[Ardour-Users] Struggling to do anything at all

[Steven Chamberlain]

Paul Davis wrote:
>> Probably a daft idea, but should I try and make my own (small?) program
>> from scratch to do recording in the specific way I'm wanting to?  This
>> process of 'reinvention' seems to happen often in Linux Audio dev. but
>> is it ever worthwhile?
> 
> very, very silly. what are you trying to record, and what are you goign
> to do with it after you're done?

I'm trying to record drums using 8 tracks.  All I need is a backing and
click track in headphones.  I would like to record the song only 8 bars
at a time, recording multiple (anything from 3 to 50) takes
back-to-back, and keeping only the best ones.  I will need to stitch
each 8-bar section together with short overlaps and crossfades, but
other than that I don't wish to do any fine-grained edits, like moving
individual drum hits.

The result I'm hoping for, is to have 8 seperate .WAV's that span the
full duration of the song.  I would send these to a friend who wants to
do the processing himself in Sonar.

I thought I could maybe loop the backing and click with something like
Audacity.  I could simultaneously run ecasound, record 8 channels at
once to disk.  Then I'd have to use maybe Audacity again, or even sox,
to split the long .WAV into short chunks (one for each 'take').  This
sounds tedious but it's currently the best workaround I can think of.

It should have been simple to do all this in Ardour but I've had many
problems, six or more of which I've mentioned on this list or in Mantis
over the last couple of weeks.

John Emmas wrote:
> In most cases, I'll do something (like just clicking on a
> particular part of Ardour's surface) and the whole thing just
> disappears from my screen.

That's exactly how it seems for me, like the thing is fragile and might
break on any mouse click or key press.  I get paranoid and find myself
saving before doing anything at all.

Regards,
-- 
Steven Chamberlain
steven at pyro.eu.org