[ardour-users] Dolby Digital Sound Mixing

[linuxsmiley at gmx.net]

Hi Jesse, hi everybody else,

output as AC3 is exactly what I need and I'm glad somebody made the 
effort creating such a tool.

Jesse Chappell wrote:

>> you can do 2D-planar multi-speaker panning in ardour, for sure, but that
>> is not the same thing at all.
>
>
> Helge, what paul is saying here is that it has a basic capability to 
> pan a track to more than 2 channels but it isn't particularly well 
> suited for 5.1.  Primarily, the interaction between the left, center, 
> and right will probably be difficult to get right with ardour's 
> default 2d panners.  For a music production I would simply ignore the 
> LFE channel entirely anyway, it is rarely used even by professionals 
> for music.

 If you interpret "LFE channel" as a "subwoofer channel" than you're 
right - I don't need it. But the front center - I think - I do need: 
e.g. one guitar on the left front channel, the second one on the right 
channel and the drums on the center speaker (just an example, needs a 
lot of fine-tuning ;-)). Am I right I can change these "balance 
positions"  during time by this "automation" function?

A question regarding performance of jack/ardour as Allan stated he has 
2.9ms latency: What window manager are you using? I'm using Gentoo, too, 
but right at the moment I'm stuck with KDE 3.4 (XFCE4 is still 
compiling). Right now I'm using the normal gentoo-sources because I'm 
new to AMD64 and wanted to check everything without ck-sources (I had 
them installed on my old AMD AthlonXP). What other performance tips can 
you give me besides switching over to ck-sources and XFCE4? I've JACK 
running in realtime mode, have /dev/shm mounted (how can I check JACK is 
really using it) and still get LOTS of xruns when JACK is just idle 
(Frames/Period: 512; Sample Rate: 48000; Periods/Buffer: 2). Right now 
doing an "emerge -uDav --new-use world" (full cpu load) I don't get them 
any more but I had them earlier the day just starting JACK with qjackctl 
... I'm just curious where I can enhance the performance for JACK/ardour 
so I get no more xruns. Tomorrow I'll replace KDE with XFCE4 and see how 
much that is going to speed things up.

Thanks for all your responses, you helped me a lot already!

Best wishes to everyone
  Helge Jung