[ardour-users] Newbie questions

[Jesse Chappell]

On 8/13/06, Atte André Jensen <atte.jensen at gmail.com> wrote:

> 1) I have about 20 or so tracks, som not playing. Will muted tracks take
> up a) memory and b) CPU?

No, muting a track will not use less resources.  The only way to save
CPU (not memory) is to disable the track by right clicking on the
track name at the top of the mixer strip and deactivate or disable it.

> 2) I have 12 tracks that make up backing vocals. They are panned + their
> individual volume ok, and I assigned them to the same group. I'd like to
> EQ them and apply in one go, and thought groups would offer me that
> possibility, but it seems not. How do I go about putting them on a
> stereo track for prossesing? I'd like have things dynamically running
> (so not mixing them down), is that much more CPU-expensive?

Groups only gang operations as you've discovered.  What you want is to
create a new stereo Bus and route the outputs of all your vocal tracks
to the input of that bus instead of the master.  Then connect the
output of the new bus to the master (if not already).  Then you can
insert plugins and control levels from the bus which will affect all
the tracks routed through it.  In that case you probably won't want to
use the group you set up.

> 3) I get quite a few xruns when running my test-project together with
> ams + zynaddsubfx + specimen + seq24 although my cpu level is well below
> 50%. My sound card operates at 48000hz but I did the project with jack
> running at 44100hz (due to some now resolved issue with zyn). Could this
> be the cause of my xrun problems? Is there anyway to convert the project
> to 48000 (quality loss is not that important, since it's mostly for
> seeing how the system behaves with the same material at 48k)?

It is possible that your sound card doesn't operate well at 44100 and
it might be the cause of xruns.  However, it could also be due to the
other apps (zyn) which might not be totally RT safe.  Or you might not
have the proper kernel patches to get the best RT performance.  The
variable are sadly quite numerous.

jlc