15 Sep
2011
15 Sep
'11
1:06 a.m.
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 12:48:39AM +0200, Dominic Sacré wrote:
Hi,
I have a medium-sized Ardour session with a couple of plugins on most
tracks, in which I'd like to record some additional tracks. Due to the
number of tracks and plugins, it's not possible to run Ardour/JACK at
very low latencies.
The same machine (and the same sound cards) is also used for monitoring
for the whole band, using a huge instance of JackMix. This needs to be
run with as little latency as possible (128 frames per period, tops).
How can I solve this dilemma? Ardour's latency doesn't really matter to
me, as long as newly recorded regions are properly aligned with existing
material.
It might also be an option to run Ardour on a different machine via
netjack, but as far as I can see the period size of a netjack slave is
tied to that of the netjack master. It also seems doubtful that Ardour
would be able to do correct latency compensation in this scenario...
Any suggestions? Is there any way to run run a second, high-latency JACK
server piggy-back on a low-latency server?
If you can't decrease the period size, the the only option
is do the monitoring *for the new tracks being recorded*
in hardware, using either a 'real' mixer or the one that
may be provided by your sound card. If you have RME gear
hdspmixer is the solution - this use case is why it exists.
If the number of new tracks being recorded simultanuously
is not too high you don't need a big mixer: one channel
for each 'live' input, and on or two for the mix of
existing tracks that you make either in Ardour or using
a separate SW mixer. Doing punch-in/out will require
some attention, but otherwise things should just work.
The really hairy case is a new track created on the PC
using a soft synth or similar - this requires a short
period for acceptable monitoring. But with external
sources there shouln't be a problem.
The latest Ardour 2 should take care of latencies - see
Paul's post of today.
--
FA