[ardour-users] cmt or at least freeverb for osx?

[Eric]

FYI, I just installed the ardour 0.99 dmg on a powerbook with osx
10.3.9 for a friend who is an artist, not an advanced computer user by
any stretch, but who has spent some time editing video in final cut.
I installed the swh, cap, and tap plugins too.  All appears to work
OK, with no installation issues whatsoever, although I didn't test the
plugins except for GVerb.  I then really wanted freeverb because I
think it sounds much better, so I went and grabbed ladspa and
ladspa-cmt using fink.  After installing them and 
"ln -s /sw/lib/ladspa/* /usr/local/lib/ladspa" freeverb shows up in ardour
and works fine.  I was using her PreSonus INSPIRE 1394 Interface for
testing and it worked fine, once I remembered to set the device to it
and not the internal audio in jackpilot.  I was able to run with a
buffer size of 128 comfortably...lower than that and there was some
crackling from GVerb when I had it set to a low delay.

I did, however, crash ardour by attempting to add the "Mono to Stereo
Splitter" and freeverb plugins both at once.  In another track, if I
added Gverb, then disabled it, then added freeverb after it things
worked OK.  I've had this problem with adding the splitter and
freeverb before on Linux...messing with the number of inputs/outputs
between plugins has always seemed like a touchy issue for ardour.

The only other problem was it's easy to knock out the firewire cable,
in which case when you plug it back in jack stays running, but seems
to become confused as the output from ardour no longer makes it to the
monitor.

As far as my friend's ability to use ardour without instruction...it
was limited.  She understood creating a new session, adding tracks,
and connecting inputs in the mixer window when I showed her how to.
But she was confused by having to Apple-click on the little unlabeled
black box where the plugins go, and then having to select one and
Apple-click again to hit "edit" for the plugin options.  The ladspa
controls confused her...she could not think to drag left and right on
the bars and ended up double clicking so she now had to type in values
but sometimes typing in values is weird when you type invalid ones.
She was also eminently frustrated that simply clicking in the track
didn't move the play cursor, and that it's kind of hard to get the
mouse on to drag.  She clicked in the beats bar several times while
trying to click in the SMPTE one, resulting in a dialog box she didn't
understand and wasn't immediately sure how to get out of because the
Cancel button doesn't have much of a border.  Another frustrating
element for her was deleting takes of tracks.  She continually
selected the track and hit the Delete key to no avail, becoming
frustrated at having to go up to the edit menu and click Cut.  She
accidently clicked the bottom part of a track once, slicing part of it
off and freaking out, then repeatedly hitting Apple-z to try and undo
it.  By contrast, she got Cubase LE with her card and has been using
that with no troubles, figuring out how to layer tracks and add reverb
and adjust levels and mixdown and all.  Of course, she would never
have figured out to set software monitoring and run plugins while
recording without my intervention...is it normal and desirable to have
both hardware and software monitoring checked by default?

As a side note, I played around with transferring her projects from
cubase to ardour.  It was simple enough to change the device setting
in cubase to be jackrouter, and subsequently set the inputs of the
ardour tracks to be the cubase outs.  However, even when I created a
send from a cubase track, it did not show up as a jack output, so I
could only capture the entire mix and not each individual track.

Just an interesting use case,
eric.