[ardour-users] Re: Book

[D. R. Evans]

andy said the following at 2004-09-11 13:22 :


> 
> - then press record on the track's mixer window strip, and press the
> record button followed by the play button in the main ardour window.
> 
> - this should start it off recording.
> 

It works!!! Thank you!

You can ignore the rest of this e-mail :-)

The reason that I couldn't get this far before was twofold:

1. This is utterly unintuitive, so all my attempts prior to reading the 
documentation were doomed to failure. That's fair enough, I guess. 
Serves me right for not reading the documentation first. Sort of. Mind 
you, people accustomed to Windows programs won't be happy that they 
can't even do the first thing they're likely to want to do unless they 
resort to the documentation first. (And this is something that's almost 
at the end of the current documentation, rather than being close at the 
beginning.)

2. Once I did read the documentation, I never got very far in the 
sequence of steps in "Basic Recording". The steps you mention are 
documented toward the bottom of page 45. But several steps earlier the 
documentation becomes incomprehensible.

Step 2 says:

Check the input configuration for the new track. Click on its editor 
corntol area. A mixer strip appears in the editor for this track. Click 
on the Input button near the top of the strip, and select Edit from the 
menu. The srtdanad I/O dialog pops up to let you connect the track to 
whichever JACK port you want to record from.

I looked at that pop-up, and was completely bamboozled as what I was 
supposed to do with it.

Step 3 was even worse, telling me to make sure that the "track's output 
is connected as [I] intend". To which my response was more or less "What 
in the name of sanity is it talking about?"

At that point, since I knew that I had no idea what two 
seemingly-important steps were talking about, I decided that it didn't 
make sense to pretend that everything was hunky-dory and proceed from 
that point. So I stopped and sent my note to the reflector.

I do want to make it clear, as I hope I did in my prior post, that I'm 
not complaining. But when the documentation for Ardour is eventually 
done, I do hope that it will be written at the right level so that the 
software becomes useful to general musicians.

   Doc