[Ardour-Users] Aligning Ardour's time line with a recorded track

[Paul Davis]

On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 4:57 PM, Peter Desjardins
<peter.desjardins.us at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi. I'm just starting out with Ardour and I have a beginner's
> question. I hope you won't mind reading it here.
>
> Is there a function for aligning the timeline with a recorded track? A
> friend of mine sent me a single track of drumming and I'd like to add
> to it in Ardour. I'd like to be able to match the beats in the Ardour
> time line to the beats in the track.
>
> The only way I can imagine doing this is by manually adjusting the
> time signature and speed until it looks and sounds correct. However,
> this must be such a common task that I'm guessing there's a function
> that will do it more quickly and reliably than I can.
>
> Is there a beat matching function? Or is doing it manually just part of the fun?
>
> Thanks for your help. Please point me to documentation that covers
> this if there is any, I couldn't find it myself.

its not well documented.

the two functions you want are bound to "9" (set-tempo-from-region)
and "0" (set-tempo-from-range)

for the first one, select a region that represents 1 bar, and press 9.
the rest should hopefully be obvious
for the second, define the edit range (see the keyboard cheat sheet
for info on this if you don't know about it) and press 0. same process
follows.

the former works best if you are working with samples corresponding to
1 bar; the second works best when working with less structured
material.

--p