[ardour-users] Ardour Tips and Tricks

[smurky]

I'm anything but an expert, however if I were in your shoes I would get 
the ram. Pronto. Then, unless you were planning to get more ram when you 
installed and have enough swap space (twice the amount of ram is 
standard), you'll need to repartition. Actually at that point I would 
say you should reinstall unless it's unfeasible.
Why the fat32 partition instead of a Linux native? What's the file 
system on the disk that you're running ardour from? JACK likes ext2, and 
ardour can only be as good as JACK will let it be. Use hdparm to tune 
your hard drives. Con Kolivas' website has tips for how to do this. Also 
there's an Ubuntu howto. There's a package called powertweak which can 
also help reduce latency. Figure out the best settings for JACK on your 
system. Do dummy runs with ardour and whatever else you'll be running 
for the sessions. Let it go for a few hours to make sure that you're not 
going to end up in xrun hell. These are the basics as far I can tell. 
Read the ardour manual and check out the ardour documentation project. 
Links below to the people who actually know what they're talking about. 
Good luck in the States.

http://www.djcj.org/LAU/ardour/
http://ardour.org/manual/
http://ck.kolivas.org/audio_hints.txt
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=16360