Below are some basic conventions we have adopted in this manual.
Ardour requires a two-button mouse to run (or the emulation of that on your system in some other way). A click is assumed to be a left button mouse click. A right-click refers to the right-hand button on the mouse. A Ctrl, Cmd or Apple key pressed with a mouse click is not the same and may in fact give a different result.
The names of keys to be pressed are written in quotation marks and italicised, like this:
Ctrl, Return, Backspace, R
Key combinations are written like this:
Ctrl + X
or
Apple + X
Many functions are accessible in Ardour by clicking on the various menu items. Additionally, you may need to access functions through the menus of macOS, Ubuntu or other Linux distributions. To illustrate this, we use two conventions: the first is illustration via screenshots (images), and the second is through a syntax like this :
View > Zoom > Zoom to Session
The above example is shorthand for “first click on the View menu, then choose the Zoom item of the list, and then click on Zoom to Session”.
This tutorial does not assume any previous knowledge of computers or audio editing, so terms which might be unfamiliar to the general reader are capitalized throughout this manual, and are listed in boldface the first time they are used in a chapter. Glossary words are also defined in-line the first time they occur in the manual, and are included in the glossary at the end of this tutorial.