[Ardour-Users] Struggling to do anything at all

[Steven Chamberlain]

Steven Chamberlain wrote:
> 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 went over to the dark side just now and had a go at doing the
recording in Cakewalk Sonar on Windows.

Remind me never to attempt any audio work on win32 again.  First was the
apparent inability to record 8 at 24/96 channels and store them as
32-bit without 'dropouts' (xruns) every few seconds.  The support forum
explains how I "shouldn't use anything more than 16-bit, 44.1kHz if I'm
making a recording for a CD."...

The only real solution to the above was to use HUGE buffers of something
like 500ms (as opposed to under 2ms on Linux).  Setting the buffer too
high caused tracks to cut out after a few seconds whilst others continue
playing and no errors were reported (definitely a bug, probably
overrunning a buffer).  To make things worse, Sonar didn't properly
compensate for latency when recording punch-ins or adjacent parts of a
song, so those had to be manually time-aligned.

I should really have mentioned the clumsy interface first.  Its way of
zooming, ordering/displaying 'layers' and setting up crossfades is
really tedious.  Even the colour scheme is enough to induce nausea.

So, despite my recent issues with Ardour I'm actually very grateful that
 it does the job, properly and efficiently.  And when it doesn't, it's a
bug, which usually gets fixed promptly.

Thanks,
Keep up the good work!
-- 
Steven Chamberlain
steven at pyro.eu.org