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

[Eric]

More follow up on teaching an everyday macosx user to use ardour:

She is still actively using it and not reverting to cubase, that's
big.  The biggest problem is there are some skipping noises in some of
the recordings.  They sound like xruns to me, although without
jack/ardour running from a terminal, I don't have any access to
warnings.  I've got her turning up the jack buffer size to 2048 now
days, closing the mixer window so the meters aren't taking CPU, and
stopping the cursor from following the playhead.  Kind of sad on a
1.25GHz G4 with 512MB of RAM when only recording two tracks and not
running any other programs.  Maybe recording to her firewire drive
would be better than the internal ATA100 one?

Also, some of the plugins aren't doing anything.  The valve and
rectifier distortion ones, for example, don't have any effect when i
disable/enable them with whatever settings.  The allpass delay crashed
ardour when we tried to add it.  The multivoice chorus cuts out
entirely when I increase the voices above one, but that may be my lack
of understanding how it's supposed to work...  This isn't really an
ardour issue, but it seems to me many of the plugins just need more
sensible defaults...they often default to doing nothing...very
confusing for a new user.

When exporting, you can't set WAV format to be big-endian (not sure if
this is necessary), but if you switch to AIFF and set it to
big-endian, then switch back to WAV it remains that way.  As a
usability note, she was confused as to why the exports had no sound in
them, until I reminded her the outputs from her tracks need to go into
the master bus.  I think those might have gotten switched up when she
switched between her firewire device to the internal audio and back
again.

Another confusing thing for new users is the piling up of bad takes.
It seems like you're overwriting a track when you re-record it, but
really she had gathered tons of bad takes.  She would have never found
"remove last capture" way at the bottom of the edit menu on her own.
I couldn't figure out immediately how to destroy old captures without
a right-button mouse...it's not on the context menu for the audio list
on the right.  Not sure what to do about this, but piling up a bunch
of unused regions probably contributes to ardour seeming slow and
xrunish.

Next I will experiment with her sending me zipped up ardour session
directories and my trying to work with them on Linux.  Think it'll work?

eric.