Ardour

From JackLab UserWiki

1 General Description
2 Versions
3 Basics, Terms and Concepts
4 More Tutorials
5 External Links

General Description

Ardour is a professional digital audio multitrack recorder and editor that is being very actively developed.

For many Linux audio users it is the central application in their studio, although it is "only" an audio sequencer and MIDI support is currently limited to synchronisation and parameter control. This should change after the release of 2.0, some code for MIDI sequencing exists already, as this was a project in Google's Summer of Code 2006.

Ardour can act as a VST host, but to use this feature the end users must compile it themselves, for legal reasons.

See our Wiki tutorial on building a rpm of Ardour2 with VST support: Ardour with VST

Versions

With the release of version 0.99.3, that was released on April 27 2006, development for 1.0 was stopped, and work on 2.0 began with several improvements and a modern GUI. Ardour 2.0 is expected to be released very soon. The Packman repository already offers a package for the current beta release, which is already very usable.

Basics, Terms and Concepts

session: the whole project; everything belonging to it should be in the folder that was created when you made a new session, so for session management you can just delete/move that folder.

audio files: can be recorded or physically imported, or embedded (symlinked) to a session's region list.

regions: virtual segments of audio files.

playlists: lists of region arrangements on a track.

tracks: routes which can contain one or more playlists, can have any number of in/outputs, pre/post fader plugins, inserts and sends.

busses: cannot contain audio, but otherwise the same as tracks.

ranges: selections over time, made with the "range tool", completely independent of track or region boundaries. In Ardour2, there is a second type of ranges, defined by markers instead of the mouse cursor, used for defining CD track boundaries.

modes: There are several tool modes, accessible by icons in the editor toolbar:

1. Object mode: used to move and resize regions on tracks.

2. Range mode: used to define a selection for later editing.

3. Zoom mode: used for quick zooming in the editor canvas.

4. Gain mode: used to edit volume changes on a per-region basis.

5. TimeFX mode: used to shrink or stretch regions to fit to a certain duration. (aka timestretching)

6. Audition mode: used to listen to what's in a region.