[Ardour-Users] using ardour for live recording

[Jörn Nettingsmeier]

On 06/16/2010 07:10 AM, Jason Jones wrote:
> 44 tracks!?!?  Holy cow...  Would you mind sharing what interface you use?

an rme hdspm pci-e madi card. or actually two - i did the job with 
faberman, who threw in a madi splitter for a fully redundant setup: my 
machine running ardour, which i used to set edit marks in realtime and 
take notes while wading through the score, and faberman's shuttle 
running jack_capture, which was just dumping the entire 64 madi channels 
to disk in case something happened to the primary machine. luckily, it 
was not needed. but that's the nature of backup - when you have it, you 
don't need it :)

> Are you on Linux or Mac?  Wow... 44 Tracks...  That's the most simultaneous
> tracks I've heard of being recorded by ardour (in my little bubble world..)

both machines were linux boxen. the session was quite insane - my 
original plan was for 24 tracks, but the composer got so inspired by the 
venue that she used almost twice as many positions as we had thought, 
and constantly changed stuff. we were chasing the double basses all over 
the place, i think we moved the mikes at least 4 times :)
we ended up taping microphones to trees and video tripods because we had 
run out of hardware, and the last few microphones were hooked up with 
several five-metre cables in series... :-o

with the increased buffer size and good disks, i'm pretty confident 
ardour could do a lot more. i ran some tests with 64 tracks for about 30 
minutes, no problems.

actually, we did record another 32 channels of eigenmike, but due to its 
closed-source-ish nature, it runs exclusively on a macbook with windows 
xp (!), and you only get at the data via firewire, so we had to have two 
machines running in sync. would have been fun to try 76 tracks in ardour 
;) some other day.

regards,


jörn



-- 
Jörn Nettingsmeier

Audio engineer
Meister für Veranstaltungstechnik (Bühne/Studio)

Lortzingstr. 11, D-45128 Essen, Germany
+49 177 7937487

http://stackingdwarves.net