On Sat, 2009-05-30 at 12:56 -0400, Joe Hartley wrote: Yeah, I was wondering if using four of those cards was going to create problems. If we have to go with the 1010, so be it. I liked the cost of the Delta 44's though! Any other thoughts?? Rich...

Ricus Vincente kirjoitti: I think this is more like propel head stuff, but why not? Watch the video. "The support is in subversion and will be included in subsequent versions. Anyone on linux, has a wiimote and is able to build Ardour can try it. See http://www.ardour.org/download_full for more information about building." http://ardour.org/node/2158 ps. I have tested Wiimote on the classroom (http://code.google.com/p/linux-whiteboard/downloads/list). Best Regards Asmo Koskinen.

Joe Hartley kirjoitti: Here is a article about that device: "Mixing It Up with the Behringer BCF2000" http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10240 Best Regards Asmo Koskinen.

On Sat, 30 May 2009 15:28:15 -0400 Ricus Vincente <wizardofgosz(a)gmail.com> wrote: Sounds brilliant! I believe that people have had good results with transport-specific controllers, I've got no experience beyond mapping a few buttons on the BCF for play/stop/home/end, which is good enough for what I am doing. -- ====================================================================== Joe Hartley - UNIX/network Consultant - jh(a)brainiac.com Without deviation from the norm, "progress" is not possible. - FZappa

Ricus Vincente wrote: If you just need transport control: The tranzport works fine. Flo -- Machines can do the work, so people have time to think. public key DA43FEF4 x-hkp://wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net

On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 12:44 PM, Joe Hartley <jh(a)brainiac.com> wrote: That article Asmo mentioned above is great, the mapping of midi to ardour controls is not exactly intuitive/discoverable (control-middleclick?), but it is simple once you know the keypress. By the way, off topic for this thread, but definitely applicable to Linux audio: is there a good primer to the ardour UI? I use ardour extensively, but the interface is non-discoverable, there are great things it can do which require non-intuitive keypresses and mouseclicks (I started reading ardour.keys and just reading the xml for keybindings to try using/assigning for example). Also, if someone was interested in working on the discoverability of ardour, this could save much headache and work for many of us. To reiterate, I am certainly no newbie to Linux audio or even ardour in particular, but I am still figuring out things I should have been doing for years now.

On Sat, 2009-05-30 at 12:45 -0700, Justin Smith wrote: Great suggestion. Thanks. My main problem now is getting the other "owners" of the studio to help cover the costs of this project. :-) Best, Rich...

On Sat, 2009-05-30 at 13:14 -0700, Kevin Cosgrove wrote: This is one of those coke/pepsi hornets-nest questions. I guess it depends upon how much I like the automation in Ardour. Plus your question has two levels. The convenience of the automation in the DAW, vs. the automation in the console, and the different question of preferring the way mixing in the box sounds over mixing through analog gear. There's no question in my mind that I always want my audio passing through analog gear on the way out (I'm taking about good analog gear here, not crap). Keeping the faders on my console at unity and making automation moves with the DAW is something that is amenable to me. Best, Rich...

On Sat, 2009-05-30 at 15:10 -0700, Kevin Cosgrove wrote: Studios have been using MDM's (ADAT) digital tape machines (Sony 3324, 3348), or dedicated hard disk recorders (Radar), leaving the digital domain to enter an analog console, and then into digital mix-down decks (DAT, Masterlink, CD) for a really long time now. Lots of hit records have been made this way. They sound fine to my ears. :-) If it's not a concern for George Massenberg, or Ed Cherney, it's not a concern for me. :-) Best, Rich...

Actually a good record even in this day and age is one which has gone through analogue summing ;) So yes, you _will_ want to go back to the analogue domain after shifting to the digital one - at least partly.

I'd like to thank everyone for all of the help they offered on building my 16 in, 16 out DAW, and any other suggestions would be appreciated. One thing that did strike me however, was that when I originally suggested using four, Delta 44 cards, a few people said that would be a problem, and to use two Delta 1010's. Cool. What about if someone needed LOTS of tracks? Like a professional studio with a big analog desk that wanted to eschew Protools in favor of something like Ardour? Say 48 in and 48 out, or even 64? Does the RME hardware allow for that? Best, Rich...

Ricus, Go spend some bucks on a decent RME card. There's a pretty good reason why you see RME cards almost everywhere. Yes. You can use e.g. multiple MADI cards (64ch each) and use them as centerpiece of your studio's infrastructure. Works nicely in the studio and abroad, but may come with a hefty pricetag, if you want to jump onto the MADI train. An alternative could be RME's ADAT or AES32 cards, depending on the kind of interface you need. All these solutions depend on external converters and merely provide you with a way to transport audio data in and out the machine. You may find pretty soon that 16 channels are not enough. Flo -- Machines can do the work, so people have time to think. public key DA43FEF4 x-hkp://wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net

On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 01:04:16PM -0400, Ricus Vincente wrote: I've been using MADI cards from RME, each of them provides 64 ins and 64 outs and they work a charm. For interfacing to analog you need external converters (first to/from ADAT, the RME ADI648) and then to/from whatever your budget allows. The cheapest converters are Behringer, performance is not top grade but if you use only the line inputs you can modify them so that the line signals goes directly to the converters instead of being attenuated and added to the mic input. Signal quality goes up considerably by doing this, and you get rid of the variable gain. Regarding Ardour it sure can do the job, but coming from a 'real' (or 'reel') multitrack you will have to adapt a bit. No more rocking the reels to find the exact punch-in spot... Provided you have enough physical ins/outs, the tracks will autoconnect to them, so you don't even have to open the mixer window if you just use it as a tape machine, just create a template with mono outs for each track. You can set up the tracks as 'tape' tracks which means that if you punch the original signal will be overwritten as would happen on a real tape. The alternative is the standard mode, where a new region will be created (on the same track) if you punch, and you can edit the transitions later. Regarding punching, I've found Ardour on the unstable side when doing that, even recent versions. Ciao, -- FA Io lo dico sempre: l'Italia è troppo stretta e lunga.

On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 03:29:09PM -0400, Ricus Vincente wrote: Having used Neves I can only say I loved them. More than Harrison or SSL. For converters, a good choice to use with MADI and MADI/ADAT are the 8-ch units from Aphex. They are great in fact. That would be perfectly possible. The only consequence is that you have to divide you focus between routing done on the mixer and within Ardour. For such use cases the autoconnect works against you, so you have to do all of it manually. It's no problem during mixing, but it takes time during a recording session. And using less than 16 tracks... Sgt. Pepper's was 4 track IIRC. What happens regularly with my current setup is that after one second or so you get an error saying that writing to the disk failed for some reason. Restarting doesn't seem to help in such cases, saving and reloading the session may help. It's not something you'd want to happen twice in front of a performing customer trying to concentrate on getting his/her side of the punch right. Yes, but that means you have to switch the monitoring manually at the right points during the punch, and of course edit the transitions later. The latter takes time. Ciao, -- FA Io lo dico sempre: l'Italia è troppo stretta e lunga.

On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 04:54:03PM -0400, Ricus Vincente wrote: Don't think so. Not if it means adjusting its speed to an external SMPTE signal. This is difficult in the digital world - it means either resampling or adjusting the sample clock. But you could put an SMPTE track in the Ardour session and make the analog machine sync to it. Ciao, -- FA Io lo dico sempre: l'Italia è troppo stretta e lunga.

On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 5:49 PM, Ricus Vincente <wizardofgosz(a)gmail.com> wrote: Ardour syncs to MTC, which is just re-encoded timecode. I've been told by a company that specializes in timecode sync hardware that it syncs faster and more accurately than any other product in the market place. Its not technically hard to sync to SMPTE itself, but nobody has had the incentive to do the work. I'd be happy to consider doing it as a paid project - it would probably be about 4-8 hours work. Not necessarily. I have a JL Cooper box that does bi-directional conversion between LTC and MTC. Has it even been reported to the bug tracker? Note that Harrisons XDubber is built around this functionality, and they tend to beat this stuff to death. I've heard no reports of problems with punch in until Fons bought it up on this mailing in. There is one vaguely related report from sometime in 2007 with version 2.0, and that was believed to be fixed (it was actually a crashing bug).

On Tue, Jun 02, 2009 at 12:20:47PM -0400, Paul Davis wrote: Is that sync with varispeed ? If the analog machine runs 0.5% slow because it has been a long day, will Ardour do the same, and without loss of quality ? Ciao, -- FA Io lo dico sempre: l'Italia è troppo stretta e lunga.

On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 12:46 PM, Fons Adriaensen <fons(a)kokkinizita.net> wrote: there are "hidden" options. the default settings assume that the timecode source and the audio interface that is driving JACK share a sample/word clock, so that 1 second of timecode time == 1 second of audio samples, and thus no varispeeding is necessary. essentially, we just notice that timecode starts, stops and jumps non-linearly, and respond appropriately. however, you can change this setting (there is no GUI for it because i've yet to find anyone who can actually defend adding this option to the GUI), and in that mode ardour will varispeed to stay locked to the master. it will stay locked to within 8-30 samples of the master's timecode position. the varispeed interpolation (linear, fixed point) is weak, and so technically quality will suffer. whether its suffering worth fixing is a matter that reasonable people might reasonably disagree about. when i initially developed MTC slaving, i used an Alesis M20 ADAT *without* sample/word clock sync. ardour would follow the wow+flutter of the M20 perfectly. it would even follow it if i used the shuttle/scrub controller on the M20.

On Tue, Jun 02, 2009 at 03:28:43PM -0400, Paul Davis wrote: It will be audible on any track that contains significant HF energy. Some instruments, voice, cymbals, etc. <Mr. Spock style> Interesting... Note that if you varispeed you have to resample recorded streams as well to keep things consistent. AFAICS, there are currently three options: 1. Sync the word clock to an SMPTE signal, as suggested by Florian, 2. Sync the analog machine to an SMPTE signal generated by something locked to the word clock used by the Ardour session. 3, Sync the analog machine to an SMPTE signal recorded as a Ardour track, which amounts to the same thing as 2. -- FA Io lo dico sempre: l'Italia è troppo stretta e lunga.

On Tue, Jun 02, 2009 at 04:56:44PM -0400, Ricardus Vincente wrote: That would indeed be crazy and you'd be the only one to blame for the results. Linear interpolation, when used for resampling to near unity rates, will produce periodic modulation (flutter) of HF content. Ciao, -- FA Io lo dico sempre: l'Italia è troppo stretta e lunga.

On Tuesday 02 June 2009 12:20:47 Paul Davis wrote: wrote: If you will contact me offlist with your rates, I may just get you to do this as my gift to the ardour community. (If anyone else wants in on possibly funding this too, let me know offlist.) all the best, drew

On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 03:29:09PM -0400, Ricus Vincente wrote: I have not seen any instability with punch ins on Ardour, but I have had Ardour rejected out-of-hand by a pro studio guy because it doesn't have a pre-roll feature. He wanted to set a punch in point, type in a number of bars/seconds/frames for pre-roll, and have the transport start exactly at the same spot every time he hit stop and then record/play. I tried moving the Start marker to the "pre roll" point, which I thought worked pretty well, but apparently that wasn't good enough, alas.