[ardour-users] Low volume for imported WAV Files

[Chris Bozic]

Ok, you got me!  :)  I have never actually mastered an ardour session
using hydrogen.  I use that way as a "proof of concept" drum track
until I can get my computer over to my friend's drumset.  My
suggestion is to try mastering a test session containing a simple
hydrogen track and some other "normal" ardour track and see what
happens.  Let me know too, I'm curious!  :)  If it doesn't master
properly, my guess is you would eventually have to export the hydrogen
track to a WAV.  But by the time you're ready to master your session,
you would probably want to sever your session's dependency on hydrogen
anyway.  (That would make backing up and archiving sessions easier.)

When you work with ardour there are two mixers that you have to be
involved with.  The alsa mixer (used to control the volumes of your
computer components) and the ardour track mixer (used to control the
volumes of your ardour tracks).  You can get to the ardour track mixer
by opening the window menu and then click mixer.  There's the place
where you can mix all of the tracks in your session along with the
"master" track.  Messing with those volume sliders should be enough to
get your ardour output to be about the same as the other audio apps on
your system.

You can also use ladspa plugins to mess with normalizing and
amplifying in real time.  You should be able to do all of that from
within ardour using that mixer window.

Have fun,
Chris




On Fri, 17 Sep 2004 04:17:38 +0100 (BST), Louis Lam <lshoujun at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Thanks for the reply...
> 
>  --- Chris Bozic <cbozic at gmail.com> wrote:
> > One unrelated thing you could try (just for fun) is set up hydrogen to
> > be a jack slave and pipe it's output through jack to a track input on
> > ardour.  If you do it like that, than you can control the hydrogen
> > track's volume like any other track while still having the freedom to
> > change the drum part without having to export to WAV.  Hydrogen will
> > start playing when you hit play on ardour.
> 
> Hey, thats a great idea, perhaps i have not gotten to the point where I know how to do that (ie.
> making Hydrogen a jack slave and control from ardour). The advantage being I can change the drum
> part (if i want to ) on hydrogen itself without exporting to WAV.
> 
> At the end of the day after i've laid all the non-drum tracks i'd want to export the whole thing
> into a wav (for mastering, convert to ogg or mp3 etc...). That would still require converting the
> drums to wav first is that right?
> 
> >But it doesn't really
> > matter how you decide to get a drum track into Ardour.  Either by WAV
> > or by jack slave, you can always use a ladspa amplifier in ardour to
> > raise the volume of a track that has less than optimal levels.
> > There's a ton of ladspa effects around that can help you out with bad
> > levels.
> 
> Thats another option, but i gotta figure out which ladspa would help me do this well.
> 
> For importing WAV files, would it help if I normalize the target wav first before importing?
> 
> I think i need to understand the way ardour controls the volume of imported WAV files. Outside of
> the mixer, don't seem to have a "master vol" where I can control the overall volume of the entire
> application.
> 
> At this point, to me it seems that the playback vol of ardour is generally lower than that of the
> CDplayer or XMMS. Gotta find some way to level it up. Any suggestions?
> 
> Thanks for helping,
> Louis
> 
> > Chris
> >
> > On Fri, 17 Sep 2004 03:11:49 +0100 (BST), Louis Lam <lshoujun at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > Hello All,
> > >
> > > I was trying out two things:
> > >
> > > 1. Import a WAV file that was previously exported by Hydrogen drums, I wanted to put this wav
> > file
> > > into an ardour project and lay tracks along with it
> > >
> > > 2. Import an existing stereo wav file that I've recorded previously and trying to do mastering
> > >
> > > On both cases, the playback volume was very low on ardour as compared to playing it back with
> > > xmms. Didn't Change the alsa mixer settings. I find it difficult to hear and to do mastering.
> > >
> > > Is there something I need to do to the imported WAV files to bring up the volume in ardour?
> > >
> > > I'm using version 0.9beta11 distributed with DeMuDi 1.2.0-rc3.
> > >
> > > Thanks in advance,
> > > Louis Lam
> > >
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