[Ardour-Users] Ardour/Hydrogen Sync issue

[Paul Coccoli]

On Sun, Mar 16, 2008 at 8:53 AM, Mark Greenwood <fatgerman at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> I have a strange thing going on with Ardour and Hydrogen.
>
>  I have both set to sync to Jack, with Ardour as the time master.
>  Ardour's time signature is set to 4/4. I've set Hydrogen's pattern
>  length to be '16', but I'm not sure if that's 16 beats as it only gives
>  me 8 beats to edit in a pattern. When I press Play in Ardour with the
>  playhead set to the start of the song (Bar 1), Hydrogen starts from Bar
>  2. If I start playback in Ardour from any other bar, Hydrogen starts
>  from a place much further ahead.
>
>  I kind of assume I've got a mixup between Ardour's understanding of a
>  bar and hydrogen's understanding of a bar. I've tried adjusting the time
>  signature in Ardour, and this changes the relationship between where
>  Ardour starts and where Hydrogen starts, but I can never get them to
>  start at the same point.
>
>  What am I doing wrong?


Patterns in Hydrogen are apparently measured in 'half-beats.'  So as
you say, in 4/4, a length of 16 would give you 8 beats per bar.  I
don't know why this is, and it makes no sense to me at all.

I suspect what you really want is a length of 8 with a higher grid resolution.

I'm not sure about Bar 1 in Ardour mapping to bar 2 in Hydrogen.
Sounds like an off-by-one error to me.  Since you've told Hydrogen
that a pattern has 8 beats in it, if you locate to bar n in Ardour,
you get bar n*2 in Hydrogen.  But bar 1 should be the first bar, no
matter what.  Maybe Hydrogen counts from 0 instead of 1?

These are the kinds of things that made me stop trying to use Hydrogen.