 3 tracks at a time 
> simultaneously (all analog) most of the day using a click-track and then 
> listening to the previous tracks recorded while recording 3 new tracks 
> until we had 15 tracks going.  Then came the drums (ack...).  We then 
> recorded 7 tracks at once while listening to the previous 15 tracks (all 
> analog).  It did this fine (barring one xrun in the middle of it).  When 
> we tried to play back the final resulting 22 tracks, it got about 
> half-way through the song before it would have the "disk stream 
> under-run" error and stop the whole thing.
> 
> We're listening to the track playback through analog outs 1 and 2 merged 
> to stereo headphones.
> 
> About the -p option and latency.  I'm not exactly sure what will happen 
> if I turn that up, but I have a feeling the latency will be quite a bit 
> more.  And about hardware monitoring?  I'm not sure what that is, but I 
> think it's supposed to let me listen to the recording as it's coming 
> directly into the delta1010?  How to I tap into that?  Does it just come 
> out the headphone mix as I've got it set up now?  What about the latency 
> with the playback of previous tracks?

Latency is of no concern to you.  When I first got into this I was under 
the impression that latency was a factor in overdubbing, but it isn't. 
If you were doing things like using the computer as a musical instrument 
(synth) or perhaps a software effects box for your guitar, then it would 
be.  That's why bumping up -p is totally ok for you to do.  Ardour is 
designed to know when you will 'hear' the output and knows where to 
'put' the input, for synced overdubbing, regardless of latency.  I am 
doing basically the same thing as you, and did find that when using 
JAMin during overdubbing, the overdubbed track was lagged and had to be 
nudged backward (forward in time) a bit to be in sync.  I guess ardour 
is suppposed to take into account the latency created by jamin and 
account for it, so it's just a bug for now.  Turn it off while 
overdubbing if you use it at all.

Hardware monitoring with the Delta 1010(LT) is done with the 
envy24control mixer app.  I doubt you've gotten this far without it(?), 
but in case you have its in the alsa-tools package.  It gives you full 
control and level monitoring of these cards.  With this, you can send 
any / all PCM signals (audio coming from ardour, for example) and live 
inputs to the Mix Monitor which you route to HW Out 1/2 for instance, 
for live hardware monitoring.

> 
> As far as recording at 96K - I definitely can turn that down - and I 
> will.  In my magically perfect world, I'd love to record at 96K, but 
> 44.1K will do fine.  Then I don't have to dither it down for CD.

Best idea i've heard.  Honestly, doing this will probably fix 
everything.  I am recording live drums/guitar (generally 6-7 tracks 
simultaneously) on a system identical to yours in every respect except 
2400+ cpu with -p1024 without ever an xrun, since I use -r48000.

> 
> What about frames?  Should I mess with that, or should I leave it at 2?

Yeah thats fine

> 
> I apologize for all of the questions, but I've got to get this thing 
> running smoothly by Monday.

Pssht, tell me about it, you'd think think this was some sort of ardour 
user support/discussion list or something :)

> 
> Thanks again for your help.
> 
> --Jason


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