[ardour-users] some usage questions

[Jason Russler]

> 1) How would you go about aligning a drum track recorded from hydrogen with
> say a song sample?

Not sure what you mean here.  I sync the transports of Ardour and
Hydrogen to JACK (both are options in each application) that takes
care the syncing in most situations.  I never actually use Hydrogen's
sequencer, I prefer to use a MIDI editor to control Hydrogen - either
MusE or Rosegarden - which means syncing the MIDI editor and Ardour to
JACK..
>
> 3) For working with left and right channels of a stereo track separately
> (e.g. with plugins), is the accpeted procedure to send the output of the
> track to two separate busses for left and reight and then send those busses
> to the master input? Or is there a way to 'split' the channels in ardour
> forming two mono tracks?

I use the method of creating two mono buses.  This does get tedious
but it works.  It's good practice to slap effects onto buses anyway
since it's not uncommon to want to route several tracks through an
effect anyway (reverb for instance).  Lots of applications call this
an effects send (like you would on a mixer) but a bus with effects on
it is pretty much the same thing.

> 4) Would I get a clue by reading something on ProTools or the like, or are
> these things pretty idiomatic to ardour?

Ardour is fairly unique in the amount of manual routing that has to be
done to get a signal processed - however you start to appreciate it
since behavior is (usually) very predictable.  At the end of the day,
Ardour's architecture is really quite simple and after you understand
that JACK is frequently doing much of the work, things get pretty
easy.  I'd suggest really learning JACK - then Ardour starts to make a
lot of sense.