On Thu, Sep 09, 2010 at 07:33:08AM -0500, Jonathan E. Brickman wrote: Nothing :-) A track strip in Ardour's mixer actually represents two signal paths: 1. From the input (jack port) to the track being recorded. 2. From the track to a mix. (2) goes via inserts, fader, pan, etc. to wherever you want it, usually the master strip. (1) is actually trivial, it's just a fixed path without any controls, and the only thing you can do with it is measure it (meter set to 'input'). If you want to hear new tracks while they are being recorded, select options->monitoring->ardour_does_monitoring. Then, when a track is enabled for recording, its input signal is copied to (2) as well. Some background: In the days of multitrack recorders, a studio mixer would actually consist of two mixers combined into one console. One feeding the tape recorder, via as many groups as you had tape tracks, and the second mixing signals from the tape recorder into stereo. The ability to mix _before_ tape was essential in the early days when you had maybe just 8 tracks. There were two ways to organise this. In the first, 'split' architecture you would have a full- featured mixer (EQ, inserts, large faders, etc), that could be switched between the two roles of 'feeding the tape' or 'mixing the tape to stereo'. While recording (when this mixer was feeding the tape), you had a separate simple mixer to make control room and monitoring mixes. Later, while mixing, the channels of this monitor mixer could often be used as effect returns. The second 'in line' architecture was pioneered by MCI in the early 1970's and quicly copied by all major console builders (today this would probably result in a patent war). In fact all mixers I've ever used were of this type. There were two key ideas to this: - combine a channel of the 'main' and 'monitor' mixers into the same physical strip instead of having the two systems side by side (so you'd have two faders in each strip), and - allow the two parts to swap roles. So you could either use the 'full' mixer to feed the tape and the simple one for monitoring (similar to the first architecture), or you could opt to use the 'monitor' mixer to feed the tracks and use the 'full' one for monitoring even during recording. The latter method would mean that when all tracks were recorded, your mixer would be almost set up ready to do the final mix. Ardour's setup is similar to the latter use, with a 'pre tape' mixer that is actually trivial - it just copies each input to a track. If you want more complex 'pre tape' mixing you need to create additional 'bus' strips. Ciao, -- FA There are three of them, and Alleline.