ardour-tutorial/en/index.json

[{"content":"Below are some basic conventions we have adopted in this manual.\nMouse Clicks 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.\nKey Names \u0026 Combinations The names of keys to be pressed are written in quotation marks and italicised, like this:\nCtrl, Return, Backspace, R\nKey combinations are written like this:\nCtrl + X\nor\nApple + X\nMenu Navigation 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 :\nView \u003e Zoom \u003e Zoom to Session\nThe 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”.\nGlossary Words 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.\n","description":"Conventions used in this Ardour tutorial","tags":null,"title":"Conventions","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/introduction/conventions/"},{"content":"When you create a new session, Ardour opens an empty new window called the Editor window. The Editor window is the most important window in Ardour, as this is where you arrange track, import and edit media on the timeline, and control plugin automation for creative effects and mixing.\nLet’s take a look at main parts of the Editor window:\n Here they are:\n Editor-specific toolbar Timeline Tracks and busses Project overview Editor mixer strip Regions, Tracks/Busses, Snapshots, Groups, Ranges, Marks  Let’s overview them quickly.\nEditor-specific toolbar Edit Modes and Cursor Modes  The Edit Modes and Cursor Modes controls define the behavior of the main canvas and the different functions the cursor can have. There are three edit modes in the drop-down menu: Slide, Ripple, and Lock. We will discuss them in the Editing sessions chapter.\nTo the right of the Smart button are the Cursor Modes:\n Smart mode (Y shortcut) Grab mode (G shortcut) Range mode (R shortcut) Cut mode (C shortcut) Stretch mode (T shortcut) Audition mode Draw mode (D shortcut) Internal Edit mode (E shortcut)  Most of them are discussed in the Working With Regions section. The last two are discussed in the Using Automation chapter.\nThe Smart mode is actually a combination of Grab mode and Range mode. When enabled, the mouse behaves as if it is in Range mode in the upper half of a region, and in Grab mode in the lower half.\nSnap Options  The Snap Options toolbar allows selecting visible grid units that affect snapping when editing regions and, in case of MIDI regions, their contents.\nHere is a comparison between 1 bar grid, 1/8 note grid and 1/32 note grid:\n Please see the sections on Setting Up Time Signature, Using Ranges and Working With Regions for more details.\nTrack View and Zoom Options  The far right part of the toolbar has track view and zoom options.\nTrack view options allow selecting how many tracks to display at the same time, and you can also shrink or expand the vertical zoom of selected tracks and busses.\nZoom options allow incrementally zooming in and out, as well as zooming out to show the entire project horizontally.\n Tip Use the shortcuts = (the equal sign on your main keyboard) for zooming, and - (the dash key on your main keyboard) for zooming out.\n  The drop-down menu controls the zoom focus. It defines the focus point of zooming operations. Try zooming in and out with a different zoom focus each time. For example, choosing Playhead will cause zoom to behave in relation to the position of the Playhead. Mouse will take your current mouse position as the reference, and so on.\nTimeline Right-click on the names of rulers and you will see a menu with all the possible rulers at your disposition. You may uncheck rulers that you don’t need in order to save screen space. More information on these operations can be found in the Setting up the Timeline and Setting Up Time Signature chapters.\n Tracks and Busses Just below the rulers is where tracks and busses are displayed. In the example below, you can see one bus called Master and one track called MyTrack. MyTrack also contains one region which represents an audio file with a drawing of its waveform. More information on tracks and busses can be found in the Creating a Track or Bus chapter.\n Project Overview This is a bird’s-eye view of the entire session.\n There are two major use cases here:\n  Navigating around the project. Just grab the rectangle and drag it around to pan over the entire project.\n  Tweaking zoom and position of the visible part of the project. Grab the left or the right side of the visible rectangle’s border and drag it inwards or outwards to zoom in or out respectively.\n  Editor Mixer The Editor Mixer is located at the left of the Editor window. It displays the mixer strip of the currently selected track or bus. It’s mainly used to control the volume, plugins, and routing for the track or the bus to which it corresponds. You can toggle to view or hide the Editor Mixer by clicking on the menu View \u003e Show Editor Mixer (Shift + E shortcut). This Mixer is covered in the Using the Mixer Strip chapter.\n Editor List The space on the right of Ardour’s Editor window can have 7 different functions, depending on which tab is currently selected: Tracks \u0026 Busses, Sources, Regions, Clips, Snapshots, Track \u0026 Bus Groups, and Ranges \u0026 Marks.\n  Tracks \u0026 Busses provides an overview of all tracks and busses in the project, including the invisible ones. This tab is covered in the Arranging Tracks chapter Sources lists all files on the disk imported to the session. Regions is a list of all takes in the session. You can reuse both sources and regions by dragging them onto the canvas. You’ll find more information on regions in the Working With Regions chapter. Snapshots are versions of the same session saved at particular moments in time, they are discussed in the Saving a Snapshot chapter. Ranges and Marks is an overview of all markers in the project, with an easy user interface to edit them.  Continuing Next up is the Mixer window where you focus on making instruments stand out in a song.\nNext: MIXER WINDOW\n","description":"Basics of Ardour's editor window","tags":null,"title":"Editor window","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/getting-started/overview-of-the-interface/editor-window/"},{"content":"Exporting is the process of saving a region, track, or entire session to a file on your computer which you can listen to, burn as a CD-R, or convert to an MP3 to share on a website.\nExport the Entire Session Once you have finished your composition, the most common export operation is to export the entire session to an audio file.\nBird’s Eye View of Entire Session At this point it’s a good idea to zoom out and take a look at your whole session before exporting.\n Select “All” from the “Number of visible tracks” menu:    Click on the Zoom to Session button (third button in the zoom options):    You should now have a nice overview of your whole session, like this:   Listen to your piece one last time and make sure you hear everything the way you want (any Solo or Mute button you forgot to deactivate? Any volume adjusment left to do? etc.)\nStart and End Markers Finally, make sure the start and end markers on the ocation markers timeline are in the right place.\nEverything included between the start and end markers will be exported, so you have to set the markers first if they are not in the correct position. In the image below, clearly the end marker is too far to the right in the timeline. This will result in a huge silence after the end of the piece (that is, between the last region and the end marker).\n If your end marker is too far after the end of your piece, click and drag it to the left until it is pretty close to the end of the very last region of your composition.\nExport it! To export a session, use the top menu: Session \u003e Export \u003e Export to Audio File(s).... This will open up a dialog box with a number of options.\n  Preset This is NOT where you write the file name. Don’t worry about this field now. Format This allows you to choose the file format (WAV, MP3, OGG, FLAC, etc.). The default is CD (Red Book), which will give you a 16-bit WAV file with 44.1kHz sample rate. Add another format If you’d like to export in more than one format at the same time, click on this tab. Location This is the place where you will find the file after it is saved. By default, it is in the export folder that lives inside your main session folder. You could also click Browse and select the Desktop, for example. Label This is where you can create a unique name for the file. Ardour will automatically append the session name to the exported file, so if you don’t write anything here the name may end up something generic like my-session.wav. Use this field to give a unique name to your file.  Having chosen your options, click Export. After the operation is finished, you can find the file using your file browser.\n Tip Export is handled through the Master bus, so the final file will include all the sounds from tracks and busses that were routed to it. This will include any normalizing, fading, panning, and automation you have created, along with the individual edits made to the regions as well. If any of the tracks have the Mute or Solo buttons engaged, this will also affect which tracks will be heard in the exported file.\n  Normalization Sometimes the rendered audio is either too loud or too quiet to match demands imposed by various popular streaming services like YouTube or Spotify. Ardour provides a tool called Loudness Assistant to help with that.\nIn layman terms, it analyzes everything that goes through the Master bus, estimates how loud the signal is, and then suggests correcting it upwards or downwards so that overall loudness would be just about right for this or that popular streaming service.\nWhile you can apply loudness (gain) correction directly to the Master bus’s output and benefit from having more manual control over the result, the most convenient way is to apply normalization at the exporting stage. You can do that two ways:\n  Just pick a popular service in the drop-down list under Formats. Ardour has presets for Apple Music, Deezer, Spotify, YouTube etc.\n  If the service is not listed in the presets, click the Edit button to open a dialog with advanced exporting settings, enable Normalize, choose Loudness rather than Peak, and then set the desired LUFS value.\n   Continuing At the end of this chapter, you now have an exported stereo mix representing your entire session. You may also want to know how to export individual regions or selected ranges from your session. This will be covered briefly in the next two chapters.\nNext: EXPORTING REGIONS\n","description":"How to export sessions in Ardour","tags":null,"title":"Exporting a session","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/exporting-sessions/exporting-a-session/"},{"content":"There are a couple of resources on the Internet to help you learn Ardour and fix some of the problems that you might have along the way.\nArdour Manual The official Ardour Manual is the main reference to Ardour. It is a work in progress, meaning you will not find every single feature explained there (yet). But it is already an amazing resource:\nGetting Help via Chat A good way to get support when learning Ardour and working with it is using the Chat function. Ardour has a built-in “Chat” option, found in the main menu under Help \u003e Chat to connect (via your web browser) to the Ardour IRC channel at libera.chat.\nYou could also use your IRC-capable chat application (like Pidgin or Xchat) to connect to the Ardour channel (#ardour or #ardour-osx) at the libera.chat network, or use this weblink directly:\nhttps://web.libera.chat//#ardour\nEnter a nickname and connect, you are welcome!\nIn such a IRC Chat channel or room, you find the Ardour developers and other users to chat about using Ardour, problems and/or bugs you are facing, or about suggestions for Ardour which you want to discuss.\nGetting Help via Mailing Lists For those that prefer mailing lists to IRC chatting, the Ardour Users mailing list is also a good place where users and some developers discuss all kinds of problems and ideas related to using Ardour. This is an active list, with many helpful and knowledgeable users around to help guide less experienced people. There are sometimes more general discussions about topics like recording technique, audio interface selection, etc.\nGetting Help via Forum The Ardour team also maintains an active forum where you can ask for help, discuss bugs and feature requests, and post your music composed, recorded, arranged, and mixed with Ardour.\n","description":"","tags":null,"title":"Further help","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/appendices/further-help/"},{"content":"Chapter 1 Introduction Basic conventions in the tutorial and an introduction to digital audio\nContents:\n Conventions What is digital audio?  ","description":"","tags":null,"title":"Introduction","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/introduction/"},{"content":"In one of the previous chapters we already discussed that Ardour operates on sessions that encompass all material you have: audio clips, MIDI clips, all effects applied to tracks and busses etc. Before we get to actual editing, let’s talk about basics of non-destructive editing, how it’s implemented in Ardour, and why it should give you peace of mind when you do some heavy editing.\nWhat does non-destructive editing actually mean? In a nutshell, a non-destructive approach to editing means this: whatever you do, your source material always stays intact. Instead of writing to original files, a program would rather describe changes you applied, store them in a project file, and then “replay” them when loading that project.\nHow does it work in Ardour? Here is a quick example. Let’s record a short audio clip, cut it in half and then drag the right half to the right creating a gap:\n Here is what actually happens here. Ardour creates a region that references the original audio file and uses all of its data, from the first to the last sample.\nWhen you split the file in two, Ardour creates two regions, and they both reference the original file. But now the project file says: the left region starts at this point in time, begins with the first sample of the original file and stops at that sample in the middle, and the second region starts at a different point in time with that sample in the middle of the original file, and then it stops at the last sample of the original file.\nYou can cut an audio region into as many smaller clips as you like, move them around tracks, change their start/end points, stretch or contract them etc. The original audio file will never change on the disk.\nWhen you save a project, all that information is preserved in the session file. When you reopen the session, Ardour reads all these references, loads original files and recreates all edited audio regions from original audio files. That’s what “replaying changes” really means.\nIf you don’t like the way you edited an original take and you are way too far into editing to undo the changes, you can start all over again without recording a new take. For that, you can open the right sidebar by pressing Shift+L, go to the Sources tab, grab the name of the original audio file of the take, drop it on any track and then move it around, cut etc.\n Moreover, any effects you apply to a track are also non-destructive. Ardour will apply them to original audio stream and play the result on-the-fly.\nIn case of MIDI clips played through a synthesizer, Ardour will use the synthesizer to render a stream of audio data while the playhead is rolling, capture that audio stream, apply effects to it, and then play the resulting audio stream as you go.\nDifferences between audio and MIDI regions As you already know, audio files are always intact. But MIDI regions are different: you can actually edit their contents, and the changes are saved to MIDI files on the disk.\nOne case where this matters is when you want to combine multiple regions into one. You can do that with audio regions by selecting the ones you want to merge and them use Region \u003e Edit \u003e Combine. This will create a kind of a meta-region that references N audio files on the disk.\nHowever you cannot do the same with MIDI regions primarily because they are editable on disk, and thus combining something that can physically change can wreak havoc on data continuity.\nWhere does Ardour store source material? Consider this generic project. You have here several audio tracks representing drums, two audio tracks for bass and solo guitar, and a MIDI track for electric piano.\n If you go to the session folder, you’ll find there a number of subfolders, including these two:\n ‘interchange’, this is where source audio and MIDI files are stored; ‘plugins’, here Ardour saves the state of every instance of every plugin used in the project.  When you record one instrument, every take you do is represented by one physical audio file per channel. So if you did three takes in a stereo track, you’ll have 6 audio files.\nDoes Ardour ever change audio data on disk? The only time Ardour does anything to actual audio files on the disk is when you explicitely tell you to remove audio files that aren’t used anywhere in the project. Typically this is done when you did dozens of takes, you made your choice and you don’t want these files on the disk anymore because they take space.\nEven then, you do it in two steps. First you go to Session \u003e Clean-up \u003e Clean-up Unused Sources to put unused original files into a trash bin, then you separately go to Session \u003e Clean-up \u003e Flush Wastebasket to actually tell Ardour to remove unused files physically.\nContinuing Now that you are familiar with basics of non-destructive editing, let’s do some actual arranging and editing.\nNext: ARRANGING TRACKS\n","description":"What is non-destructive editing and how does it work in Ardour?","tags":null,"title":"Non-destructive editing","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/editing-sessions/non-destructive-editing/"},{"content":"Besides importing existing audio files, another way to create regions in your Ardour session is to record new audio.\nThe source of this audio could be the line or microphone inputs of your audio interface, or it could even be sound originating from other applications on your computer which have been connected to Ardour via JACK. Please see the section on routing for more details.\nThis section will show you how to record audio from an external source (for example, a microphone) onto a track in Ardour.\n First, you should check that the proper inputs have been routed to the track you wish to record to.\n Select the track by clicking on the empty space just below its name and volume slider. The track becomes highlighted.   The vertical Editor Mixer strip located on the left side of the Editor window should now show the track you just selected (Audio 1 in the image above). Just below the track name in the Editor Mixer you will find a button that allows you to edit the routing. Click on that button to investigate the routing.   Tip If you don’t see the Editor Mixer strip, use the Shift + E shortcut to make it appear.\n  In the next image you can see that the only input of this mono track is receiving signal from system capture_1. This normally means the first microphone input of your soundcard. The actual names of the connections on your personal computer may be different depending on a number of factors, including whether you are using a macOS, Windows, or Linux computer. If you don’t see a connection named system capture_1, look for whichever connection name is likely to be your input microphone.\n The tabs that you see displayed vertically on the left are available sources. “Audio 1 in” on the bottom right is the destination. The green dot represents a connection.\nThe Ardour tabs show the connections that can be made from other sources within Ardour. The Other tab displays audio connections available from software other than Ardour, if any is available. The Hardware tab shows hardware connections (for example, the built-in microphone of your computer or the inputs from your sound card). This will be explained in more detail in the Understanding Routing chapter.\nFor the purpose of this chapter, simply make sure that system capture_1 (or equivalent in your computer) from the Hardware tab is connected to the track you want to use so that we can do a test recording. If you don’t see a green dot as in the screenshot above, click on the matrix to make the connection manually. You can now close this window.\n Tip The example above assumes you are recording a mono sound source onto a mono track. If you want to record in stereo, the instructions are pretty much the same, but you should create a stereo track. You should then see two green dots, one for capture_1 and another for capture_2.\n  Arming the Track  Warning Please be sure to first turn down the volume of your loudspeakers before the next step.\n  “Arming the Track” is simply to get it ready for recording. Once you have checked that the proper capture inputs have been routed to the Track, you can arm the Track to record by clicking on the small red icon on the horizontal track strip (not the big one in the Transport controls).\n When properly armed, the small red icon will remain highlighted, and you will be able to see the incoming signal by looking at the peak meter on the Editor Mixer or on the horizontal track strip.\nIf you are using headphones, you should be able to hear (“monitor”) the sounds being recorded. If you are using loudspeakers, be sure to turn their volume down to avoid feedback.\n Tip Unless you have told Ardour to do otherwise, the input being recorded will be monitored (in other words, heard) via the Audition output. If you are not using headphones to monitor the recording process, you may get some loud feedback at this point!\n  Arm Ardour and Start Recording Now that you have armed the track to record, you must arm Ardour itself to record by clicking on the big red button in the Transport toolbar. The button will blink in red, indicating that Ardour is ready to record. To start recording, click on the Play button in the Transport menu, or press the space bar of your computer keyboard. Clicking the Play button again (or pressing the space bar) will stop recording.\n While recording, the armed track will capture the sounds from the input. Any existing sound on other tracks will play normally during the recording. This allows you to play, sing or speak along with other regions and tracks you have already recorded or embedded in your session.\nWhile recording, you will be able to see the levels (the amplitude in decibels) of the incoming sound, as well as see the peaks of the waveform appearing as it is recorded.\nAvoid Clipping The audio in the screenshot below was recorded too loud and produced clipping (in other words, the signal recorded was outside the bounds of what could be represented digitally), which results in a loss of information and audible distortion. The clipped peaks in the waveform are marked in red.\n The best and easiest way to avoid clipping is have some control over the volume of the incoming audio signal before it gets to the sound card. For example, you can can move the microphone further away from the sound being recorded or use a mixer to reduce the volume of the incoming signal. When the audio signal has been recorded within proper limits, you should see no red peaks, and the level meter should show a negative number as maximum peak (for example, a maximum peak of around −3.0 decibels allows for a comfortable distance from the clipping point.)\nThe range of decibels between the region’s maximum peak and the clipping point is commonly referred to as headroom. It is common recording practice to keep approximately three to six decibels of headroom between the maximum of your signal and the clipping point, with the clipping point itself being represented as 0dB (zero decibels). In other words, an audio region with a comfortable amount of headroom would have its maximum peaks between −6dB and −3dB.\nRegion List Recorded audio appears as a new region in the recording track. Like all regions, this newly recorded one will be available in the Regions list, from where you can drag-and-drop it into other tracks if needed.\nThe region you just recorded will automatically receive the name of the track where it was recorded, with different takes being automatically numbered. In the screenshot below, “Audio 1-1” and “Audio 1-2” represent two different recordings made on a track named “Audio 1”.\n You might want to plan ahead and organize your recording session by giving appropriate names to different tracks. For example, a track used only for recording vocals can be named “Voice”. This way, recorded sound files will be named accordingly, and different takes will appear in the Regions list identified as “Voice-1”, “Voice-2”, etc, rather than the default generic names, such as “Audio 1”.\nTo rename a track, just double-click on its name (before you arm the track to record) and type in the new name.\n  Tip Did we mention how important it is to save your work often? Hit Ctrl + S right now. Get in the habit of hitting it every few minutes.\n  Continuing At this point, you may want to skip directly ahead to the Arranging Tracks section to learn how to arrange the regions into a composition. If you plan on doing more complicated Recording than what we have discussed here, in particular with a multichannel soundcard, or from other JACK-enabled audio programs on your computer, you should also have a look at the Understanding Routing chapter.\nNext: ARRANGING TRACKS or UNDERSTANDING ROUTING\n","description":"How to record audio with Ardour","tags":null,"title":"Recording audio","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/recording-audio/recording-audio/"},{"content":"There are a number of ways to save Sessions in Ardour, so that each session can be use later on. The simplest way is to save the entire session just like you would save other documents: hitting Ctrl+S.\nA new session is first saved at the moment you create it. While you are working on it, you should save it frequently. Get into the habit of hitting Ctrl+S (or Command+S on a Mac) every few minutes.\n Tip Avoid using any characters other than letters and numbers when naming your session. Avoid white spaces, accented letters, !@#$%*()+, periods, commas, etc. Use dashes or underscores if you like. For example, instead of “My Great Session!”, prefer “My_Great_Session”, or “MyGreatSession”, or “my-great-session”. Instead of “Açaí”, write “Acai” (without accented letters), etc. Once you have created your Ardour session, do not manually rename any folders or files that belong to the session.\n  Ardour File and Folder Format The contents of a typical session’s folder on your hard drive might look something like this:\n A bit of information about some of the components inside that folder:\n The name of this session is my_session. The main session file is called my_session.ardour. The session file is periodically backed up by Ardour with a .bak extension. The .history file keeps a record of changes you have made during your session, and is also periodically backed up. The interchange folder contains the actual audio data of all the regions used in your session. The export folder is where exported files are saved by default.  If double-clicking on the session file does not launch Ardour, use the standard method of first opening the application itself, then choosing a session from the Session Setup dialog.\n Moving a Session to Another Computer or Disk If you need to move your Ardour session to another computer, or if you would like to make a backup of it on an external drive, you must copy the entire folder containing all of the files mentioned above. It is not enough to copy just the *.ardour file.\n Warning When copying an Ardour folder to another computer or drive, do not manually change its name or the name of any of the internal files. Please also note that, as Ardour sessions are case-sensitive, copying a session to a USB stick (VFAT file-system) will likely corrupt the session. ZIP up the session folder to move it between machines.\n  The easiest way to transfer the entire project is indeed to just ZIP the session’s folder. If you don’t have snapshots in your session, you can also use the Session \u003e Archive... command. This will create a single ZIP file containing the project file and all audio data transcoded to lossless FLAC files. Please note that an archive will not contain snapshot, only the current state of the session will be preserved.\nContinuing Saving an entire allows you to open it again at a later time. However, if you would like to preserve a certain state that your is in, to be able to return to that state later on after you have made changes, then please continue to the next session called Saving a Snapshot.\nNext: SAVING A SNAPSHOT\n","description":"How to save and move an Ardour session","tags":null,"title":"Saving a session","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/saving-sessions/saving-a-session/"},{"content":"Ardour supports both Linux, Windows, and macOS. There is very little difference about how it works on all these operating systems. So while this tutorial assumes using Ubuntu Linux, you should expect it to work the same way on other operating systems and Linux flavors.\nFirst-launch wizard When you first start Ardour, it will ask you a few questions to make a basic customization: user interface and font scale (if you have a HiDPI display), default folder where new sessions would be created, preferred way to monitor signal being recorded etc.\n This dialog will never be shown again, unless you wipe all settings. You can change all the preferences you set there at any time later in the Preferences dialog.\nCreate new session Once you get past the first-launch wizard, Ardour will suggest you create a new session from one of a few available templates.\n A session encompasses all the material you have: tracks with audio and MIDI data, effects associated with tracks and busses etc. Thus, a session is essentially a project file from which you can render a mono or a stereo audio file to deliver to a client, use in a video, or upload to a streaming service.\nFor simplicity’s sake let’s go with an empty session as shown above.\nArdour will always automatically suggest storing a new session in the default folder that you set at the previous step.\nWhen giving a new session a name, please avoid using any characters other than letters and numbers, like white spaces, accented letters, !@#$%*()+, periods, commas, etc. Use dashes or underscores if you like. For example, instead of “My Great Session!”, prefer “My_Great_Session”, or “MyGreatSession”, or “my-great-session”. Instead of “Açaí”, write “Acai” (without accented letters), etc.\nName your new project and click Open .\nOnce you have created your Ardour session, do not manually rename any folders or files that belong to the session. Otherwise, Ardour will fail to locate the files inside those folders and will ask you to point to them.\n Tip Once you saved at least one session, the Session Setup dialog will look differently: there will be a list of recently opened sessions and a way to open an existing session that is not on that list.\n  Choosing an audio system and its settings At the next step, you will need to choose and configure the audio system.\nOn Linux, you have multiple audio systems (or backends) available. ALSA is suggested by default. It is currently the recommended way to use Ardour in production. With ALSA, there are no convenience wrappers or abstractions. You connect to physical audio and MIDI ports directly. This means Ardour will take over the audio interface of your choice and won’t share it with any other applications. As long as Ardour is running, any other desktop applications you are running too won’t be able to connect to the audio interface and play any sound.\n The PulseAudio backend currently only supports playback. This means you won’t be able to record any audio as long as you use PulseAudio, but you can edit, mix, and export in e.g. Bluetooth headphones on the go. It’s also the most convenient option when you want to follow a mixing or mastering tutorial on e.g. YouTube and be able to listen to the output from Ardour.\n Finally, there’s JACK audio backend. It is designed following a client-server architecture pattern. JACK captures all physical ports of an audio interface and routes signal between its clients (e.g. a digital audio workstation, a software synthesizer, a drum sequencer etc.) and various ports. It is available on both Linux, Windows, and macOS.\nToday, the use of JACK audio server is discouraged by Ardour developers except for particular use cases like sophisticated signal routing. For simple multichannel recording your user experience will be vastly better when relying on native audio engine available in your operating system, like ALSA on Linux and CoreAudio on macOS. If you absolutely need JACK, it’s best to start and control it from a separate program like Qjackctl or Cadence.\nMost supported audio systems have a few common settings:\n Device — it’s either your built-in sound card, or an external sound card if you have one (such as a USB interface). Sample Rate — 48K or 44.1K are common choices. Buffer Size — especially for external USB audio, try picking an option that results in a latency that is a multiple of 1ms (4ms, 6ms etc.) to produce less glitches. Periods — it’s often suggested to use 3 for an external USB audio interface, but you should see if you can get a multiple of 1ms with 3 or if you should dial back to 2.  Once you’ve chosen, configured, and started the audio/MIDI backend, Ardour will try to discover any new plugins, and then you will be greeted with Ardour’s main window:\n Continuing In the next chapter you’ll familiarize yourself with Ardour’s user interface and its main windows: Editor, Mixer, Recorder, and Cue.\nNext: OVERVIEW OF THE INTERFACE\n","description":"Launching Ardour on Ubuntu Linux, first steps","tags":null,"title":"Starting Ardour","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/getting-started/starting-ardour/"},{"content":"Mixing is the process of converting multiple tracks into a stereo or a multi-channel mix where all the instruments can be heard clearly.\nMixing Tools Levels, panning, equalization (EQ), and compression are the main tools used to achieve a good mix. In addition to these core tools, a wide range of plugin effects can also be used to enhance the sound, such as reverb and delay. Introducing the Mixer Strip The mixer strip is the vertical column that contains various controls related to signal flow. Each track and bus in Ardour has its own mixer strip. The mixer strip is also the main tool we will use in the process of mixing our Tracks. In this chapter, we will get a general overview of the mixer strip, with each section described. We will also provide references to chapters containing information specific to each aspect of the mixer strip.\nThe Mixer Strip from Top to Bottom Mixer strips can be accessed from both the Editor window and the Mixer window (shortcut Alt+M to toggle between the two). Mixer strips in either window (Editor or Mixer) mirror each other: any actions performed on a mixer strip in the Mixer window will be reflected in the corresponding mixer strip in the Editor window, and vice-versa. The editor window and Mixer window are more fully explained in the An Overview of the Interface chapter. In the Editor Window, you can see the mixer strip of the currently selected track on the left side of the window. If you don’t see it, hit Shift+E to display the Editor’s mixer strip.\nOverview Here we see the entire mixer strip, as it would appear in either the Editor window or the Mixer window.\n Regular \u0026 Narrow Modes The mixer strip can be switched between the regular width and a more narrow width to conserve space. The very top part of the mixer strip, pictured below, switches between regular and narrow modes using the left button. The button with an eye icon hides the mixer strip entirely (you can re-enable it later).\n You can easily spot differences between narrow and regular modes: shorter captions on buttons, no legend for the peak meter etc.\nTrack Name and Routing Button Continuing from top to bottom, the next section of the mixer strip contains three narrow regions. The first of these regions shows the name of the track (that’s the word “Audio 1” in the image below). The next region, named “1” in the image below, is a button which allows access to the input routing. Please see the Understanding Routing and Recording Audio chapters for more information on input routing. The last narrow region controls phase reversing (we won’t go into details on this topic in this tutorial).\n Processor Box The large black region at the bottom of this section is the processor box. This is where you can add plugins, for example. The signal flow in the mixer strip is top-to-bottom. It starts with the input on top, the topmost plugin in the box is the first one in the effects chain, the one in the bottom is the one applied last.\nThe processor box will always contain a blue fader processor. This indicates where in the processor chain the main channel fader is located — this is the fader shown in the lower half of the strip. Please see Using Plugins and Using Sends for a detailed discussion of this area.\n There are additional views and controls possible in the processor box, as seen on the screenshot above:\n  Inline displays. Some plugins can display a mini-overview of their settings, e.g. an equalizer can display a preview of how various frequency bands are affected. And some plugins are written with just this objective in mind — to provide a quick overview of something in the mixer strip. Ardour comes with two such plugins, an inline scope and an inline spectrogram.\n  Plugin controls. It’s possible to add controls to various plugins in a mixer strip. That way, for the settings that you tweak most often, you don’t need to open a plugin’s window every time, you can just drag a slider left and right with your mouse or scroll the mouse wheel when hovering a control. Press Ctrl to make smaller increments when dragging or scrolling.\n  To control both these features, use Controls submenu in the right-click menu of a plugin. As inline displays are enabled by default, all you can do is disable it (and then enable back). To enable a control for a plugin, simply click on its name in the menu.\n  Tip To enable multiple controls for a plugin, the most convenient way is to open the right click menu, hover a control and press Spacebar on your keyboard, hover the next control, press Spacebar again etc.\n  The next portion of the mixer strip includes controls for panning, record, mute, and solo, among others.\nPanning Panning commonly has to do with placement of sounds anywhere between left and right speakers to help separating instruments from one another by placing them in different parts of a virtual room.\nDepending on the amount of channels in a track, Ardour will provide a dedicated user interface to control panning. In the screenshot below, a mono track is on the left and a stereo track is on the right:\n Please refer to the Panning chapter for more information.\nSoloing and Muting Tracks and busses can have two additional related states: soloing and being muted.\nAny track or bus on mute will be inaudible through the Master bus or the Audition. The track mixer also contains a miniaturized Mute button, in between the Record Arm button and the Solo button. Right-clicking on the Mute button gives you advanced options for the behavior of the mute button.\n When a track or a bus is soloing, all the other tracks and busses are inaudible through the Master bus or the Audition, unless you solo them. So if you need to play just two tracks out of eight, you don’t have to mute six other tracks, you only need to solo those two. Please note that soloing a bus will not silence any tracks and vice-versa.\n When any track or bus is on solo, the solo indicator in the Auxiliary Controls menu will flash red. Clicking the solo indicator while it is flashing will deactivate every solo in the session.\n Arm Record The Rec button arms the track for recording, as seen in the Recording Audio chapter.\n Fader, Fade/Peak Meters The most prominent control present in a mixer strip is the fader, used to adjust the overall gain for the corresponding track or bus. The peak meter shows the peak value of the selected track, and is located directly to the right of the fader. Each peak meter consists of one bar graph in the case of a mono track, and two bar graphs in case of a stereo track. The small rectangular field above the meters shows the highest peak value that has been played on that track so far.\n By clicking the right-hand button at the bottom of the mixer strip (it reads “post” in the image above), you will be able to select the metering point, for example the direct “in” from the sound card, the “pre” Fader signal, or the “post” fader signal.\nAs you can see in the image below, there is a smaller version of the mixer strip in each track, called the track mixer, which contains a horizontal fader, a vertical peak meter, as well as miniature buttons for arm record, mute, and solo. They all mirror those found in the mixer strip for that track.\n Please refer to the chapter on Mixing Levels for more detailed instruction about using the fader and peak meters.\nRouting Finally, we reach the bottom of the mixer strip. Here we find the Output Routing button, marked as “Master” in the earlier screenshot, because it connects to a bus called “Master”. This was discussed earlier in the Understanding Routing chapter.\nContinuing Now that we’ve had a look at the main areas of the mixer strip, we can proceed to the Mixing Levels chapter to see how we can start to use it.\nNext: MIXING LEVELS\n","description":"Elements of the mixer strip in Ardour","tags":null,"title":"The mixer strip","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/mixing-sessions/the-mixer-strip/"},{"content":"In the following chapters we will use Ardour to create a short rhythmic passage using several drumkit samples.\nWe will continue working on this passage in later tutorials, such as Working with Regions and Creating Looped Sections. We assume that you have read the chapters in the Getting Started section already, and are familiar with Importing Audio, Tracks, and the Timeline.\nImporting Samples The first step is to add some sounds, which is discussed at length in the Importing Audio chapter. Here, we are using the Add existing media dialog (Ctrl + I) to import some drumkit samples as regions. The samples used in this tutorial were obtained from a sample pack from the freesound.org website (the Nord Drum Mini Kit sample pack).\n After importing a few sounds from the downloaded sample pack (bass drum, snare, hi-hat, clap), our session looks like this (in this case we used the Add files as new tracks option, and inserted at session start. The drumkit samples appear as new individual tracks in the Editor window, each with the name of the audio file used. If the file names are too long or obscure, you may want to rename your tracks for clarity.\n Organizing the Tracks Let’s rename the tracks so we can quickly see the location of each instrument. To do that, double-click on the track name to edit it.\n You may also wish to rearrange the order of the tracks from top to bottom in the editor window. Do that by clicking the Tracks \u0026 Busses tab at the far right of the Editor window and drag-and-dropping the tracks in the order you want.\n Another option to rearrange tracks is to select a track and use Ctrl+Arrow Up/Down shortcut to move it up or down.\n Tip You can also use the V check boxes in this tab to view or hide tracks in the main canvas.\n  Here we have ordered the drumkit so that the kick drum is on the bottom, the snare and high-hat are in the middle, and the clap is on top.  Continuing In the next step we will learn about setting up the meter to organize these samples into a rhythm.\nNext: SETTING UP TIME SIGNATURE\n","description":"How to organize regions on the timeline in Ardour","tags":null,"title":"Arranging tracks","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/editing-sessions/arranging-tracks/"},{"content":"You may wish to export only a region of your session, perhaps to use as a sample in another application, or to edit it in a different program. This chapter shows you how to do that.\nExporting a Region To export a region, select it in Grab mode and then right-click into the sub-menu Export, or use the top menu: Region \u003e Export.\n This will open up the same export dialog box explained in the Exporting Sessions chapter. Choose your options and click Export. Only the selected region will be exported.\n Tip Not all parameters and edits are taken into consideraton when exporting a region. Trimmed, split, stretched and reversed regions can be exported, but edits such as panning and automation are not exported.\n  Also, the volume of the audio track itself or the Master bus will not affect the exported file. To export these edits, please see the chapters on exporting a range and exporting a session.\nExporting Several Regions At Once If you are building a collection of samples to use later in another software, and your samples are basically trimmed and edited regions, at the end of the process you will need to export all of them. If the number is large, exporting them manually can be tedious. Here’s one way of exporting several regions at once.\n In Grab mode (G shortcut), select all the regions you want to export. They do not need to be on the same track.   Go to the Region \u003e Ranges menu and choose Add Range Marker Per Region.   Ardour has now just created range markers that fit exactly the beginning and ending of your selected regions (see the green rectangles in the range markers ruler):    Go to the Session \u003e Export menu and choose Export to Audio File(s) (Alt+E).\n  In the export dialog box, click on the Time span tab. You will see all the newly created ranges listed there. There is also a default range that stands for the entire session.\n  Under Time Span, click Select All and de-select the very first range (the “session” range). The reason is because we want to export the shorter ranges, not the whole session.\n   Go back to the main tab (File format) and click Export.  Your regions have now been exported to single audio files.\n Tip This method exports everything that falls under each defined time range. In other words, if you have other regions in other tracks sounding simultaneously with the region(s) you want to export, they will be mixed together. Another way of looking at it is this: the export operation will export everything that plays under the defined time ranges. If that is not what you want, you can use solo or mute buttons on select tracks to ensure you export only what you want.\n  Continuing Finally, the next chapter will discuss Exporting Ranges rather than just an individual region. The last trick (exporting multiple regions at once) in fact already involved using ranges, as you may have guessed.\nNext: EXPORTING A RANGE\n","description":"How to export regions in Ardour","tags":null,"title":"Exporting a region","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/exporting-sessions/exporting-a-region/"},{"content":"Chapter 2 Getting started Create your first session and learn the basics of Ardour’s user interface\nContents:\n Starting Ardour Overview of the interface Creating tracks and busses Importing audio Setting up the timeline  ","description":"","tags":null,"title":"Getting started","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/getting-started/"},{"content":"This glossary offers brief definitions for many or the terms used throuhout the Ardour3 FLOSS Tutorial.\n Aggregate Device (macOS) An Aggregate Device is one virtual soundcard made of of two or more physical soundcards. PowerBooks and MacBooks made in 2007 or later will need this set up in order for JACK to have both input and output channels. This is set up in the Audio MIDI Setup application. AIFF A sound file format developed by Apple and commonly used for lossless and uncompressed audio. AIFF files are compatible with Windows, Macintosh and Linux operating systems. ALSA (Linux) Advanced Linux Sound Architecture. ALSA provides audio and MIDI functionality to the Linux operating system. Amplitude (mixing) The strength of an audio signal. The scale of amplitude is *logarithmic, since it expresses the physical ratio of power between one sound and another. Levels in digital audio systems are usually represented as the number of Decibels below the clipping point of 0 dB. See also loudness. Arm (Track to record/Ardour to record) Action that makes Ardour ready to start recording. Before recording in Ardour, one or more tracks need to be armed first, and then Ardour needs to be armed itself. Artifacts (sound) Perceivable distortion or decrease in sound quality generated as a by-product of certain signal processing operations. Artefacts are usually seen as undesirable or unexpected results of an otherwise intentional sound transformation. Attenuation Reducing the level of an audio signal, usually measured using a logarithmic scale. See also gain. Audio MIDI Setup (macOS) The Audio MIDI Setup utility is a program that comes with the macOS operating system for adjusting the computer’s audio input and output configuration settings and managing MIDI devices. Audio Unit Plugins Audio Unit (AU) is a plugin architecture in macOS computers. It may be thought of as Apple’s equivalent to the popular VST plugin format by Steinberg. MacOS comes with a collection of AU plug-ins such as EQ filters, dynamic processors, delay, reverb, time stretch, among others. Audition The auditioner is a hidden mixer strip which auditioned regions are played back through. Auditioning a region will play only that region, without processing sends or plugins. Automation Automation is the automatic adjustment of various parameters such as gain, panning or plugin settings. Changes can be made once and then will be repeated every time the mix is replayed. Automation in Ardour is controlled by automation lines linked to each Track or Bus. Auxiliary Controls Buttons on the top right side of the controls found in the Editor Window: Punch In/Out, Auto Play, Auto Return, Auto Input, Click, Solo, and Audition. Amplitude The level or magnitude of a signal. Audio signals with a higher amplitude usually sound louder. Bands (equalization) The particular frequency regions to be boosted or attenuated in the process of Equalization. Bars (music) Same as ‘measure’, a bar is a metrical unit. In Western notation, it is the space comprised between two vertical lines drawn through the staff. The specific duration of a bar depends of its time signature and the current tempo of the music. Bass (Frequencies) A generic way of referring to the lower frequencies of the spectrum of a sound. Beat The basic pulse underlying a piece of music. Beats per Minute Beats per minute (BPM) is a measure of tempo in music. A rate of 60 beats per minute means that one beat will occur every second; 120 bpm equals two beats per second, and so on. BPM indications usually appear at the beginning of a traditional musical score as a metronome mark (for example, “quarter note equals 60”, meaning one quarter note per second). Bit A bit (binary digit) is a single number with a value of either 0 or 1. Bit Depth Refers to the number of bits used to write a sample. In the CD standard, each sample of audio is represented by a 16-bit number. This gives 2^16 (two to the power of sixteen = 65,536) possible values that a sample can have. A higher bit depth means a greater possible dynamic range. Studio recordings are usually first made recorded with a bit depth of 24 (or even 32) to preserve as much detail before transfer to CD. DVDs are made at 24 bit, while video games from the 1980s remain famous for their distinctively rough “8 bit sound”. Bit depth is also referred to as word length. Buffer Size (JACK) The buffer is a section of memory specifically allotted to temporary signal data. Small buffer sizes allow a lower latency and so are needed when using audio applications that require real-time interaction. The drawback is that CPU consumption for the system is higher with smaller buffer sizes. Larger buffers (like 512 or 1024) can be used when there is no such requirement. Built-in Input and Output These are the default interfaces for getting sound in and out of your computer if you don’t have an external sound card. In a laptop, they are the common input (mic) and output (headphone) connections. Bus A bus is similar to a track except that it does not contain its own regions. You cannot record directly into a bus or drag regions into it. The Mixer strip vertically represents the signal flow of a bus, whereas the Main Canvas horizontally displays time-based information for each bus (such as automation lines). BWF Broadcast Wave Format (BWF) is an extension of the popular Microsoft WAVE audio format and is the recording format of most file-based non-linear digital recorders used for motion picture and television production. This file format allows the inclusion of metadata to facilitate the seamless exchange of sound data between different computer platforms and applications. CAF CAF (Core Audio Format) is a file format for storing audio, developed by Apple. It is compatible with macOS 10.4 and higher. The Core Audio Format is designed to overcome limitations of older digital audio formats, including AIFF and WAV. Just like the QuickTime .mov file format, a .caf file format can contain many different audio formats, metadata tracks, and much more data. Center Frequency In some EQ plugins, the user has the possibility of choosing the center frequency for each of the frequency bands. The center frequency of a Band will be the one most sharply attenuated or reinforced by the equalizer for that specific band. Frequencies surrounding the center frequency will be less affected. Click (Mouse) In this manual, it specifically means to click on the left button of your mouse. Whenever the right button is required, the action is referred to as “right-click”. Clipping Clipping occurs when a signal is too high in level to be reproduced. Any samples too high in level will simply be truncated, resulting in distortion, loss of audio detail, and artefact frequencies which were not present in the original sound. Clipping Point The clipping point of a digital system is referred to as 0 dB, and the level of any sound is measured in how far below the clipping point it is (-10 dB, -24 dB, etc). Clocks The two big numerical displays near the top of the Editor window. They can display the time in a number of formats: Timecode, Bars:Beats, Minutes:Seconds, and Samples. Compile FLOSS applications are distributed as source code, which is human-readable but cannot be run as an actual application. To turn this source code into a running application, it must first be Compiled. When you download a disk image for macOS or a software package from your distribution (such as Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora), it has been compiled for you already. However, if you wish to add features (such as support for VST Plugins) which your distribution does not provide, then you must compile the application from source code yourself. Compression(DSP) Essentially, compression makes the quiet parts of a signal louder without changing the level of the louder parts. This entails a reduction of the actual dynamic range: a compressed sound is less dynamic (has a smaller range of levels) Compression (data) Like any other data, audio data can be compressed so that it uses less hard disk space. Compression such as FLAC, ALAC, or MLP reduce the size of audio files compared to WAV or AIFF without changing the data, which is referred to as lossless compression. Audio can be compressed to a still smaller size by using lossy compression such as MP3, Ogg Vorbis or AAC but this is achieved by removing data which can have an audible effect. Connections Manager(JACK) The window in Jack that allows to manage all connections between audio inputs and outputs. CoreAudio(macOS) CoreAudio provides audio functionality to the macOS operating system. Cursor Modes These are the six buttons just below the Transport commands in the Editor Window. The six different functions that the mouse pointer can have in Ardour are: Select/Move Objects, Select/Move Ranges, Select Zoom Range, Draw Gain Automation, Stretch/Shrink Regions, Listen to Specific Regions. Decibels Decibel is a logarithmic scale used to measure many quantities, including the gain_, level_ or loudness_ of a signal. Decibel is usually abbreviated to dB and in digital audio usually denotes how far under 0 dBFS (the clipping_ point of a system) a signal is. Delay (effect) The amount of time between one event and another. As an audio effect, a delay takes an incoming sound signal and delays it for a certain length of time. When mixed with the original sound, an “echo” is heard. By using feedback to return the delayed signal back into the delay (usually after lowering its gain), multiple echos with a decay result. Destructive Editing/Recording Destructive actions are those that permanently modify or erase the original data (sound files) in the course of editing or recording.  Distortion : Distortion occurs when an audio signal is changed in some way that produces frequencies not present in the original. Distortion can be deliberate or unwanted, and can be produced by driving the signal to a clipping_point, or by using mathematical transformations to alter the shape (or “waveform”) of the signal (usually referred to as “waveshaping”).\n Disk Image (.dmg) A disk image is a single file containing the complete contents and structure representing a data storage medium or device. By double-clicking on a .dmg file on a Mac, a virtual device will be mounted to your Desktop (it will look as if you had inserted a USB device or a DVD, for example). Many software installers in OS X are available as .dmg files. Driver(JACK) Software written to control hardware. CoreAudio is the Mac sound driver. ALSA is the most common Linux driver. DSP Digital Signal Processing. Dynamic Range Used to refer to the difference between the loudest and the quietest sound that can possibly recorded, as well as the amount of detail which can be heard in between those extremes. Sounds which are too quiet to be recorded are said to be below the noise floorof the recording system (microphone, recorder, sound card, audio software, etc). Sounds which are too loud will be distortedor clipped. Edit Modes The three available Edit Modes (Slide Edit, Slice Edit, and Lock Edit) control the behavior of editing operations in the Main Canvas. Edit Point The point in the Main Canvas where an action such as Paste takes place. This can be the Mouse, the Playhead or a Marker. Editor Window Ardour provides two ways of viewing a session: the Editor and the Mixer. The Editor represents the time based aspects of a session: it shows tracks and busses as horizontal timeline displays, with material within the tracks (audio, MIDI, video, automation data, etc.) arranged along the horizontal (time) axis. EQ See Equalization. Equalization Equalization (EQ) is the process of adjusting the relative levels of different frequencies in a recording or signal. In other words, it is the process of boosting or attenuating the various frequency bands of a sound according to a chosen artistic goal. Filter A type of signal processing that supresses some frequencies. Floating Point Numbers It is simply a number with a decimal point. “Floating Point” refers to the specific technique the computer uses to represent a larger range of integer and non-integer values. FLAC An open source lossless audio format generally compatible with Linux, Windows and Macintosh. Unlike AIFF and WAV, FLAC is a compressed format, allowing file sizes to be reduced. FLOSS FLOSS stands for Free Libre Open Source Software. FLOSS Manuals is a collection of manuals about free and open source software together with the tools used to create them and the community that uses those tools. They include authors, editors, artists, software developers, activists, and many others. Format (audio file) The types of sound file that sounds are saved as. Among the most common are AIFF, WAV, FLAC, mp3 and Ogg Vorbis. fps Frames Per Second. Frame rate, or frame frequency is the frequency (rate) at which an imaging device produces unique consecutive images called frames. The term applies equally well to computer graphics, video cameras, film cameras, and motion capture systems. Frame rate is most often expressed in frames per second (FPS). Frequency Refers to the number of times an oscillation occurs in one second. Frequency is measured in Hertz, and is correlated to the pitch of a sound. Frequency is a linear scale, while pitch is logarithmic. The pitch ‘A’ above the middle C has a frequency of 440 Hz. The ‘A’ one octave above is twice that frequency (880 Hz). Gain Increasing the levelof an audio signal, usually measured using a logarithmic scale. See also attenuation. Grid The Grid is a system of points that a Region might snap to while editing it. The Grid can be “No Grid”, “Grid” or “Magnetic”. Grid Points The points in the Grid which Regions will snap to when it is active. Grid Points may be minutes, seconds, video frames, bars, beats or some multiple of beats. Hertz A term used to describe the number of times something occurs in one second. In digital audio, it is used to describe the sampling rate, and in acoustics it is used to describe the frequency of a sound. Thousands of Herz are described as kHz (kilo Herz). High Shelf In an Equalizer, a Shelf cuts or boosts everything above (High Shelf) or below (Low Shelf) a specific frequency. Headroom The range of Decibels between the region’s maximum Peakand the Clipping Point is commonly referred to as Headroom. It is common recording practice to keep approximately three to six Decibels of Headroom between the maximum of your signal and the Clipping Point. Jack Audio Connection Kit (JACK) JACK is a low-latency audio system which manages connections between Ardour and the soundcard of your computer, and between Ardour and other JACK-enabled audio programs on your computer. You must install JACK for Linux or JackOSX before you can use Ardour. JackOSX (OS X) The name of the version of JACK that runs on macOS. See JACK for more details. JackPilot The control interface that comes with JackOSX. Jack Server The Jack Server is the “engine” or “backend” of the Jack Audio Connection Kit. Jack Router The Jack Router allows audio to be routed from one application to another using the Jack Server. JAMin JAMin is the Jack Audio Connection Kit Audio Mastering interface. JAMin is an open source application designed to perform professional audio mastering of stereo input streams. It uses LADSPA for digital signal processing (DSP). LADSPA Plugins Linux Audio Developer Simple Plugin API (LADSPA) is a standard that allows software audio processors and effects to be plugged into a wide range of audio synthesis and recording packages. For instance, it allows a developer to write a reverb program and bundle it into a LADSPA “plugin library.” Ordinary users can then use this reverb within any LADSPA-friendly audio application. Most major audio applications on Linux support LADSPA. Latency Latency is the amount of time needed to process all the samples coming from sound applications on your computer and send it to the soundcard for playback, or to gather samples from the sound card for recording or processing. A shorter latency means you will hear the results quicker, giving the impression of a more responsive system. However, with a shorter latency you also run a greater risk of glitches in the audio because the computer might not have enough time to process the sound before sending it to the soundcard. A longer latency means fewer glitches, but at the price of a slower response time. Latency is measured in milliseconds. Limiting The process by which the amplitude of the output of a device is prevented from exceeding a predetermined value. Linear A scale of numbers which progresses in an additive fashion, such as by adding one (1, 2, 3, 4…), two (2, 4, 6, 8…) or ten (10, 20, 30, 40…). Multiplying an audio signal, for example, by either a linear or a logarithmic scale will produce very different results. The scale of frequency is linear, while the scales of pitch and gain are logarithmic. Linux kernel The core of the GNU/Linux operating system. In a Real-time System, this kernel is usually Compiledwith new parameters which speed up the use of audio applications in the system. Lock Edit One of the three available Edit Modes, Lock Edit is similar to Slice Edit, but regions will remain at their original positions regardless of any edit operation performed. Logarithmic A scale of numbers which progresses according to a certain ratio, such as exponentially (2, 4, 8, 16, 256…). Both scales of pitch and gain are logarithmic, while the scale of frequency is linear. Lossless See Compression (data) Lossy See Compression (data) Loudness Unlike amplitude, which expresses the physical power of a sound, loudness is the perceived strength of a sound. Tones at different frequencies may be perceived as being at different loudnesses, even if they are at the same amplitude. LV2 LV2 is an open standard for plugins and matching host applications, mainly targeted at audio processing and generation. LV2 is a simple but extensible successor of LADSPA, intended to address the limitations of LADSPA which many applications have outgrown. Main Canvas In the Editor Window of Ardour, the Main Canvas is the space just below the timeline rulers where Tracks and Busses are displayed horizontally. Master Out A master out is a bus to which all (or most) tracks and other busses send their output. It provides a convenient single point of control for the output of Ardour, and is a typical location for global effects. Master out use is enabled by default, and the master out bus is set up to be stereo. Meter The grouping of strong and weak beats into larger units called bars or measures. Mixing Audio mixing is the process by which a multitude of recorded sounds are combined into one or more channels, most commonly two-channel stereo. In the process, the levels, frequency content, dynamics and panoramic position of the source signals are commonly manipulated and effects such as reverb may be added. MIDI MIDI is an industry-standard protocol defined in^^ 1982 that enables electronic musical instruments such as keyboard controllers, computers and other electronic equipment to communicate, control, and synchronize with each other. MIDI allows computers, synthesizers, MIDI controllers, sound cards, samplers and drum machines to control one another, and to exchange system data. MIDI does not transmit audio signals, but simply messages such as note number (pitch), velocity (intensity), note-on, and note-off. Mixer Strip Each track and bus is represented in the Mixer Window by a vertical Mixer Strip** that contains various controls related to signal flow. There are two places in Ardour in which you can see mixer strips. The mixer window is the obvious one, but you can also view a single mixer strip on the left hand side of the Editor (shift + E to hide/view) Mixer Window The Mixer shows the session by representing tracks vertically as Mixer Strips, with controls for gain, record enable, soloing, plugins etc. The Mixer represents the signal flow of Tracks and Busses in an Ardour session. The mixer window provides a view that mimics a traditional hardware mixing console. Monitoring Monitoring is the process of routing a specific mix or submix of your session into separate outputs (like headphones). For example, a musician being recorded may want to listen to existing material while performing. Ardour and JACK make it easy to setup monitor outs since any incoming signal can then be delivered back to any output, optionally mixed together with other signals and with any kind of sound processing added. Mono A mono sound file contains only one channel of audio. A mono track in Ardour has only one input and handles mono sound files. MP3 A lossy, size-compressed sound file Format. Graphic Equalizer/Multi-Band Equalizer A Graphic (or Multi-Band) Equalizer consists of a bank of sliders for boosting or attenuating different frequency of a sound. Non-destructive Editing/Recording This is a form of editing where the original content is not modified in the course of editing. Behind the scenes, the original sound file is kept intact, and your edits are in fact a list of instructions that Ardour will use in order to reconstruct the signal from the original source when you play it back. For example, creating fade-ins and fade-outs on your Regions is a type of non-destructive editing. Normalize To normalize an audio signal means to adjust its Gain so that it peaks at the maximum the sound card allows before Clipping. Normal Mode See Track Mode. Note value The proportional duration of a note or rest in relation to a standard unit. For instance, a ‘quarter note’ (crotchet) is so-called because its relative duration is one quarter of a whole note (semibreve). Octave (music) A distance of 12 semitones between two notes. In Hertz, the ratio of an octave is 2:1. For example, the note ‘A’ above the middle C has a frequency of 440 Hz. The note ‘A’ one octave above is 880 Hz, and one octave below is 220 Hz. Ogg Vorbis An open source lossy, size-compressed sound file format. Panning Panning is the location of sounds in the Stereo Field. Parametric Equalizer The Parametric Equalizer is the most versatile type ofEQ used for Mixing because of its extensive control over all the parameters of filtering. Peaks Peaks are a graphical representation of the maximum Levels of a Region. Peak Meters Peak Meters are a running representation of the maximum Levels of a Region, and are located next to the Fader in the Mixer Window, and also in the Track Mixer, of each Track. Pitch Pitch represents the perceived fundamental frequency of a sound.^^^^It is one of the three major auditory attributes of sounds along with loudness and timbre. In MIDI, pitch is represented by a number between 0 and 127, with each number representing a key on a MIDI keyboard. The relation of pitch to Frequency is Logarithmic. This means that a sound which is heard as one Octave(+12 MIDI notes) above another one is twice the frequency in Hz, while a sound one octave below (-12 MIDI notes) is half the frequency. Playhead In Ardour, the Playhead is the red line that moves in time (i.e., left to right) to indicate the current playback position. Plugin In computing, a plugin consists of a computer program that interacts with a host application (in this case, Ardour) to provide a certain function “on demand”, usually a very specific one. Reverb, filters, and equalizers are examples of plugins that can be used in Ardour in association with Tracks or Busses. Portaudio A free and open source set of audio driversfor Linux and macOS. Post-Fader (Plugin or Send) In the Mixer Strip, the post-fader area is the black space below the gain slider, to which plugins or sends can be added. The input of these plugins and sends will be the signal after any manual or automated gain change (thus “post-fader”). Pre-Fader (Plugin or Send) In the Mixer Strip, the pre-fader area is the black space above the gain slider, to which plugins or sends can be added. The input of these plugins and sends will be the incoming signal before it is affected by any manual or automated gain changes controlled by the slider (thus “pre-fader”). Quantization In signal processing, quantization may refer to bit depth (see bit depth definition). In MIDI, quantization refers to the process of aligning notes to a precise temporal grid. This results in notes being set on beats or exact fractions of beats. MIDI sequencers typically include some type of quantization function. Range A segment of time. Ranges are created with the Select/Move Ranges tool and may include one or more tracks. Loop and punch ranges are special types of ranges that are created and manipulated with the loop/punch ranges meter. Real-time System(Linux) In a Real-time System, the Linux kernel is usually recompiled (rebuilt) with new parameters, and other settings in the system are optimized which speed up the use of audio applications in the system. Regions Regions are the basic elements of editing and composing in Ardour. Each region represents all or part of an audio file. Removing a region from a track does not remove the audio file from the disk. Region List The region list is located at the right hand side of the Editor Window and it shows all the regions associated with the session. Reverberation Reverberation is the persistence of sound in a particular space after the original sound source is removed.^^^^A reverberation, or reverb, is created when a sound is produced in an enclosed space causing a large number of echoes to build up and then slowly decay as the sound is absorbed by the walls and air. Digital reverberation can be added to a sound in Ardour through the use of plugins. Right Click (mouse) Click on the right button of your mouse. Routing Routing is sending an audio signal from somewhere to somewhere else. Signals can be routed not only from the outside world into Ardour and vice-versa, but also within Ardour itself (for example, from a Track to a Bus). Rulers Rulers are the thin horizontal bars that display the time line, helping to see when exactly a region or sound starts or stops. Also displayed with the rulers are the meter and tempo markers, the location markers, the range markers and the loop/punch ranges. Sample (data) In digital audio, a sample is the smallest possible segment of a recorded sound. In CD audio, for example, it takes 44,100 samples to make one second of recorded sound, and so we can say that the sampling rate is 44,100 Hertz. Samples also have a bit depth which determines the dynamic range that is possible to record and playback. Common bit depths are 16 (for CD audio), 24 (for studio recording and DVDs) or 32 (for sounds inside the computer). Sample (music) In electronic music, the word sample can mean any portion of sound extracted from an existing piece of music to be reused in a new composition. Sampler An electronic music instrument or software which plays back a recorded sound (or sample) whenever it is sent a note message. The pitch of the note determines how fast or slow the sample is played back, which emulates the pitch changes in other instruments. Samples can be looped (played over and over) and one-shot (played once). Sampling Rate The rate at which the computer records and plays back sound, which is measured in Hertzrepresenting the number of samplesper second. CD audio is recorded and played at 44,100 Hz (or 44.1 kHz), while DVD audio runs at 96,000 Hz (96 kHz) and cheap consumer gadgets like voice recorders, video games, mobile phones, toys and some MP3 players often use a rate of 22,050 Hz (22.05 kHz) or even less. The sampling rate determines the highest frequency that can be recorded or played, which is expressed by the Nyquist number (half the sampling rate). Playing back sounds at a different sampling rate then they were recorded at will result in hearing that sound at the “wrong speed”. Send An optional auxiliary output for a track or bus. Session A session is all of the information that constitutes one project in Ardour. Each session is saved in its own folder containing all the audio, region and parametric data, and a master file with the .ardour extension. Shelf In an Equalizer, a Shelf cuts or boosts everything above (High Shelf) or below (Low Shelf) a specific frequency. Slice Edit One of the three available Edit Modes, Slice Edit does not allow dragging regions around, but still allows you to perform slice operations (such as cut, paste, and split). Space between regions will be kept constant after any edit operation that affects it. If you delete the second half of a region, for example, any subsequent regions on the same track will automatically move back in the time grid. Slide Edit Another one of the three available Edit Modes, Slide Edit is the default mode. It allows you to drag regions around horizontally (within the same track) and vertically (between tracks). SMPTE timecode : A set of cooperating standards to label individual frames of video or film with a timecode defined by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. Timecodes are added to film, video or audio material, and have also been adapted to synchronize music. They provide a time reference for editing, synchronization and identification. Snap Mode The Snap Mode menus are found just below the Clocks. They control the amount Quantization of the time grid, i.e., the amount of “snap” an audio Region has to the type of grid you have chosen. Snapshots Saving a snapshot in Ardour is similar to saving the session to a new file to avoid overwriting the original session file. A snapshot contains the current state of your work, while sharing all the audio and data files of the Session. If you were trying to find a “Save As” function in Ardour, saving a snapshot is probably what you are looking for. Solo Toggle switch found in track controls and mixer strips. When toggled on, only solo tracks will send output. Several tracks can be marked solo at once. The general Solo button (top row of controls in the Editor Window) can be used to un-solo all soloed tracks at once. Spectrum The representation of a signal in terms of its frequency components. Stereo A stereo sound file contains two channels of audio (usually known as Left and Right channels). A stereo track in Ardour has two inputs and outputs, in order to record and playback stereo files. Stereo Field Stereo field is the perception of spatial location of sounds based on a sound reproduction system of 2 channels (Left and Right). Take(recording) A sequence of sound recorded continuously at one time. Tape Mode See Track Mode. Tempo(music) The rate at which beats occur. Precise Tempo indications are measured in bpm (beats per minute), although subjective indications are also common in scores (Allegro, Adagio, Very Fast, etc). Terminal A “terminal” is the text-based interface that allows to operate a computer by typing commands into it. Most computer users today rely solely on a graphical interface to control their systems. Both macOS and Linux though, include a terminal which may make some tasks easier for some users. Timecode A time code is a sequence of numeric codes generated at regular intervals by a timing system. The SMPTE family of timecodes is almost universally used in film, video and audio production. Time Signature (music) A sign placed at the start of a piece of music (after the clef and key signature) or during the course of it, indicating the meter of the music. Track A Track is the place to where you can drag a Region from your Region Listand where you can record sounds coming from an outside source. The Mixer Strip vertically represents the signal flow of a track, whereas the Main Canvas horizontally displays time-based information for each track. Track Mode Track Mode gives you a choice between Normal Mode and Tape Mode. Normal Mode creates a new Region for each Recording Take, while Tape Mode destructively records–in other words the previous Take of a Track is eliminated with each new Take. Transport The buttons located on the upper left corner of the Editor Window, with controls such as Rewind, Play, Stop. Treble(frequencies) Generic way of referring to high frequencies of the Spectrum of a sound. VST (Virtual Studio Technology) Steinberg VST is an interface for integrating software audio synthesizer and effect plugins with audio editors and digital workstations such as Ardour. VST and similar technologies use digital signal processing to simulate traditional recording studio hardware with software. Thousands of plugins exist, both commercial and freeware. VST was created by Steinberg. WAV A sound file format developed by Microsoft and IBM and commonly used for lossless and uncompressed audio. WAV files are compatible with Windows, Macintosh and Linux operating systems. Waveform The time-domain visual representation of a sound. Waveforms are drawn inside the colored rectangles representing Regions in the Main Canvas. Word length See Bit Depth.  ","description":"Terminology used in this Ardour tutorial","tags":null,"title":"Glossary","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/appendices/glossary/"},{"content":"The main function of the Mixer window is to display all the mixer strips for the various tracks and busses side by side for easy reference and finetuning. This window is mainly used during the mixing process where you distribute instruments across the virtual room and process them with effects to stand out in a mix. It also provides access to plugins and routing features. Please see the chapters on understanding routing, mixing, and using plugins for details.\nThe user interface of a virtual mixing console largely resembles that of a physical mixing console where you have mixer channels with gain control and a signal meter.\n The Mixer window has 3 larger sections:\n Left sidebar with a list of favorite plugins, visibility control for mixer strips, and a track/bus groups manager Mixer strips for tracks and busses, including a master bus that the final signal usually travels through Optional Monitor Section with features like Pre/After Fade Listen, Exclusive Solo etc.  Continuing In the next section we’ll take a quick look at the Recorder window that is streamlined for launching and controlling the recording of multiple tracks at the same time.\nNext: RECORDER WINDOW\n","description":"Basics of Ardour's Mixer window","tags":null,"title":"Mixer window","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/getting-started/overview-of-the-interface/mixer-window/"},{"content":"Levels are the volumes of each track relative to the others.\nIf you can’t hear a bass line above the other instruments, one obvious option would be to raise the bass line volume. Levels can be adjusted using the fader in the mixer strip or in each track, just below the track name. The first step in mixing is to listen to everything that has been recorded and adjust the levels of all tracks so you can hear everything clearly, but in a manner that is appropriate for the song. For example, the vocal track is normally louder than the rhythm guitar because the voice is the focal point of the song.\nUsing the Fader The fader is the primary control of levels for each track. The exact value of the track’s levels are displayed in the small rectangular field above the fader. You can change the levels by either dragging the slider or typing in a new number directly into the rectangle with the number.\nBy default the fader is set to −0.0 dB, meaning that the levels of the track are not changed. In the screenshot below, the fader for the track named “kick” is set to -0.0, and the peak meter indicates that the highest peak so far was -5.1dB.\n Avoiding Clipping One other important task in mixing is to avoid clipping. The peak value on the mixer strip turns red when the signal has peaked above 0.0dB. You can use this tool to monitor the highest levels of your track while mixing.\nIn the screenshot below, the synth track has just clipped to +5.9. You can also see little red edges on the waveform itself, indicating the exact locations where the recorded sound clipped.\n Click on the red number in the peak meter to reset it.\n Tip For the sake of the exercise, try to record your voice so that it clips. Hear how the playback is distorted.\n  You should make sure that anything that you send to your sound card or that you will eventually export as a sound file (such as for CD mastering) never goes above 0.0dB to avoid actual clipping.\nIf the clipping occurs in a very percussive sound and it is almost unnoticeable, you may be able to hide it by decreasing the gain (for example, normalize the region to 0.0dB, or a lower number like -1.0dB). However, often the clipping results in audible distortion of the recorded sound. The best solution in this case is to just record again with lower levels.\nContinuing When you are finished with this chapter of the tutorial, you should have a collection of tracks whose levels are well adjusted to each other and do not clip when added together in the Master bus. Once this is accomplished, we can proceed to learn about panning in the next chapter, so that our mix takes on a strong feeling of stereo space.\nNext: PANNING\n","description":"","tags":null,"title":"Mixing levels","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/mixing-sessions/mixing-levels/"},{"content":"This section will give you a basic overview of Ardour’s user interface.\nWe will take a look at shared elements of the interface, main windows, and focus on the Editor window and the Mixer window. Later chapters will give more detailed information on each feature listed here.\nArdour’s window Here is a typical view of a project opened in Ardour:\n There are two larger parts of the user interface:\n  Static part that contains program’s menu, transport panel, clocks, navigation timeline, and various controls. We’ll talk about it later on this page.\n  Dynamic part that changes depending on the currently opened window. We’ll talk about that on further pages covering every window (Editor, Mixer, Recorder, Cue).\n  Let’s get on with the static part and focus on features that will be of immediate use to you.\nProgram’s menu This is a fairly straightforward way of accessing features in any program, you shouldn’t have any problems navigating it. Session-specific commands are in the Session menu, everything that is related to playing and recording is in the Transport menu, most editing features are in Edit and so on.\n For convenience, item-specific features are duplicated in the right-click menu. For instance, you’ll find the contents of the Region menu in the right-click menu for a selected region (a clip that you can see on the timeline, see further pages of the tutorial).\nInfo Panel This panel displays useful information about the currently opened project (sampling rate, latency, DSP load) as well as how many estimated minutes of recording are available given the current amount of free disk space.\n If you right-click on it, you will see more options such as name of the current project snapshot (more on that later) and wall clock (as seen on the screenshot above).\nTransport panel The transport panel allows easily navigating the project: going to session start/end, playing entire session or just a selection (called ‘range’ in Ardour), initiating recording.\n The bottom of the panel has jog/shuttle controls for skipping backward and forward at various speed while playing back the contents of the session.\nIn case you want the transport panel sans jog-shuttle controls somewhere else on the screen, you can open a floating window called Transport Controls (Window \u003e Transport Controls). You can move this window anywhere on the screen and resize it.\nClocks  The main clocks are located next to the transport controls. Clocks in Ardour can display time in 4 different formats: Time Code, Bars:Beats, Minutes:Seconds, and Samples. Right-click on the clock to select a format. You can also turn the clock off. The reason for having two transport clocks is that it allows you to see the playhead position in two different time units without having to change any settings.\nIf you are working in a home studio where you use a footswitch to toggle recording and you are a few meters away from the screen, you might want a bigger clock. Use Window \u003e Big Clock to open a clock window that will float on top of all other windows and resize it to your liking.\n Please see the Setting Up the Timeline chapter for more details on the clocks.\nNavigation timeline To the right of these two clocks you can see the mini-timeline, also called Navigation Timeline. It’s a convenient way to be reminded of cues and location markers, especially when you are in the Recorder window where the timeline doesn’t have those rulers.\n Please check the Ardour manual for more information on the mini-timeline.\nSwitching Between Windows To the right of the global toolbar, right after the Navigation Timeline and the master bus output meter, you’ll find a convenient widget to switch between major Ardour windows — Editor, Mixer, Recorder, and Cue.\n Alternatively, you can use Ctrl+PageUp/PageDown to cycle through windows, much like in any web browser.\nYou can also use the Alt+M shortcut to switch between Editor and Mixer windows. If you are currently in either Recorder or Cue window, pressing that shortcut for the first time will take you to the Mixer window, and the another one will take you to the Editor window.\nContinuing The next sections will explain basics of main Ardour’s windows:\nEditor | Mixer | Recorder | Cue\n","description":"Basics of Ardour's user interface","tags":null,"title":"Overview of the Interface","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/getting-started/overview-of-the-interface/"},{"content":"A snapshot is a representation of the current state of a session. In a nutshell, it’s like versioning your project by giving every version a meaningful, descriptive name. Even though it’s not really exposed to users, every session always has at least one snapshot which is whatever you have there at the moment.\nLet’s say you recorded a song in your home studio and you are trying different arrangements to see which one works best. Instead of creating multiple sessions and copying files between them, you can make snapshots every time you think you have something worth preserving. At any point in time, you can save the current state of the session and switch to an earlier snapshot to compare your arrangements.\nSaving a Snapshot Ardour provides two commands in the Session menu to create a snapshot:\n Snapshot (\u0026 keep working on current version) You will create a new snapshot and continue working on the original version. Any new saves will overwrite the current state of the project, the newly created snapshot will not be affected. Mental model: “I think I’m about to change things in a major way, so I need a backup if everything goes sideways with my experiment”. Snapshot (\u0026 switch to new version) You will create a new snapshot and switch to working on that version. Any new saves you do will affect the new snapshot until you switch to the original snapshot. Mental model: “This is actually quite interesting, let’s explore this idea further and get back to the previous one if this turns out to be a dead end”.   By default the program will name the new snapshot according to the current date and timestamp of your system. If you wish, you can change the name to one that more meaningfully corresponds to the session you are working on.\n Recalling Snapshots You can recall a saved snapshot via the Snapshots tab in the area on the right:\n There you see a few snapshots that we created, and the my_session entry represents the original state of our session.\nClick on any snapshot from the list to reload it.\nContinuing Sometimes it is helpful to have a default starting point for new sessions, for example, for a setup that you use all the time when starting a new project. To learn how to do this, please continue to the next section called Saving a Template.\nNext: SAVING A TEMPLATE\n","description":"How to save and recall a snapshot of an Ardour session","tags":null,"title":"Saving a snapshot","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/saving-sessions/saving-a-snapshot/"},{"content":"Routing an audio signal is sending it from somewhere to somewhere else.\nIn addition to getting audio signals to and from Ardour, routing plays an important part inside Ardour itself. Examples of using routing inside Ardour include routing audio from tracks to the Master bus or to other busses, creating ‘sends’, routing the outputs from busses to the Master bus, etc. (see chapter on Creating a Track for an explanation of tracks and busses). All routing, both internal and external to Ardour, is handled by JACK.\nRouting in Ardour The standard routing of inputs, tracks and busses in Ardour is determined when a new session is created in the Advanced Options of the New Session dialog box (see the Starting Ardour page). By default, the routing is as follows:\n The audio device inputs are routed to the track inputs. All outputs from tracks and busses are routed to the master bus inputs. The Master bus outputs are routed to the audio device outputs.  Note that when a new bus is created, nothing is routed to its input.\nThis routing setup makes sense for sessions containing only tracks, but to make use of any busses (other than the Master bus) or to get creative with the paths of the audio signals inside Ardour, we need to be able to change the routing.\nThe Audio Connection Manager window (also known as the patchbay) is the main way to make connections to, from ,and within Ardour’s mixer. You can open this window with the shortcut Alt + P, or through the Window \u003e Audio Connections menu.\n The patchbay presents two groups of ports; one set of sources, and one of destinations. Sources and destinations are organized by tabs. The available sources are displayed vertically on the left side, and the destinations are displayed horizontally at the bottom.\nIn the screenshot below, notice that the Hardware tab is selected on the top left (that’s a source), and the Ardour Tracks is selected as a destination in the bottom. This means that the matrix you see displays connections from available hardware sound sources (for example, a microphone), into existing Ardour tracks.  The green dots represent a connection. The screenshot above tells us that incoming sounds from capture_1 (the first input source of your soundcard, or the built-in microphone of your laptop) are going into Ardour track named Audio 1, and also that incoming sounds from capture_2 are going into input of Ardour track named Audio 2.\nNotice we can see that Audio 1 is a Mono track because it only has one connection slot, while track Audio 2 is Stereo since it has two slots (Left and Right).\nThe next screenshot shows the signal path from Ardour Tracks (selected vertical tab) into Ardour busses (selected horizontal tab). As mentioned earlier, the default setting for all Ardour Tracks is that their sound goes to the Master bus.\n Note: remember that Audio 1 is a Mono track? We saw it in the earlier screenshot that Audio 1 only has one input slot. But now on the screenshot above you see that “Audio 1” has two outputs (left and right). This is normal: we define whether a track is Mono or Stereo by its number of inputs, not outputs. Mono tracks will hold a single channel of audio, but you can still choose to place the sound on the left or the right speaker (or anywhere in between). For more on this please see the Panning chapter.\nFinally, let’s explore a couple more tabs in the Audio Connection Manager to see the sound going from the Master bus to the actual hardware outputs (your loudspeakers or headphones):\n As you can see, the selected source tab is now Ardour Busses, and the destination tab is Hardware. This session happens to have only one bus, the default “master out”. The green dots show that all sounds coming out of the Master bus are going to system playback 1 and 2, which are the outputs of your soundcard.\nHow to connect and disconnect? To make a connection, click on the desired empty square in the matrix; a green dot will appear to indicate the connection is made.\nTo undo a connection, simply click on an existing green dot and it will disappear.\nThere is a neat trick you can use when you need to map many mono/stereo outputs to many mono/stereo inputs: rather than making many single clicks, draw a connection line. Here is how you do it:\n Practical example of routing to a bus In the following example session, there are two guitar tracks and one unused bus called Guitar bus, all Stereo.\n Suppose you want to send the output from the two guitar tracks to the Guitar bus instead of the Master bus. This can be useful to control the volume of both guitars with just one fader (in this case the Guitar bus fader) or placing two instruments into the same virtual room by using a reverb plugin on the bus. Then the output of the Guitar bus, which is the sum of the two guitars, goes directly to the Master bus.\nHere is how to edit the patchbay to get the desired routing. Select Ardour Tracks tab from Sources (vertical tabs), and Ardour Busses from destinations (horizontal bottom tabs). Undo existing connections from both tracks to Master. Then create connections from both tracks to Guitar bus. The final result would look like this:\n Now both guitar tracks are routed to the Guitar bus, and no longer directly connected to the Master bus. We then make sure that the Guitar bus is, by its turn, routed to the Master bus (the output routing of a bus is edited in the same way as for a track), so that we can still hear the sound from both guitar tracks. Now we can control the volume of both guitar tracks together by changing the fader of the Guitar bus. What’s more, we can now add plugins to the Guitar Bus to process the sound of both guitar Tracks together.\nTrack- or Bus-specific views of the Patchbay The Audio Connection Manager (Patchbay) that you open with Alt + P shows you the complete matrix of every single source and every single destination available in Ardour. Sometimes this is too much: you just want to quickly change the routing of a single track input or output, for example. Ardour allows you to access a relevant subset of Patchbay connections when you click directly on the Inputs or Outputs button of a track or bus in the mixer strip.\nThe Inputs button is at the top, and the Outputs button is on the bottom of the strip. Clicking on either one will show you a menu of connection options. In the screenshot below, for example, you would click on the 1/2 button right under the track name Guitar 1 in order to access this menu:\n You may select a connection right there from the menu, or choose Routing Grid to see a simpler version of the Audio Connection Manager with only the Inputs or Outputs of the selected track or bus.\nAll Ardour connections are JACK connections It is important to realize that any routings that you make or disconnect from within Ardour are in fact JACK routings, which you can see from other applications like Qjackctl or Catia, depending on your operating system. Below is an example of a Catia window (Linux only) displaying the same JACK connections discussed above:\n Continuing In this chapter, we covered how to manage routing inside Ardour, or between Ardour and the sound card. However, one of the strengths of using the JACK system is that it can also manage connections between applications on the same computer. To gain a better understanding of how this works, please continue to the chapter Routing Between Applications. If you would prefer to work only with Ardour, then skip ahead to the section on Arranging Tracks.\nNEXT: ROUTING BETWEEN APPLICATIONS or ARRANGING TRACKS\n","description":"Routing signal in Ardour","tags":null,"title":"Understanding routing","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/recording-audio/understanding-routing/"},{"content":"What is an audio track? An audio track is a place where you can drag a region from your region list and where you can record sounds coming from an outside source.\nA region represents an audio clip, i.e., one of your sound files or just a portion of a sound file. In the image below, the horizontal strip areas marked “MyTrack” and “short-drone-mono” are tracks. The rectangles containing audio information are called regions (for example, the region “wheels-mono.1” is contained within MyTrack).\n What is a bus? A bus is similar to a track except that it does not contain its own regions. You cannot record directly into a bus or drag regions into it. However, you can add plugins to a bus and then feed the output of multiple tracks into that bus (see below for details).\nThe area marked Master in your session is an example of a bus. Typically every session has a Master bus. All the audio to be exported from your session will be sent to the Master Bus.\nHow are tracks and busses used? Audio-processing plugins and automation can be applied to both tracks and busses.\nAudio tracks can be routed to busses. In fact, many tracks can be simultaneously routed to one bus. busses are traditionally used as a convenient way to apply any kind of signal processing to many tracks at once. For instance, you might find it useful to route all tracks that contain drum sounds to a single Bus that you would call ‘drum bus’. Then, if you decide that all your drum tracks are too loud, you can quickly adjust the level of the ‘drum bus’ rather than adjusting each separate track that feeds into it.\nAnother use of a Bus would be to have a common reverberation plugin, so that any audio track which requires the reverb effect could be routed to a single bus.\nAdding tracks and busses Right-click in the empty area beneath any existing tracks and busses. Alternatively, click on the menu Track \u003e Add track, Bus, or VCA... (shortcut Ctrl + Shift + N). The following window will appear:\n Ardour offers different track types depending on the type of data they contain. This tutorial will only cover audio tracks and busses. (see the Ardour manual for details on all track types or their brief explanation in a section below).\nChoose Audio tracks or Audio busses to specify whether you want to create tracks or busses.\nThe Add numeric input box lets you specify how many tracks (or busses) you would to like to create.\nYou can optionally give a Name to the track or bus being created. The Configuration drop-down menu allows you to specify how many channels of audio you’d like the new track or Bus to handle. For example, if you will be recording your voice on this track using a single microphone, choose Mono. If you plan to import a clip from an existing song and place it on this track, choose Stereo. The choice made here will also affect which plugins you can use on the track (mono tracks cannot use stereo plugins and vice versa).\nThe Position menu lets you choose where you want the new track or bus to be placed: first, last, before or after the selection.\nYou can safely ignore the other options for now. To learn more about each of them, please check this page of the complete Ardour manual.\nClick the Add and Close button to create the tracks or busses you have just configured, and automatically close the Add Track window. The tracks you just created will appear as new rows in the main canvas. If you want to add multiple tracks with different configuration, opt for Add selected items (and leave dialog open) instead.\nOther types of tracks and busses When adding tracks and busses to your project, you’ll see more options available. Here is a quick overview of them.\nMIDI tracks are similar to audio tracks: they have regions with MIDI data, they can have multiple plugins in a processor box, e.g. a software synthesizer or a sampler followed by a delay plugin followed by an EQ plugin.\nMIDI busses are similar to audio busses, but they can only transform incoming MIDI data.\nFoldback busses are meant for stage monitoring mixes where you might want giving each performer a customized mix that goes right into their earpiece. E.g. more rhythm section and less brass section in the mix for a solo guitarist. See here for more details.\nVCA masters are another way to group tracks. These mixer strips provide a single fader for multiple tracks. Please refer to the user manual for more information.\nContinuing Once you’ve added one or more tracks, you will want to put some audio material into them to work with. Continue on to the Importing Audio and Recording Audio chapters to learn how to do this.\nNext: IMPORTING AUDIO\n","description":"","tags":null,"title":"Creating tracks and busses","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/getting-started/creating-tracks-and-busses/"},{"content":"The main body of the manual was written during a Book Sprint led by Derek Holzer in the moddr_lab at WORM in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, between 23 and 27 November 2009, with input and support from the international community of Ardour users and developers. The tutorial was originally written for Ardour 2.X versions. The original FLOSS manual can be found at flossmanuals.net.\nOriginal contributors: Adam Hyde, Bruno Ruviaro, Dave Peticolas, Walter Langelaar, David Elwell, Thomas Goose, Derick H., Rob Fell, William Abernathy, Derek Holzer, Stefan Hanser, Tomasz Kaye, Dick MacInnis, Mr Stock, Ross Johnson, Jon Cohrs, Claudia Borges, Ma Rk, Al Thompson, Jay Maechtlen, Christopher Stamper, Thomas Margolf, Mark Lindhout, Joern Nettingsmeier.\nIt was further updated in 2010 by Chou Shoichi, Damian Soto, Ross Johnson, Christian Herzberg, Malcolm Smith, Giorgio Moscardi.\nIn December 2014, the tutorial was updated for Ardour 3.5 and moved to GitHub. The text was completely revised, and screenshots were replaced with newer ones. In August 2015, a similar revision was made to update all screenshots and text to Ardour 4.2. The 2014 and 2015 revisions were made by Bruno Ruviaro and Alex Christie.\n2016/2017 fixes by Dan “dannybpng” and Jougleur.\n2018 update by Miroslav Šulc.\n2021 update for Ardour v6 by Luca Aquino.\n2022 update for Ardour v7 by Alexandre Prokoudine.\n","description":"","tags":null,"title":"Credits","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/appendices/credits/"},{"content":"As you have already learned in previous chapters, exporting an isolated region does not export all of the changes you might have made to that region. To export edits such as panning, fader automation, and plugin effects, you must export either a range or the entire session.\nExporting a Range To export a range, follow these steps:\n Click on the Range Mode button (R shortcut)   Make a range selection:   Right click on the range and choose Export Range from the menu:   This will open the familiar Export dialog explained in the Exporting Sessions chapter. Choose your options, if any, and click Export. The range will be exported and saved as an audio file.\nWhat Exactly Is a Range? To define a range is simply to specify a beginning and ending point in time. The Selection display to the right of the secondary clock shows the start and end times of the selected range, as well as its duration.\n The range created through the method above will disappear as soon as you click outside of it.\nThe Export Range command will export everything that plays through the Master bus, exactly as it plays back in your session. If any of the tracks have the Mute or Solo buttons engaged, this will also affect which tracks are heard in the exported file.\nHow to Create a Range Marker and Then Re-select a Range Range markers are essentially two location markers the are grouped together to mark the beginning and end of a section on the timeline. Range markers look like this:\n You can use range markers to “bookmark” one or more ranges that you need to remember or use again later. Here is how you can do that.\n  Make a range selection either in Range mode or in Grab mode with Smart option enabled.\n  Create range markers in one of the following ways:\n   Right-click on a range selection and choose Add Range Marker. From the timeline, right click on the Range Markers horizontal space and choose New Range. From one or more selected regions, right-click on the region and choose Add Single Range Marker (if a single region is selected), or Add Range Marker Per Region (if multiple regions are selected).   Click anywhere outside the range selection to lose it.\n  Right-click on either of the two range selection markers on the timeline and choose the Select Range menu option. The range selection will be restored.\n   Tip You can clear all existing range markers by right-clicking on the Range Markers area of the timeline and choosing Clear All Ranges.\n  Continuing You now know how to Export isolated Regions, selected Ranges from your Session, or the entire Session as a Stereo Mix. The last section of this tutorial explains saving sessions, snapshots, and templates.\nNext: SAVING A SESSION\n","description":"How to export ranges in Ardour","tags":null,"title":"Exporting a range","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/exporting-sessions/exporting-a-range/"},{"content":"Once you have established a good balance of levels on all the tracks, you can begin to think about panning.\nPanning helps to establish a stereo field, a relative space between the speakers in which to place your sounds and instruments.\nThe Panning Interface The panning control in Ardour is located in the middle of the mixer strip.\nA mono track will have a mono panner. It looks like this:\n A stereo track will have a stereo panner, like this:\n Mono Panner The default mono panner distributes 1 input to 2 outputs. Its behavior is controlled by a single parameter, the position. By default, the panner is centered. You can change the position by clicking and dragging directly on the mono panner. Right-click on the panner to access other options.\nStereo Panner The default stereo panner distributes 2 inputs to 2 outputs. By default, the panner is centered as well.\nPanning Tricks A more extensive discussion of panning philosophy and techniques is beyond the scope of this tutorial, but here are some general rules of thumb:\n Guitars tend to be panned to the left and right. Vocals and bass tend to placed in the center. You want to create a balance so that one side is not louder then the other. Headphones may be helpful in determining how instruments should be panned, and whether the mix feels lopsided because one side is too loud.  Two other tools that are useful in creating a “spatial” or stereo field are Reverb and Delay. These effects can be used together with sends to create a drum send which would be further back in the mix with more Reverb, and a vocal send which might have a little more Delay but sound closer than the drums. Please see the sections on using plugins and sends later in this part of the tutorial for more information.\n Tip Always keep an eye on your levels while panning tracks! Panning a track to one channel increases the level of that channel. This may change the balance of levels you set up in the previous chapter, and in extreme cases can result in clipping. When this happens, reduce the overall levels of that track and check again how it sits in the mix.\n  Multichannel Panning As Ardour supports multichannel tracks, it will also provide a multichannel-specific panning user interface for those tracks as well. Here is an example of a 4-channel audio track. You can see that there is a small user interface right in the mixer and a larger editor window that you can access by clicking anywhere in the empty space inside the panning area:\n Unless you work on projects where e.g. Ambisonics is involved, you will probably mostly deal with multichannel tracks when you use samplers, especially drums/percussion samplers. As different instruments in a drum kit tend to get a different treatment in post-production (e.g. how they are processed with a compressor), samplers tend to create a channel per instrument: one per kick drum, one per each snare etc. The idea is that you would route a channel into a separate bus and process it differently. Using a panner control in that case is unlikely to happen.\nContinuing By now, you should have a collection of tracks which are both mixed well and have an exciting stereo image. In the following chapters, we will learn about using plugins to enhance the sound of your mix.\nNext: USING PLUGINS\n","description":"How to pan signal in Ardour","tags":null,"title":"Panning","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/mixing-sessions/panning/"},{"content":"The Recorder window is streamlined for one particular use case: recording to multiple tracks. The interface is pointedly simplified to remove all distraction.\n There are three major sections in the Recorder window as outlined above:\n Window-specific toolbar The timeline and the tracks representation Inputs control  Window-specific toolbar The toolbar has specific commands and information: arming and disarming all tracks for recording, discarding the last take, automatically switching all inputs for signal monitoring, estimation of the time you can record to the disk until it’s out of free space etc.\n The timeline and the tracks representation The timeline only displays timecode, and the tracks view has no waveform rendering at all. This helps with the use of system resources when recording dozens of tracks simultaneously.\n Inputs control The bottom part of the window is where you control inputs: you can both monitor input volume and rename physical ports for convenience. To do the latter, just click on the input port name and give a new name.\n E.g. if you have two mic inputs, one for vocal and one for guitar, naming them accordingly will simplify picking the right one for the right track. This will be even more convenient for audio interfaces with e.g. 18 inputs.\n Continuing Finally, in the next section we’ll take a quick look at the Cue window that is new in Ardour 7.0 and provides a familiar user interface to launching audio and MIDI clips.\nNext: CUE WINDOW\n","description":"Basics of Ardour's recorder window","tags":null,"title":"Recorder window","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/getting-started/overview-of-the-interface/recorder-window/"},{"content":"Chapter 3 Recording Learn how to route signal and record audio\nContents:\n Recording audio Understanding routing Routing between applications  ","description":"Learn how to route signal and record audio with Ardour","tags":null,"title":"Recording","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/recording-audio/"},{"content":"If you often go through the motions of setting up the same information in each new session you create, such as tracks/busses, their names and interconnections, what plugins with what settings you have in mixer channels etc., then you may wish to create a template instead.\nWith a template, you can save the state of a currently open session without all the region information files. Templates are useful if, for example, you’re doing extensive routing on tracks and busses and want to save the Editor window’s state for use in other sessions.\nAn example might be a template to record tracks of drums, bass, guitar and vocals, each with their own input on the soundcard, which you might use as a basis for each session you created in that situation.\nSave a Template You can save a new template from the main menu: Session \u003e Save Template. You are asked to give the new template a name and optionally provide a description that will show up in the Session Setup dialog:\n Load a Template When creating a new session, you can load up a previously saved template. All you will need is to tell Ardour where on the disk to save the session:\n Conclusion Congratulations, you have reached the end of this introduction to Ardour! We hope that this tutorial has been useful for you to learn the key functions of the program.\nIn the following section, the Appendices, we have included some extra information we thought would be useful to new users of Ardour, including how to get Further Help, a Glossary of technical terms used in this manual, some Links to further information about Ardour on the Internet and, last but not least, the Credits of those involved in creating this free/libre open-source software (FLOSS) manual.\nThanks for reading, and if you have some knowledge about Ardour that is not included here, please feel free to propose changes (more info on how to do it: How to Contribute. Also, this manual itself is fully open-source and lives at GitHub. You can even fork it and create your own customized version of it!\nAppendices: FURTHER HELP || GLOSSARY || LINKS || CREDITS\n","description":"How to save and use a session template in Ardour","tags":null,"title":"Saving a template","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/saving-sessions/saving-a-template/"},{"content":"The time signature determines the musical speed of the passage we are composing and is measured in beats per bars.\nIf we are composing something rhythmic, it will also determine the lengths of the sound samples we use to some extent. So it is important to be able to set up the time signature before we continue.\nTo see the time-signature-related timelines for the session, you can right-click anywhere in the “header” of the rulers and check the following options: Time Signature, Bars \u0026 Beats, and Tempo.\n There is always at least one marker for both the time signature and the tempo in the session, right in the beginning of the timeline. You can change either of the two further in the session. To do that, you need to pick either time or bar and beat on the timeline, right-click on the dedicated timeline lane, choose New Time Signature or New Tempo, and provide a new value in the newly opened dialog.\n You can also easily change the latest time signature or tempo even if you scrolled past the point in time where you can see the marker on the timeline. Simply click on either tempo or TS button right below the secondary clock and provide a new value in the newly opened dialog.\n For the tempo (button on the left), choose the number of beats per minute (bpm) for your session.\nFor the time signature (button with “TS” caption on the right), you can enter new values for the beats per bar as well as the note value.\nContinuing Next, we will explore using ranges to set up a loop we can listen to while we arrange the rhythm.\nNext: USING RANGES\n","description":"How to set up time signature in Ardour","tags":null,"title":"Setting up time signature","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/editing-sessions/setting-up-time-signature/"},{"content":"Ardour is a digital audio workstation (DAW). Beforing using it to record and edit sound, it might be useful to review how digital audio works.\nFrequency and Gain Imagine a loudspeaker. To move the air in front of it and make sound, the membrane of the speaker must vibrate from its center position (at rest) backwards and forwards.\nThe number of times the membrane vibrates each second determines the frequency (the note, or pitch) of the sound you hear. The distance the membrane travels from its resting point determines the amplitude (the volume, or loudness) of the sound. Normally, we measure frequency in Hertz (Hz) and amplitude in decibels (dB).\nA microphone works like a loudspeaker in reverse: vibrations in the air cause its membrane to vibrate. The microphone turns these acoustic vibrations into an electrical current. If you plug this microphone into a computer’s sound card and start recording, the sound card makes thousands of measurements of this electric current per second and records them as numbers. The number of samples (i.e. measurements) made per second is called the sample rate, and the number of possible values each sample can have is called the bit depth. The combination of sample rate and bit depth indicates how closely the digital signal can reproduce the sound it has recorded.\nPeaks and Clipping When Ardour displays the samples which have been recorded, they appear as the waveform we see below. The center horizontal line indicates the membrane of the speaker at rest, and the peaks of the waveform indicate the maximum amplitude.\n If we take a waveform and increase its amplitude a lot, some of the peaks may now fall outside the range that the computer can represent digitally. The computer’s inability to represent peaks outside the range of amplitude is called clipping, which results in a permanent loss of digital information, as well as a change in the sound quality which is recognizable as distortion. Ardour marks clipped peaks with the color red, as can be seen in the image below.\n In the image above, one can also see the mixer strip on the far left, which gives a running measurement of the peaks, as well as an indication at the top of the peak meters showing the maximum peak so far. The red number indicates clipping has occurred.\n Tip Clipping often can happen at the time of recording if you set your microphone levels too high.\n  The range of decibels between the region’s maximum peak and the clipping point is commonly referred to as headroom, and common recording practice is to keep approximately 3 to 6 decibels of headroom between the maximum of your signal and the clipping point, with the clipping point itself being represented as 0 dB (zero decibels). In other words, an audio region with a comfortable amount of Headroom would have its maximum peaks between −6 dB and −3 dB.\nAlso, because the peaks of audio signals add together, care must be taken when mixing several sources together to keep the combined signals from clipping.\nSample Rate and Bit Depth To make audio playable on a compact disc, for example, the computer must generate 44,100 samples per second. The sample rate determines the highest frequency which can be recorded or played back by the computer. A sampling rate of 44.1 kHz means that the highest frequency which can be represented is just under 22.05 kHz. Since normal human hearing lies within the range of approximately 20 Hz to 20 kHz, this is commonly accepted as a reasonable sample rate. Other commonly used sample rates include 48 kHz (e.g. multi-effects pedals) or 96 kHz (DVD audio).\nEach sample is recorded as a 16-bit number. One bit is a piece of information which is either 0 or 1. If there are 16 bits together to make one sample, then there are 2^16 (65,536) possible values for each sample.\nThus, we can say that CD-quality audio has a sample rate of 44.1 kHz and a bit depth of 16 bits. Professional music recordings are usually mixed using 24 bits to preserve the highest amount of detail before being mixed down to 16 bits for CD. Older computer games have a distinctively rough sound, using only 8 bits. By increasing the sample rate, we are able to record higher sonic frequencies, and by increasing the bit depth, we are able to use a greater dynamic range (the difference between the quietest and the loudest sounds possible to record and play).\nContinuing In the next chapter, we’ll launch Ardour on Ubuntu Linux and learn the basics of the user interface.\nNext: STARTING ARDOUR.\n","description":"What is digital audio?","tags":null,"title":"What is digital audio?","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/introduction/what-is-digital-audio/"},{"content":"The Cue window provides tools to set up live performance using Ardour. We are not going to use Cue in this tutorial, so this is just a quick overview to give you a basic idea what all this is about.\nUser interface elements The user interface follows the general approach expected by users of other applications with this type of a feature set.\n Here are the main UI parts:\n A grid of clip launchers A browser for reusable clips Clip settings  From left to right you get tracks that contain clips (not visible on the timeline when you switch to the Editor window). From top to bottom you get 8 rows called scenes, A to H.\nThe browser on the right allows easily dropping pre-recorded clips onto clip slots for playback. You can use both audio and MIDI clips. Dropping a clip on the empty space will create a new track and automatically fill the first slot (scene A) with that clip.\nSettings below allow customizing how a clip is played, whether it is stretched to match certain bpm value, whether it triggers playback of a certain other clip etc.\nNon-linear workflow Working with clip launchers is commonly referred to as non-linear workflow, because it is based on looped playback of pre-recorded clips where you don’t have to go from scene A to scene H directly.\nYou can set up your clip launchers in a way that a clip in scene B will play 4 times, trigger a clip in scene A that will play 2 times, then jump to clip C and play it 6 times, then go back to clip B, which will repeat the entire cycle again and again until you stop it manually. And all that without ever pressing the Play button in the transport to play a song from start to finish.\nCombining linear and non-linear workflows While you can play an entire song live without ever getting out of the Cue window — especially when you have a hardware grid controller and all pre-recorded clips you might need — you can integrate clip launchers into regular linear workflow in the Editor window. To do that, you need to add markers in the Cue Markers timeline.\nHere is a simple example of that:\n Ardour plays two bars of a regular MIDI track that uses a sampled instrument, then launches scene A at bar 3, scene B at bar 4, and stops all scenes at bar 5. You can trigger and stop scenes at any time in your otherwise linear project, as many times as you like.\nContinuing Now that you are familiar with main Ardour’s windows, let’s jump to the next section where we create a new track and then import some audio file.\nNext: Creating tracks and busses\n","description":"Basics of Ardour's cue window","tags":null,"title":"Cue window","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/getting-started/overview-of-the-interface/cue-window/"},{"content":"Chapter 4 Editing sessions How to arrange tracks, then cut, loop, and stretch regions\nContents:\n Non-destructive editing Arranging tracks Setting up time signature Using ranges Working with regions Further region operations Changing edit modes Creating looped sections Stretching \u0026 shrinking regions  ","description":"The basics of editing Ardour sessions","tags":null,"title":"Editing sessions","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/editing-sessions/"},{"content":"Sections of audio are known as regions in Ardour. A Region can be an entire sound file or a portion of it. Here you will learn how to import audio files from the hard drive of your computer so they can be used in your Ardour session.\nTo import an audio file into your session, you will use the Add Existing Media dialog. Use the shortcut Ctrl+I to get to this window, or alternatively go to the Session \u003e Import menu).\nOn the left side of this dialog you will see a file browser which allows you to search your hard drive for appropriate sound files to add (preferably, start with a common file format, such as WAV or AIFF).\n At the lower left corner there is a menu which indicates how these files will be added. Add files… as new tracks will import audio files and place them on a newly created track. Add files… to source list will simply import audio files into the Sources list, without creating any new tracks. Choose this option now, as we don’t want Ardour to create any tracks at this point. Make sure the Mapping options says one region per file.\n  Tip If you do not have any suitable audio files on your hard drive to follow these steps, visit freesound.org), where you can find a large collection of Public Domain and Creative Commons–licensed samples in a variety of sample rates and formats.\n  On the right side of the Add Existing Media dialog you will see a section allowing you to inspect the properties of the file you selected. Here you will see the name, number of channels, sample rate, format and length of the sound file, along with any tags you have chosen to add to the file.\nThe Play button allows you to preview the file. You can also select Auto-play if you would like to hear a sound file immediately as soon as you click on it in the file browser (without having to push the Play button).\nYou will notice that the option Copy files to session is checked by default. This will make a copy of the imported file(s) into the folder of the current session. This is safer, but it uses more disk space. If you uncheck this option (not recommended!), Ardour will use the sound file from its current location on the hard drive. In this case, if the file is moved to a new location on the hard drive, you will run into trouble, because Ardour won’t be able to find it the next time you open this session. It is highly recommended that you leave this box checked (Copy files to session).\nClick OK to proceed.\n Tip The file(s) you have imported will appear listed in your Sources list. This list is located at the far right of the editor window. If you don’t see it, make sure Show Editor List is checked under the View menu.\n   By dragging and dropping an audio file listed on the Sources list onto the main canvas, you can insert it in an existing or new track. If you drag it into an existing track, it will be added there. If you drag onto the empty space beneath existing tracks, a new track will be automatically created to accommodate it.\nRelease the mouse button to complete the drag-and-drop operation. A new region will be inserted at the exact time point where you dropped it.\n Tip If a sound file is selected in the Editor List (i.e., if it is highlighted in blue), the next time you click on that file name, Ardour will think you are trying to rename the region (the name will become editable). More likely you were just trying to click to drag and drop the file onto a track. In order to click and drag a previously highlighted region from the list, you need to point and click in the empty space right before or after the name.\n  Important: always make sure you are placing stereo regions on stereo tracks. If you drag a stereo file onto a mono audio track, only the left channel will be used. In the screenshot below, a stereo file with very distinct left and right channels was dragged onto a stereo track and a nono track. Notice that in the mono track only the left channel is displayed (and played back).  Importing Audio Directly to a Track As mentioned earlier, the Add existing media dialog also allows you to import audio files directly onto tracks.\nChoose Add files… as new tracks to automatically create a new track and add the selected file to it. The track will be named after the sound file name.\n If you have previously selected one or more tracks, the menu will display the additional option Add files… to selected tracks to add a sound file into the already existing selected track.\nWhen adding files as new tracks, note that the Mapping options lets you choose between one track per channel and one track per file. For the purpose of this tutorial, choose one track per file, otherwise the left and right channels of a stereo file will be split into two separate tracks.\nChoose Insert Point When using either one of the options above (add as new track or add to selected tracks), you should also specify where in the track you want the new region to be placed. In the screenshot below, we are choosing session start.\n The region appears in a new track in the session. The new track automatically receives the name of the imported sound file.\nThe sound file will also appear in the Regions list so that it can be inserted into other tracks as well by dragging and dropping it.\nRemove Regions from Tracks To remove a region from a track, you can select it with the mouse and use the Cut function from the menu, the Control (or Apple) key and the X key, the Delete key or the key combination of Fn + Backspace (which is used, for example, on a laptop keyboard that does not have a proper Delete key).\n Warning Save your work often! The shortcut Control + S is your friend. Use it a lot, all the time.\n  Continuing Now that you have some material in your session, you might want customizing the timeline to better suit your needs or jump to recording new material live.\nNext: SETTING UP THE TIMELINE or RECORDING AUDIO\n","description":"Importing audio to Ardour tracks","tags":null,"title":"Importing audio","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/getting-started/importing-audio/"},{"content":"License All chapters copyright of the authors (see below). Unless otherwise stated all chapters in this manual licensed with GNU General Public License version 2.\nThis documentation is free documentation; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.\nThis documentation is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.\nYou should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this documentation; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.\nGeneral Public License Version 2, June 1991\nCopyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA\nEveryone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.\nPreamble\nThe licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software–to make sure the software is free for all its users. This General Public License applies to most of the Free Software Foundation’s software and to any other program whose authors commit to using it. (Some other Free Software Foundation software is covered by the GNU Lesser General Public License instead.) You can apply it to your programs, too.\nWhen we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.\nTo protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it.\nFor example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.\nWe protect your rights with two steps: (1) copyright the software, and (2) offer you this license which gives you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify the software.\nAlso, for each author’s protection and ours, we want to make certain that everyone understands that there is no warranty for this free software. If the software is modified by someone else and passed on, we want its recipients to know that what they have is not the original, so that any problems introduced by others will not reflect on the original authors’ reputations.\nFinally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone’s free use or not licensed at all.\nThe precise terms and conditions for copying, distribution and modification follow.\nTERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION\n0. This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License. The “Program”, below, refers to any such program or work, and a “work based on the Program” means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language. (Hereinafter, translation is included without limitation in the term “modification”.) 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For software which is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, write to the Free Software Foundation; we sometimes make exceptions for this. Our decision will be guided by the two goals of preserving the free status of all derivatives of our free software and of promoting the sharing and reuse of software generally.\nNO WARRANTY\n11. BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.\n12. IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MAY MODIFY AND/OR REDISTRIBUTE THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.\nEND OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS\n","description":"This tutorial's license","tags":null,"title":"License","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/appendices/license/"},{"content":"Plugins can be used to enhance or transform the sound of individual tracks.\nThey can be applied directly to a single track, or to a group of tracks using a send. Later in this tutorial, we will discuss some plugins specific to the Mixing process, such as Compressors, Limiters, Parametric Equalizers, Reverbs and others.\nProcessor Box In Ardour terminology, a processor is anything that gets plugged into a mixer strip and treats the signal in some way. Ardour provides several built-in processors such as the fader or panners. Processors can also be plugins used for effects or as instruments, as well as sends or inserts which affect signal routing. The arrangement of processors is arbitrary, and there is no limit to how many there can be.\n The main space shown in the screenshot above is the processor box. The blue box fader is in fact a processor that comes by default inside the processor box. It represents the fader that you use to control the track’s volume. All processors are shown as colored rectangles, with a small “LED” beside them that lights up when the processor is enabled. The colour of the processor depends on its location in the sequence; processors that are pre-fader are colored in red, and post-fader processors are colored in green.\nAdding a Plugin to a Track or a Bus Plugins can be added by right-clicking in the processor box of the track or bus. A menu of options is presented. From the menu, new processors can be inserted.\n The Plugin Selector is a convenient way to browse and choose plugins:\n From the Plugin Selector, you can search them by name, type, or other criteria available from the drop-down menu. Let’s add the reverb plugin called ACE Reverb:\n Once selected, click Add and the plugin will show up in the bottom list of “Plugins to be connected”. Then click Insert Plugin(s), and they will show up in the processor box.\n Editing Plugin Parameters Double-click a plugin to edit its parameters. In this example, we double click the “ACE Reverb” red box and get this window:\n Here you can control reverb parameters such as Blend and Room Size. The effect will apply to all sounds contained in the track.\n Tip Double-click on a slider to switch to numeric input mode, type the new value in, then press Enter to confirm the change or Esc to abort.\n  Bypassing Plugins To bypass the plugin, press the Bypass button in the plugin settings window, or simply click the LED of the plugin in the processor box. This turns the plugin off and allows the signal to pass by it unaffected. This is useful when you want to compare how a track sounds with and without the plugin.\n Bypassed plugins are shown with the LED turned off. On the screenshot above, the fader is enabled and the ACE Reverb plugin is bypassed.\nRight-clicking the plugins will give a menu with several options, including Delete.\nPre-Fader vs Post-Fader You have a choice whether you would like to add your plugin before or after the fader rectangle in the processor box. Pre-fader plugins are inserted in the signal path before the fader, so that the fader controls the level of the signal coming out of the plugin. Post-fader plugins are inserted after the fader: the fader controls the level of the signal going into the plugin.\nFor some plugins, pre- or post-fader placement does not matter. For others, the difference is subtle. For others still, inserting them in the right place is absolutely essential (for more details, see for example this thread at the Ardour discussion forum).\nPlugin Formats For those interested in learning more about plugin formats, here’s a quick overview:\nLADSPA plugins are a somewhat obsolete plugin format mainly used on Linux.\nLV2 is an extensible successor to LADSPA. LV2 plugins are available on Linux, Windows, and macOS, should respective developers choose to build them for these systems.\nAU plugins are the native plugin format for macOS and will only work in that operating system.\nVST plugins is fairly common on both Windows and macOS. Some VST plugins built for Windows can be used on Linux, however they may not function correctly and require 3rd party software to run. Others are built natively for Linux and tend to work fine.\nMore information about using plugins with Ardour can be found in the user manual.\nContinuing In this chapter, we learned how to add a plugin to a single track. This is useful if that track needs a specific plugin, but if you have a plugin which is used for many tracks at the same time, you should continue to the next chapter about using sends. You can also continue to the various, plugin-specific chapters such as Dynamics and Equalizing.\nNext: USING SENDS\n","description":"How to use plugins in Ardour","tags":null,"title":"Using plugins","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/mixing-sessions/using-plugins/"},{"content":"A range is a selection of the timeline that can include one or more tracks. It has many uses like selecting a portion of audio/MIDI data to cut it.\n Creating ranges There are two common ways to create a range:\n  You can do it with the Grab tool (G shortcut) when the Smart mode is enabled. In that case you need to position the mouse pointer around the middle of a track vertically to start selecting data rather than picking and moving a region. The mouse pointer looking like a vertical line means you are good to start selecting.\n  You can also use the dedicated Range tool (R shortcut). In this case, just click and drag anywhere on the canvas to start selecting.\n  You can select data of multiple tracks at once as seen on the screenshot above. To do that, just drag the mouse pointer upwards or downwards crossing the border between tracks.\nWhen the Editor List dock is available, you can see range properties on top of it: start/end times of the range as well as its duration. When a range is created, the Tracks \u0026 Busses tab will also select tracks that the range crosses.\n It can be useful to create ranges that align with the edges of regions on your timeline. To do that, enable the Snap option in the toolbar and select No Grid in the drop-down list next to it.\n Editing ranges Once you created a range, you can easily tweak it’s start and end positions by hovering range boundaries with the mouse pointer, grabbing them and dragging to the left or to the right.\n If you forgot to include a track into a range, you don’t need to redo the range selection. Just hold Ctrl button and click on the track’s header on the canvas. Alternatively, hold Ctrl and click on track’s name in the Tracks \u0026 Busses tab of the Editor List dock.\n Playing back ranges in a loop Returning to our rhythmic passage example, we will want to hear the passage we are composing, perhaps as a loop, while we are moving the samples around. To do that, we must create a range to listen to within our session, so that we can return to exactly this point in the session again and again.\n Zoom out if needed (-) to see full bars in the timeline. Use the Range tool to select an entire bar, then right-click inside a range and pick one of the two commands:\n  Loop Range (on the screenshot above) to create a loop and start playing it immediately.\n  Set loop from selection to only create loop markers withut immediate playback.\n   As long as loop markers are there, you can start playing back that portion of the timeline in a loop whenever you like (on the screenshot above). To do that, either click the Play loop range button in the Transport toolbar or press the L shortcut.\n You can also tweak the position of loop markers while playing the range in a loop. Just grab a marker and drag it to the left or to the right.\nMore editing options for ranges There are more operations you can do on ranges, all available in the right-click menu:\n Separate will cut the original regions at range borders. Duplicate will create one copy of the range and place it starting at the right border of the range. Any existing data will be overlaid, so you can still access it. Crop Region To Range will trim affected regions to the extent of the range.  You can also inspect loudness and spectral characteristics of data in a range or export just the data inside a range rather than the entire session (see this chapter for more info on exporting ranges).\nContinuing In the next step, we will learn about working with regions to compose a rhythm with these samples.\nNext: WORKING WITH REGIONS\n","description":"How to create and edit range selection in Ardour","tags":null,"title":"Using ranges","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/editing-sessions/using-ranges/"},{"content":"What Kind Of Contributions We Accept We intentionally limit the scope of this tutorial to very basic techniques that are sufficient to get users started with recording, mixing, and exporting with Ardour. So we’ll gratefully accept patches that do not change the scope in any major way: bug fixes, better explanations, better illustrations etc. We also encourage translations of the ardour-tutorial.\nUsing Markdown Syntax And Extras All text files use Markdown syntax with a few extras. We use a limited subset of available options and one shortcode specific to HTML5, a \u003cfigure\u003e element (see here for more info). Another extra feature available in the template of choice is a so called shortcode for notice boxes that look like this:\n Tip Some text\n  We generally stick to two type of notice boxes: ’tip’ and ‘warning’.\nThe rest is really straightforward:\n Single underscore like _Name_ makes italics and is used for UI elements like window captions. Double asterisk like **OK** makes bolds and is reserved for button captions. Backticks around some text are typically reserved for menu paths and filenames.  How to Submit Changes The repository with this tutorial is available on GitHub. The general idea is that you fork the repository, make changes in a branch, then create a pull request. Please see here for a complete guide.\nHow To Create And Submit A Translation The entire tutorial can be translated into a different language. Once you create a git branch to separate your work, here is what you do next.\nTranslating Menu The menu is stored in config.toml, inside the [Languages] section. For each language, that section has two parts:\n The main part where names of chapters and pages chow up. The ‘shortcuts’ menu with links to Ardour’s homepage, forum etc.  To translate the header of the main part, copy and paste the entire block that starts with [Languages.en] and then:\n Change the language code in [Languages.en]. Translate the title. Submit the name of the language that will show up in the drop-down list of available translations. We encourage you to use language or the local one, in your alphabet — whichever works for you. Change the two-letter language code in the line that starts with landingPageURL. Translate the caption of the homepage of the tutorial in the line that starts with landingPageName.  Thus\n[Languages.en] title = \"Ardour tutorial\" weight = 1 languageName = \"English\" landingPageURL = \"/ardour-tutorial/en/\" #landingPageURL = \"/\" landingPageName = \"\u003ci class='fas fa-home'\u003e\u003c/i\u003e Home\" translates to e.g.:\n[Languages.ru] title = \"Введение в Ardour\" weight = 1 languageName = \"Russian\" landingPageURL = \"/ardour-tutorial/ru/\" #landingPageURL = \"/\" landingPageName = \"\u003ci class='fas fa-home'\u003e\u003c/i\u003e Начало\" This main part of the menu will start automatically accumulating links to translated pages as you start adding pages with translations.\nUse the same approach to translate the shortcuts menu. E.g. the link to Ardour’s website\n[[Languages.en.menu.shortcuts]] name = \"\u003ci class='fas fa-fw fa-home'\u003e\u003c/i\u003e Ardour's homepage\" url = \"https://ardour.org/\" weight = 11 becomes\n#[[Languages.ru.menu.shortcuts]] #name = \"\u003ci class='fas fa-fw fa-home'\u003e\u003c/i\u003e Сайт Ardour\" #url = \"https://ardour.org/\" #weight = 11 Please keep all translations of the menu in a single larger block.\nTranslating Chapters And Pages All content lives inside the content folder where subfolders are names of chapters like Recording (recording), Mixing sessions (mixing-sessions) etc. Here is the general structure:\n/content # The root folder for all content /content/_index.en.md # The start page you see when you click Home /content/chapter-folder/ # The folder for an entire chapter like \"Recording\" /content/chapter-folder/_index.en.md # Chapter /content/chapter-folder/page/ # Folder for a page in a chapter, e.g. \"Understanding Routing\" /content/chapter-folder/page/index.md # Original text of that page in English /content/chapter-folder/page/en/ # Screenshots created with English user interface All text files have a language code right in the file name:\n regular pages are named index.XX.md, chapters are named _index.XX.md,  where XX is a two-letter language code like ‘de’ for German or ‘fr’ for French. You should be able to use four-letter codes as well, e.g. ‘pt_BR’ or ’es_AR’.\nSupposing you want to translate the Getting Started chapter into French. Here is how you do it.\n  Create a copy of getting-started/_index.en.md and name it _index.fr.md. Now you should have _index.en.md and _index.fr.md in the same folder.\n  Translate _index.fr.md. If you already translated the main menu, you should be able to open the original page in English, switch the language to ‘Français’ and see your translated page.\n  Go to the starting-ardour subfolder, create a copy of index.en.md and name it index.fr.md and then translate it.\n  Repeat step 3 for all subfolders. This should give you the translation of an entire chapter on getting started with Ardour.\n  Translating User Interface Elements and Screenshots If Ardour’s user interface is available in the language you are translating this tutorial into, it is generally up to you to decide if you refer to localized user interface or not.\nWe know that users are very passionate about both localized and non-localized UIs, so one approach you could take is to create localized screenshots, refer to localized user interface and then mention the English counterparts in parenthesis. Here is an example of a translation into German:\n Nach dem Import einiger Sounds aus dem heruntergeladenen Sample-Pack (Bassdrum, Snare, Hi-Hat, Clap) sieht unsere Session so aus (in diesem Fall haben wir die Option Dateien als neue Spuren hinzufügen (EN: Add files as new tracks) verwendet und beim Start der Session eingefügt.\n If you intend to create screenshots of localized user interface, please create a subfolder that’s named after a language code (two-letter of four-letter, whichever is applicable) and place your screenshots there. Having done so, please update references to screenshots in the text. E.g.\nsrc=\"en/ardour7-save-template.png\" becomes\nsrc=\"de/ardour7-schablone-speichern.png\" Submitting Translation The process is the same as for general patches: submit a pull request. See above for a link to a step-by-step guide.\n","description":"How to contribute to this intro tutorial","tags":null,"title":"How to contribute","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/appendices/how-to-contribute/"},{"content":"Chapter 5 Mixing sessions How to use basic tools to make every instrument stand out in a mix\nContents:\n The mixer strip Mixing levels Panning Using plugins Using sends Dynamics Equalizing Using automation  ","description":"How to mix a session in Ardour","tags":null,"title":"Mixing sessions","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/mixing-sessions/"},{"content":"Once you import some audio files to Ardour, play them back and start familiarizing yourself with the user interface, you might want finetuning various parts of the user interface for your needs. The timeline settings are one of the obvious options there, because what you want to see on the timeline largely depends on the kind of material you work on.\nUsers creating audio plays, documentaries, reportages or soundscapes may wish to use minutes and seconds for units, while those recording bands or producing electronic music will most likely use bars and beats. Video producers will find a frames-per-second timecode handy, while those wishing for extreme precision may even want to use samples. All of these can be viewed in Ardour and used as a means to organize your regions and edits.\nLet’s talk about setting up clocks, snapping, and timeline rulers.\nPrimary and Secondary Clocks There are two clocks near the top of the Editor window which can display the time in a number of formats: Timecode, Bars:Beats, Minutes:Seconds, and Samples. Right-click to change the format of each of the two clocks.\n These are called the transport clocks. The left one is the primary transport clock and the right one is the secondary transport clock. The advantage of having two transport clocks is that you see the playhead position in two different time units without having to change any settings.\nIf you never need the second clock, you can disable it entirely. Go to Edit \u003e Preferences \u003e Appearance \u003e Toolbar and disable the Display Secondary Clock checkbox.\nPlease check the Ardour manual for more information on clocks.\nSnap Modes Snapping settings are located just below the clocks to the right. They control the quantization of the time grid, i.e., to which units the timeline grid is divided and to what extent audio regions and MIDI notes get snapped when snapping is enabled. E.g. you can snap to whole seconds when you drag an audio region around or you could snap to a 1/16 note when creating or editing MIDI notes.\nThere is one global switch, Snap, and then a drop-down list of grid quantization presets: Bar, 1/4 note, 1/8 note etc., Triplets, Timecode, Minutes and Seconds, CD frames, and more.\n When No Grid quantization preset is selected, there is no grid displayed on the tracks/busses canvas. In that case, with snapping off, nothing will snap. And with snapping enabled, regions and notes will only snap to location markers.\nTimeline The timeline is located below the snapping settings, just above the main canvas. By right-clicking on the timeline labels (i.e., right-click on the left-side area where the words “Timecode, Bar:Beats, Meter” etc are displayed), you can set the check boxes to show or hide the different types of time information.\n  Minutes/Seconds To view minutes and seconds on the timeline, right-click the timeline labels and select Mins:Secs. Bars/Beats To view bars and beats on the timeline, right-click the timeline and select Bars \u0026 Beats. It is possible to set a time signature and tempo for the entire Ardour session, as well as to change them at different points in the same session. For more information on this, please see the Setting Up The Time Signature chapter. Timecode To work with SMPTE video timecode, first you need to set the timecode fps (frames per second). This can be found in the timecode tab of the Session Properties window (Session \u003e Properties in menu or the Alt+O shortcut).   Once you have done that, make sure you make the Timecode ruler visible by right-clicking in the timeline and checking the Timecode box.\nContinuing Now that you’ve set up the timeline, continue on to the chapter on creating tracks and busses to add one or more tracks to your session.\nNext: CREATING A TRACK OR BUS\n","description":"","tags":null,"title":"Setting up the timeline","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/getting-started/setting-up-the-timeline/"},{"content":"A Send is just an extra output for a track or bus with its own separate fader that can be used to route the signal to other points in Ardour.\nAlso known as auxiliary sends, they tap the signal at a specific point in the signal flow (pre-fader, post-fader, before or after EQs and other plugins, etc.) and send a copy of that signal somewhere else, without affecting the normal signal flow downwards to the channel fader.\nIn Ardour, you can easily add sends to tracks and busses through the mixer strip. Sends are processors, just like plugins.\nWhen is a Send Useful? In earlier chapters, we built a drum kit pattern with four separate tracks: kick, snare, hihat, and clap. Let’s say now you’d like to add a reverb to the drums. You could of course add a separate plugin for each individual track, and tweak their settings separately, but this method unnecessarily increases the amount of work. Every time you want to change a reverb setting across the board for all drums, you’d have to open all four reverb plugins and change them in the same way.\nThis is where sends come in handy: you can use them to add a particular effect to a set of tracks without creating multiple instances of the same plugin.\nHere’s the overview of how we will do this:\n Create a single bus with the desired plugin. Add a send to each drum track to which you want to apply the effect. Route these sends to the bus.  Creating the Bus and adding a Plugin Create a bus (Track \u003e Add Track, Bus, or VCA... in the menu), name it appropriately, and add a plugin in the pre-fader region (right-click just above the fader’s blue rectangle in the processor box), as discussed in the previous chapter, Using Plugins.\nIn this example, we have created a mono bus called Drums, and added the ACE Reverb plugin to the bus.\n Bus inputs The “-” display in the bus input button indicates that nothing is routed to this bus yet. We will take care of this later.\nBus output Before routing a send to this bus, first make sure that the bus outputs are routed to the Master bus, as shown below (button at bottom reads “master”).\n Also, open the plugin window (double click on the ACE Reverb rectangle) and set the plugin’s signal mix to 1.0 Blend value.\n This ensures that the bus carries all of the processed signal from the plugin, and none of the unprocessed signal to the Master bus. Remember, the unprocessed, ‘clean’ signals are still available from their original tracks, so there is no need to duplicate them in this bus.\nCreating and Routing Sends Now we can create sends in the other tracks and route them to the bus inputs.\nLike plugins, sends are also created in the processor box. Go to each of your drum tracks, right-click in empty space of the processor box, and create a New Aux Send… directed to the appropriate bus (in our case, named Drums).\n  Tip If you do not see the New Aux Sends… option in the menu, it’s probably because you did not create any bus yet. Go back to the previous step to create the bus.\n  You should now see the send displayed in the processor box:\n The little Send slider you see just below the green rectangle is the send fader, which controls how much sound will be sent from this track to the bus.\nPost-Fader vs Pre-Fader Sends Notice that the image above shows a post-fader send (it sits after the fader rectangle). In post-fader sends, the send level is controlled first by both the track/Bus Fader and second by the send fader.\nIn a pre-fader send, on the other hand, the send level is controlled only by the send fader, independently of the track/bus fader. A pre-fader send would look like this:\n You can drag the send rectangle up and down the processor box to make it pre- or post-fader as needed.\n Tip The choice of pre- or post-fader depending on the type of effect plugin used and the desired result. For this exercise, either one will work.\n  A send behaves just like any other plugin in the processor box. You can deactivate it temporarily by clicking on the small LED, and you can right click on the rectangle to access other options, including Delete.\nSend Fader To control the level of each send, simply click and drag the send fader to increase or decrease its volume.\n The Drums bus is now receiving the sum of all tracks, and applying the effect to it. A single plugin applied to the bus controls the effect for the mix of all drum sounds routed there. This way, you have independent control over the “dry” sound of the original tracks, and the “wet” sound of coming out of the bus.\nBecause sends are very useful for this kind of work with effect plugins, they are also commonly called “Effect Sends”.\nContinuing Now that you know how to add plugins to a track, as well as how to add sends to tracks to create plugin busses usable by any number of tracks, it might be helpful to learn about a few other plugins useful in the mixing process. Please continue on to the following chapters covering dynamics and equalizing.\nNext: DYNAMICS\n","description":"Using sends in Ardour","tags":null,"title":"Using sends","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/mixing-sessions/using-sends/"},{"content":"Sections of audio are called regions in Ardour. To compose the short rhythmic passage we’ve been working on, we will need to know how to select, move, split and trim these regions, as well as how to fade in or fade out their volume and create crossfades between them. Some of these options may need to happen at specific edit points in the composition, or according to the musical meter we can define with the timeline and the grid as well.\nSelecting Regions The Grab mode (G shortcut) is the tool to select and move objects. It is located just below the transport menu in the Editor window (the little “hand” icon). You will use this tool a lot in your Ardour work.\n When it is active, your mouse pointer will look like a little hand icon.\nTry all of the operations below, for practice:\n  Click on the waveform of the region to select it. Click and drag on a region to move it around (left and right within the same track, but also up and down onto other tracks).\n  Use Ctrl+Click to create and drag around a copy of the region.\n  You can select multiple regions by holding the Shift key while clicking on each region you want to select.\n  You can also drag a selection box over multiple regions to select them all.\n     Move multiple regions at the same time after selecting them.\n  You can select several sequential regions on one track all at once by holding down the Shift key while selecting the first and the last regions of the sequence (copy a few regions on the same track to try this out).\n  When you select a single region, make sure to click on the waveform section of its rectangle. The lower stripe with the region name is used for a different action (see the Trimming Regions section below).\n  Use the Del key to delete selected regions.\n  Standard copy (Ctrl+C), cut (Ctrl+X), and paste (Ctrl+V) operations also work with regions.\n  Moving Regions While moving a region, a timecode will appear on the screen in yellow numbers. This timecode is the region’s starting point on the timeline. The unit of this timecode is the same as the unit of the primary clock, which you can change by right-clicking on the clock and choosing a new unit (Minutes:Seconds, Bar:Beats, etc).\nYou can move regions horizontally (sideways) to a different point in time on the same track, or you can move the selected region vertically (up or down) to a different track.\nWhen a set of one or more regions is selected, you can move the whole set by dragging with the mouse.\n Tip Make sure to select the region in its waveform section, because selecting the bottom title bar area is used for a different action (see Trimming Regions below).\n  Duplicating Regions In addition to Ctrl+Click+Drag and standard copy/paste, Ardour offers other handy ways to duplicate regions. Use the Grab mode (select/move objects) to select one or more regions, then use the Duplicate function to make one or more copies (menu Regions \u003e Duplicate). Three options are available:\n  Duplicate (shortcut Alt+D): make a copy of the selected region on the same track, immediately after the original.\n  Multi-Duplicate (shortcut Shift+D): make multiple copies of the selected region at once (same track, in sequence). You can specify the number of duplications.\n  Fill Track: make as many copies of the selected region as needed to fill the entire track, all the way up to the End marker on the timeline.\n  In the following screenshot, regions have been duplicated using the methods above.\n Using Edit Points When you use the standard copy/cut/paste commands, where exactly will the regions be pasted? The exact location is determined by the edit point drop-down menu.\n If Mouse is selected as the edit point, the copied region will be pasted at the current position of the mouse.\nIf Playhead is selected as the edit point, the copied region will be pasted at the red playhead line on the same track where the original region is.\nFinally, if Marker is selected as the edit point, then the copied region will be pasted immediately after the currently selected location marker.\nMarkers It is very useful to be able to tag different locations in a session for later use when editing and mixing. Ardour supports several ways for doing this. The most common method is using location markers, which define specific positions in time.\nLocation markers can be added to the timeline by right-clicking on the Location Markers strip and selecting Add New Location Marker. If you don’t see the Location Markers strip, right-click on the timeline and select it to make it visible. Location markers can also be selected with the mouse and moved to new positions. Right-clicking on a location marker lets you rename the marker, among other options.\n  Tip When you first create a new session, two location markers are automatically added by default. These are the start and end markers that you see in the screenshot above. If you don’t see the end marker, zoom out enough and you will find it.\n  Splitting Regions To split a region simply means to divide a single region into two independent regions. There are two ways of accomplishing this:\n  You can use the Cut mode (C shortcut) to point and click anywhere you want to split; or\n  You can stay in the Grab mode and use the S shortcut (for “Split”). In this last case, the point at which a region will be split depends on the currently selected edit point. If Mouse is selected as your current edit point, select a region and place the cursor at the point you would like to Split, then type S\" (same as going to menu Edit \u003e Split Region).\n   After being split, the original single region becomes two independent regions, with a new name for each, as in the image above. The two new regions are now entirely independent. You can move and edit them separately.\n Regions can also be split by using the playhead or a marker as the edit point.\nThe split regions will receive a name derived from the original name of its parent region, and you will see this reflected in your regions list. For example, in the image above, you see two regions called pink.15 and pink.16, which means there were split from a parent region called “pink” (not shown in image).\n Tip Splitting ranges will follow your grid settings. For example, if you have an active grid set for bars, splits will happen at the bar boundaries. If you choose No Grid, splits will happen wherever the edit point is, regardless of any grid.\n  Trimming Regions If you move the cursor near the left or right side edge of a region, you will see that the pointer becomes an arrow. Click and drag inwards from either end of the region, and the region will be shortened accordingly. This is called trimming the region. Regions can be trimmed from the start of the region (drag from left to right at the edge) or from the end (drag from right to left).\nThis action is non-destructive: no audio is actually being deleted. It is as if you were just “hiding” those portions of the region that you don’t want or don’t need anymore. Later on, you can “un-trim” the region (i.e., extend it back to its original full size), even if it has been moved or copied to a new track.\n  Tip Like splitting, trimming will obey grid settings. If you don’t want your trimming to be constrained to any grid, simply turn the grid off (No Grid).\n  Deleted Regions Because Ardour is non-destructive, the regions you have deleted from tracks are not completely removed from the session. They can always be accessed again from the region list on the far right side of the Editor window (Regions can be dragged from the list onto any tracks).\nCreating Fades in Regions A fade is a change in the volume of a region, either as the region starts or as it ends. A fade at the start of the region is a fade in, and at the end of a region it is a fade out. Each region has two small handles along the top corners, which can be dragged inwards from either edge to create a fade in or fade out. The screenshot below shows a fade in (indicated by the shaded area).\n In fact, every region has a fade in and fade out built-in. By default, the region fade is very short and serves to avoid clicks in the transitions at the start and end of the region. By adjusting the regions fade length as shown above, a more gradual transition can be accomplished.\nBy right-clicking on one of the fades (the shaded area), the speed of the fade can also be adjusted.\n Crossfading Between Two Regions When one region fades out while another fades in, this is called a crossfade. If the two regions are in different tracks, you can use the method described above with the fade in and fade out handles. The following screenshot shows an example.\n However, if both regions are in the same track, you need to overlap them in order to create a crossfade. When regions overlap on the same track, Ardour treats them as layers, that is, one of the regions is considered to be on top of the other. The important rule to understand is:\nThe fade in (or fade out) of the topmost region represents the crossfade between the two regions.\nOnce you understand this principle, it’s easy to create and control crossfades between regions. Here’s an example. The two separate regions seen below will be made to overlap in order to create a crossfade.\n Note that we did not add any extra fade out to the first region, but we did add a longer fade in to the second region. Then we drag the second region partly on top of the first:\n The fade in of the second region works now as the crossfade between the two regions. In other words, the first region will fade out in a mirror image way as the second region fades in.\nIn order for this to work, though, we need to make sure that the region that has the desired fade is on top in Ardour’s layering system. In order to change layering of regions, select a region and go to the menu Region \u003e Layering.\n The difference may be hard to hear if you are doing this with the very short percussive sounds we imported earlier. To really hear the effect, import a couple of longer samples to try it out (for example, a sample of rain sounds, and another of a human voice). Overlap several seconds of your long samples on the same track. You will hear the difference as you move the second region to the bottom (Lower to Bottom), and then back to top (Raise to Top). When it’s on top, we will hear the desired crossfade. When it’s at the bottom, we will hear no crossfade, just an abrupt change from first to second region (assuming your first region has no fade out specified, as in the screenshots above).\nUsing Grid Settings Experiment with the Grid Mode setting, as discussed in the Setting Up the Timeline chapter, to give different kinds of quantization — in other words, to constrain the boundaries of each region to certain grid points. Here, the grid has been activated and set to Beats/16, to quantize the regions to sixteenth notes within each bar. You may wish to trim the endpoints of some of the samples, as discussed above, to fit within the metric structure you have set up.\n Continuing In the next chapter, we will explore a few more things you can do with regions\nNext: FURTHER REGION OPERATIONS\n","description":"Selecting, splitting, moving regions in Ardour","tags":null,"title":"Working with regions","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/editing-sessions/working-with-regions/"},{"content":"One of the problems you may encounter in a mix is that, depending on the material, the loud parts are too loud, and/or the quiet parts are too quiet.\nThis kind of problem cannot be easily solved using faders to adjust the levels alone. You may set the levels so high that they clip, or you may add unwanted background noise by simply turning levels up. These are all problems with what is called the dynamic range, i.e., the difference between the loudest and quietest parts of your session. There are several types of tools for adjusting the dynamic range available mostly as third-party plugins within Ardour, including limiting, compression, and gating.\nLimiting A limiter is a tool that prevents the volume of a track from going over a certain level, usually the peak level (0dB) or something close to it. Many limiters have the option to boost the levels of the incoming signal before they are limited, and in this way you can “close the gap” between the loudest and quietest parts of your mix. A limiter can be used on the Master bus to prevent the overall mix from clipping. Limiters are almost always used post-fader.\nIn the example below, a plugin named Fast Lookahead Limiter is used (if you don’t find that specific one among your installed plugins, look for any other called “Limiter”). To set how much it limits, simply adjust the Limit (dB) slider. The Fast Lookahead Limiter literally looks ahead in the signal by a few milliseconds, and when it sees that the signal is about to go over the limit you have set, it automatically turns the levels down.\n The Input Gain (dB) slider determines how much the levels are increased before they reach the limiter, and the Attenuation (dB) meter on the right-hand side shows how much the levels are being reduced at any given moment. While the reduction in volume is nearly-instantaneous, the Release time (s) slider determines how long it takes the limiter to return to 0dB of Attenuation.\nNote that the “harder” one drives the limiter (by increasing the input gain and/or decreasing the maximum peak limit allowed), the more reduction the limiter is forced to make, and the more likely it is that artifacts of the processing will occur (such as distortions or erratic changes in volume). On the Master bus, it is generally best to avoid excessive limiting.\nCompression A compressor boosts the overall volume of a sound, but then “squeezes” it depending on how loud it is. This can make vocals sound more even or drums sound fuller and louder. The end effect is similar to how a limiter can reduce the range between the quietest and the loudest sound, however the effect is more selective when using a compressor.\nA typical compressor will have these obligatory controls:\n Threshold Sets the level at which the compressor will start to act. Ratio Controls how much the compressor will “squeeze” the sound. Attack and Release Control how quickly the compressor affects the sound.   The ACE Compressor plugin on the screenshot above has two additional controls:\n Threshold level (in dB) Sets the level at which the compressor will compress or squeeze the sound. Makeup gain (in dB) Boosts the whole signal after the compression occurs.  To soften out a vocal, for example, you could set Threshold level of −10dB or so and a Ratio of 2.5, and then bring the volume back up with the Makeup gain. The other three controls — Attack time, Release time, and Knee — allow you to control the shape of the compression.\nFor soft vocal compression, you would want a semi-fast attack time so that the compressor catches the beginning of each word, a slower release time to let the voice ring out, and a soft knee radius to create a gentle form of compression that isn’t too noticeable.\nIf you want to make drums sound big, you might try a slow attack time so that you don’t compress the pop of the drum, a fast release time so that the compressor can catch the next hit of the drum, and a large ratio to make the dynamics between the beginning and end of the drum hit similar.\nBelow is a screenshot of a similar compressor from the LSP plugins suite:\n If you want to speed up learning how to use a compressor, a generally good idea is to insert one scope visualization plugin before the compressor and one right after, then open both\nGating The simplest kind of a gate allows a signal to pass through when it is over a certain level, and blocks the signal when it is lower than that.\nGates are often used as a kind of noise reduction. For example, the gate on a microphone channel might only open while the singer is singing, preventing other background noises from coming through as well when she is not singing. Gated drums are also a very well-known studio production trick to make them sound “sharper”.\nHere, the Hard Gate plugin (from a suite of LADSPA plugins called CMT) displays a single control parameter, the Threshold at which the gate will open and let the signal through.\n Other kinds of gates, such as the LSP Gate plugin on the screenshot below, are more complex. They have independent control over how quickly the gate opens (Attack) and closes (Release), as well as other parameters quite similar to those described for the SC Compressor above.\n Continuing Now that we’ve explored some tools for getting the dynamic range exactly where you want it, it’s time to look at adjusting the balance of frequencies present in each individual track and in your overall mix. In the next chapter, we’ll learn how to use the equalizer to do just that.\nNext: EQUALIZING\n","description":"Applying limiters, compressors, and a gate in Ardour","tags":null,"title":"Dynamics","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/mixing-sessions/dynamics/"},{"content":"Chapter 6 Exporting sessions How to export a region, a selection of data, and a whole session\nContents:\n Exporting a session Exporting a region Exporting a range  ","description":"How to export sessions, regions, and ranges in Ardour","tags":null,"title":"Exporting sessions","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/exporting-sessions/"},{"content":"In this section you will learn a few more things you can do with regions.\nRight-clicking a selected region reveals a context menu. The first item in the menu (labeled with the region’s name) contains a large sub-menu. All of these operations are also available from Ardour’s main Region menu.\nThis section describes a few of the most commonly used operations accessible from these menus.\n  Play Play back from the beginning to the end of that region (H shortcut). Tag Give a region some meaningful tag, e.g. “Good” that helps distinguishing it from others in the Regions list Loop Set the loop range to fit that region’s duration, and start looping it right away. Rename Change a region’s name. Properties Lots of information on the region, plus the ability to change its gain. Position Among other options, in this sub-menu you will find the Lock toggle box: it locks the region so that it cannot be moved or trimmed. It can still be split, however, and the resulting regions will be unlocked. Edit This submenu contains useful tools such as Pitch Shift (Alt+8) and Reverse (Alt+4). Pitch Shift alters the pitch of a region without changing its duration. Reverse makes the region play backwards. Gain Has useful options such as Mute (Alt+1), Normalize (Alt+3), Boost Gain (Alt+6), and Cut Gain (Alt+7). Duplicate Includes Duplicate (shortcut Alt+D), Multi-Duplicate, and Fill Track. These were explained in detail in the Working with Regions chapter. Loudness Analysis Estimates loudness of a region in LUFS, as well as Peak and True Peak values. Spectral Analysis Window displaying the overall frequency content of the region.  Feel free to explore by yourself other submenus not mentioned above. Many of them are mirrors of the options you find under Ardour’s Region menu. Below we go into a bit more details on some of the most useful functions.\nPitch Shifting The Pitch Shift (Alt+8) function alters the pitch of a region without changing its duration. The function applies a pitch-shifting algorithm to create a new audio clip based on the source clip.\nThe Pitch Shift window allows the user to specify the amount and direction of transposition desired. The window includes a Preserve Formants option. When pitch shifting by large amounts, the preserve formants option can give results that sound slightly more natural, particularly when used on vocal material.\n Normalize The Normalize function (Alt+3 shortcut) non-destructively boosts the level of the selected region so that the peaks are at 0 dB or less. When normalizing to 0.0, the region will be as loud as possible while avoiding clipping. Sometimes you may find useful to normalize a region to a value less than 0, such as -1.0, -3.0, or -6.0 decibels, so it doesn’t become too loud.\n Two other useful gain operations for regions are Boost Gain (Alt+6) and Cut Gain (Alt+7), both incrementing gain by 1dB upwards or downwards. Be sure to try them out.\nReverse The Reverse (Alt+4) function reverses the selected region of audio, in effect causing it to play backwards. Reversing a region creates a new audio file “behind the scenes”.\nOperations On Two Or More Selected Ranges If more than one range is selected, the operation will apply to all of them (for example, Normalize, Reverse, etc.)\nCombine Some operations from the context menu will only become available when two or more regions are selected. For example, let’s take a look at the Combine function, under the sub-menu Edit. First we select two adjacent regions:\n Then we choose Combine from the right-click context menu, or from Ardour’s main menu Region \u003e Edit \u003e Combine:\n As a result, the selected regions are combined into one. This is particulary useful when you have found an exact sequence of regions that works just as you want, and then you would like to copy and/or move the whole sequence as group.\nNotice that the resulting combined region has the word “compound” attached to its name.\n Continuing In the following chapter, we will learn a bit more about the powerful tools Ardour has available by changing Edit Modes.\nNext: CHANGING EDIT MODES\n","description":"Pitch-shifting, normalizing and other operations on regions in Ardour","tags":null,"title":"Further region operations","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/editing-sessions/further-region-operations/"},{"content":"We have already learned a bit about the Grab mode (select/move objects) and Range mode. In this chapter we will get an overview of all the edit modes and cursor modes available on that part of the Editor window.\n Edit Modes These controls define the behavior of the main canvas and the different functions of the cursor.\nThe drop-down Edit mode menu contains three options:\n Slide mode This is the standard mode. It allows you to freely drag regions around horizontally (within the same track) and vertically (between tracks). Ripple mode Automatically moves regions when you cut or shift one of the regions. E.g. if you cut a portion of an audio interview that isn’t interesting, Ardour will shift all regions in all tracks to the left so that there would be no silence where content used to be. Lock mode However you edit a region with this mode on, the content of the region will always be where it is. You can only move the region up or down between tracks, but not left or right.  We will only use the Slide edit mode in this tutorial.\nCursor Modes Grab Mode  This cursor mode (G shortcut) allows you to select or move objects such as regions and breakpoints (in an automation curve). When this cursor mode is selected, your cursor pointer will look like a little hand icon.\nRange Mode  This cursor mode (R shortcut) allows you to click and drag to define or resize time ranges. When this cursor mode is selected, your cursor pointer will look like a vertical line. Time ranges can be selected over one or several tracks, depending on the selection of your tracks.\nCut Mode  Use this cursor mode (C shortcut) to split regions into smaller regions. The cursor turns into the shape of scissors. This allows you to point and click on a region to split it at the cursor.\n Tip You can cut regions directly from the Grab mode too (sometimes this method can be more practical.) Without leaving the Grab mode, simply place the mouse at the desired location on the region to be cut, and hit the S shortcut (for “split”). Important: your edit point (to the left of the Modes toolbar) must be set to Mouse.\n  Audition Mode  This cursor mode allows you to click on any existing region on any track and have it immediately played back. Playback stops at the end of the region. When this cursor mode is selected, your cursor pointer will look like a small loudspeaker icon.\n Tip You can also quickly audition a selected region without leaving the Grab mode. Simply select a region and hit the shortcut key H.\n  Stretch/Shrink Region  This cursor mode (T shortcut) allows you to drag and resize the duration of an entire region without changing the pitch. This is sometimes called “time stretching’, hence the T shortcut. Please see the chapter on Stretching/Shrinking Regions for more details. When this cursor mode is selected, your cursor pointer will look like a diagonal arrow.\nDraw Mode  This mode (D shortcut) has 4 use cases:\n Drawing new automation points (automation will be discussed in detail in the Using Automation chapter). Drawing new MIDI regions. Drawing new MIDI notes in MIDI regions. Editing existing MIDI notes and automation points when a region is sufficiently zoomed in.  If you haven’t zoomed in enough, it’s easy to create either a new MIDI note or a new automation point you did not need. If this becomes a problem, you should use the next mode which only allows for editing existing points and notes, not creating new ones.\nFor drawing MIDI notes, the toolbar additionally has controls for default note length, MIDI channel, and velocity.\nInternal Edit Mode  Use this mode (E shortcut) to edit existing automation points or MIDI notes.\nFor automation points, the cursor looks like a hand and turns into a small cross when you are on top of an existing point. Click, hold, and drag in order to move points.\nFor MIDI notes, the cursor looks like a hand with a quarter note above it when you hover the middle of note, that’s for selecting a note and moving it around. Hovering either the left or the right border of a note will change the cursor and allow adjusting start/end position (and thus duration) of a note.\nFor both automation points and MIDI notes, you can press Ctrl and click on multiple items to add them to a selection of items, then move multiple notes or points altogether.\n For MIDI notes specifically, you can also use rubberband selection: place the cursor anywhere outside existing notes (the cursor will lose the quarter note symbol), then press left mouse button and start dragging. A selection frame will appear. All notes it touches will be selected.\n Continuing In the following chapter, we will see how to take the regions we have edited and create looped sections from them.\nNext: CREATING LOOPED SECTIONS\n","description":"Edit modes for regions in Ardour","tags":null,"title":"Changing edit modes","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/editing-sessions/changing-edit-modes/"},{"content":"An equalizer (or EQ) allows you to separately control the gain of different frequency ranges of a sound.\nThis can be useful not only to sculpt the timbre of an isolated sound (for example, to make it sound “sharper” or “smoother”), but also to make sounds of various timbres to integrate better into the mix.\nOften, even after adjusting levels and panning, different tracks with similar frequency content (for example, a bass guitar and a kick drum) may be difficult to tell apart in the mix. An equalizer is a good tool to address this.\n3-Band Equalizer The simplest kind of equalizer is the one familiar to us from analog mixers. It has three parameters, which adjust the levels of three bands, or frequency ranges: one for the bass (low frequencies), one for the middle range frequencies, and one for the treble (high frequencies). The DJ EQ plugin on the screenshot below is just such an EQ. If you don’t have this particular plugin on your computer, explore the ones you have that have “EQ” in the name; you will likely find something similar.\n Multi-Band (or Graphic) Equalizer A more complex multi-band (or graphic) equalizer often has a lot more bands. Each band is centered on a frequency, and the level of each band can be independently adjusted. In some multi-band EQs, such as the LSP Graphic Equalizer plugin shown below, the center frequency of each band can be defined by the user. This allows you to either attenuate (or remove) an unwanted frequency, or to reinforce (boost) a desired one.\n The overall “curve” of the bands can also be used to determine the general tone of your track or mix. In the example above, the lower part of the mid-range frequencies have been “scooped out” a bit (note how bands 1,2 and 15,16 are left untouched at 0 dB, while intermediary bands 3 through 14 draw an attenuation curve, with band 7 at -13.5 dB as the lowest point).\nParametric Equalizer The parametric equalizer is the most versatile type of EQ used for mixing because of its extensive control over all types of EQ parameters. Ardour ships with a parametric equalizer plug-in called the ACE EQ. It looks like this:\n Others may have shinier graphical interfaces like the x42 EQ by Robin Gareus, but they all essentially do the exact same thing. You may have EQ plugins on your computer that look a bit different than these screenshots, but the parameters you can control are likely very similar.\n In both screenshots above (a-EQ and x42 EQ), there are options you can adjust for each frequency band. Each of the three bands has a level (dB) adjustment to cut or boost frequencies, a frequency (Hz) adjustment to select center frequency, and a some form of Q adjustment which determines how wide the range of frequencies to be affected will be.\nHigh Shelf, Low Shelf Both plugins shown above (a-EQ and x42 EQ) also contain a high shelf and low shelf. A shelf cuts or boosts everything above (high shelf) or below (low shelf) a specific frequency. For example, a low shelf can be used to remove unwanted rumbling sounds, and a high shelf can be used to reduce hiss. The frequency control of a shelf determines the cut-off frequency. for example, a low shelf with cut off frequency 200 Hz means that the equalizer will attenuate everything below that frequency. The amount of attenuation is controlled by the level knob.\nNote that for ACE EQ, there’s no Q parameter for either the high shelf or the low shelf, but x42 EQ has it.\nAn Example of Using an Equalizer In order to achieve a better separation of two instruments in the mix through the use of EQ, you first need to find out where the two instruments overlap.\nHere’s one approach.\n  Using ACE EQ or any equivalent EQ plugin, select an appropriate band for one of the instruments. In the case of a bass guitar, it would be a low frequency band (start at, say, 100 Hz).\n  Boost the gain to 10dB, change the Q (also called “bandwidth”) so that is a narrower range, and then adjust the frequency upwards and downwards slowly. You’ll hear a pitch move up and down.\n  Bring it down slowly until you hear the frequency range where the two instruments overlap. Now simply reduce the gain to -5dB, and you will hopefully hear the instruments a bit clearer. Next, apply the same process to the other instrument.\n  There are many approaches to EQ. Hopefully this will provide one example of how to begin EQ’ing tracks in your mix. But most importantly, when it comes to EQ, it is better to use too little than too much, unless you’re intentionally using extreme EQ as a compositional parameter.\nContinuing You should have enough tools now to create a clean, well-balanced stereo mix of your session. However, if you want the parameters of your faders, panning or plugins to change over time, then you will want to explore the next chapter on automation. If not, then skip ahead to learn how to export sessions in the next section.\nNext: USING AUTOMATION\n","description":"Applying equalization to audio in Ardour","tags":null,"title":"Equalizing","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/mixing-sessions/equalizing/"},{"content":"Sometimes you may need to record the audio output of another program into Ardour, e.g. the sound of a YouTube video playing in Firefox, or the output of SuperCollider or PureData. This chapter shows how to accomplish that.\nThe examples on this page were created on a computer running Ubuntu Linux. Beware that things may work differently if you are on another OS (in particular if you are using a Mac). The general principles are always the same, though.\nFrom your browser to Ardour Web browsers (Firefox, Chromium, etc.) are not JACK-aware applications. Fortunately, PipeWire now makes it fairly easy to connect any application that makes sounds to any JACK-aware recording application such as Ardour.\nAll you have to do is launch Qjackctl, start JACK, then start making sounds in the browser, then connect browser’s outputs to a track in Ardour. You can use either Connections or Graph windows in Qjackctl to do that, or you can do it directly in Ardour. For that, in the Audio Connection Manager manager switch to the Other tab in Sources on the left and connect your browser’s output to an Ardour track that is called From YT here:\n As applications like web browsers do not usually have persistent audio output ports, you do need to make your browser output some audio for the ports to be created. That usually means playing a video or starting a videoconference.\nAfter that, all you have to do is arm the track for recording, then start recording:\n  Tip Please make sure you disconnected all other outputs (such as a mic) from the track’s input, otherwise your track might catch more than you wanted and mix it with the audio from your browser.\n  From JACK-aware applications to Ardour Other music software like SuperCollider, Hydrogen, and PureData are JACK-aware. This means they will show up directly as source and destination options in Ardour’s Audio Connection Manager. You don’t need to worry about any PulseAudio / Jack bridge as in the YouTube example above.\nThe procedure is essentially the same: create a mono or stereo track to record the audio, set that track’s inputs to the desired source, and record as usual.\n The screenshot above was taken while recording a drum pattern from Hydrogen directly into an Ardour tracks named Drum N where N is a number from 1 to 18. By default, Hydrogen creates a stereo output from its own mix. However you tell it to create per-instrument output ports instead (the checkbox is on the Audio System page of the Preferences dialog).\nHydrogen’s window is on the right. Ardour’s patchbay window was left open for demonstration: notice that the application Hydrogen shows up as a source under the Other tab. Its ports are connected directly to the inputs of the tracks.\nContinuing This concludes the Recording chapter. Now that you have some audio imported, recorded from a line or microphone input, or even from another application, proceed to the Arranging Tracks section and learn how to arrange your composition.\nNEXT: ARRANGING TRACKS\n","description":"Routing signal from programs to Ardour","tags":null,"title":"Routing between applications","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/recording-audio/routing-between-applications/"},{"content":"Chapter 7 Saving sessions How to save a session, a snapshot of it, and a template for further reuse\nContents:\n Saving a session Saving a snapshot Saving a template  ","description":"Saving sessions, snapshots, templates in Ardour","tags":null,"title":"Saving sessions","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/saving-sessions/"},{"content":"Chapter 8 Appendices Where to find more info about Ardour and how to improve this tutorial\nContents:\n Further help Glossary Credits License How to contribute to this tutorial  ","description":"","tags":null,"title":"Appendices","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/appendices/"},{"content":"You can easily repeat sections of audio in your Ardour session.\nHere, we take the short rhythmic passage we created in Working with Regions and duplicate it to make a loop.\nBefore duplicating the passage, it is a good idea to combine individual regions in the same track into a single one: it is easier to move them around this way, and it prevents you from accidentally moving a single hihat out of place, for example. There are two ways of doing this: Combine Regions (allows you to “uncombine” later on), and Consolidate Range (“writes it in stone”, does not allow you to separate them later).\nIf you are still planning on making alterations to the rhythm (adding, removing, or moving individual regions), it may be better to use the Combine regions option. If you like the sequence the way it is and don’t want or don’t care to have the ability to separate them later, use Consolidate Range option.\nCombine Regions Simply select all the regions you want to combine:\n Then go to menu Region \u003e Edit \u003e Combine (or right-click on the selected regions and find the same option through the context menu, as shown below):\n The combined regions will look like this (note the word “compound” appended to the name):\n Should you need to separate them again in the future, simply select the compound region and go to the same menu and choose the option Uncombine.\nConsolidating the Range A more permanent alternative to Combine is to use the Consolidate. When you’ve arranged your regions into a single “loop cycle” and you’re satisfied with the sound, create a range with all the regions that will make up the loop.\nFirst, make sure every track used in the loop is selected. Unselected tracks are gray, and selected ones are colored (depending on UI theme). If any of the tracks you used are not selected, hold down the Shift key while clicking on them to add them to the selected group. Finally, use the Range tool to select the entire loop. Once again, the Grid setting will help you to set the range precisely to the start and end points of your metric bar. Once you have the entire loop selected, right-click on the range and select Consolidate range. If you would like any automation or plugin effects you have added to the loop to be included, select Consolidate range with processing.\n When the range is consolidated, new regions will appear in each track, each containing all the repetitions of the samples which you set up in the previous steps. Remember, once the range is consolidated, there is no way to undo this operation. In any case, if you find that you need to alter the rhythm in any way, you can always retrieve the original individual samples from the region List and rebuild the pattern with them.\n Duplicating the Range After you have merged individual regions that form your pattern (using either Combine) or Consolidate)), it’s time to duplicate the pattern to make it loop for several bars.\nThe Multi-Duplicate feature (seen in the Working with regions chapter) is a good way to accomplish this. Go back to Grab mode (G) , select all regions, and hit Shift+D. Choose how many times you want to duplicate the pattern (for example, 16). After duplication our session looks something like this:\n Just for review, other options you could have used for duplication are:\n  The Fill Track command from menu Region \u003e Duplicate \u003e Fill Track. This would fill the entire track with copies of the selected regions, all the way up to the_End Marker_.\n  The single Duplicate command from the same menu (Alt+D). This lets you make a single copy at a time.\n  The single duplicate action with Ctrl+Click on the region + Drag a copy.\n  Continuing In the next tutorial we will learn about stretching/shrinking regions that are longer or shorter than one bar in order to fit the rhythm of our passage.\nNext: STRETCHING/SHRINKING REGIONS\n","description":"Creating and combining region duplicates in Ardour","tags":null,"title":"Creating looped sections","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/editing-sessions/creating-looped-sections/"},{"content":"Automation is a way of dynamically changing audio processing parameters over time.\nUp to now, we have used fixed values for various parameters of our tracks, for example, a track fader set to -3.0dB; or a mono panner set to 100% left. These fixed values would apply for the entire track throughout the whole session.\nBut what if you would like these values to change over time in a pre-determined way? For example, you may want to have the gain of a track to gradually decrease over twenty seconds. Or you may want to make a sound move from left to right over two seconds.\nThis is accomplished with automation. The fader, panning, and any of the parameters of the plugins used in that track can be automated. An automated parameter is displayed underneath the parent track in its own automation track. Automation data is visually represented as an automation line, made up of a number of automation points. Here’s how a track with automation looks like:\n In the image above, the automation lane called Fader is associated to the parent track called Audio 1. The automation line controls fader (volume) changes over time.\nCreating a Fader Automation Line Let’s create a simple fader automation. Click the A button of a chosen track. A menu will appear, where you can select the parameter you would like to automate. Choose Fader.\n An automation lane will then appear. Select the Draw mode (D shortcut):\n Now you can create automation points by clicking anywhere in the automation lane. An automation line joins the automation points you add. The yellow number (-15.3dB in the image below) indicates the gain level for the selected automation point.\n Automation States The automation curve will not play, however, until you set the automation state to Play.\n  Manual When set to Manual, the track will ignore any automation data. It will just play with whatever volume is the fader is set to. In this mode, you are able to move the track fader by hand to set a new fixed level. That’s the default behavior of a track when it’s first created. Play When set to Play, the track will automatically change the gain levels following the automation curve drawn in the automation lane. You will no longer be able to move the track fader by hand. During playback, you will see the track fader moving up and down according to the curve. Write This mode will continuously record user changes to the automated parameter as the transport plays, creating an automation line. For instance, you may start playback and then make real-time changes in gain using the fader of your track. All the changes you make will be written (recorded) as an automation line, which then you can play back later by switching the automation mode back to Play. Touch This mode is similar to the Write mode but it won’t record over existing automation data unless the parameter is being changed.  If these concepts are new to you, focus now on just the first two modes (Manual and Play) and practice creating automation by drawing automation curves by hand.\nCreating a Plugin for Automation You may add automation to any plugin which has already been added to a track. In the example below, we have the AM pitchshifter plugin added to a track.\n In order to select a plugin parameter for automation, click the button on the track marked a. The menu will appear. Under Processor Automation you will find a listing of the plugins you have added for that track.\n Within each listed plugin, you may choose which parameter you want to automate from a list. In the example, we chose the Pitch shift parameter of the AM pitchshifter plugin. An automation lane for that parameter appears. Note that as you open several automation lanes, they will appear one after the other below the main parent track.\nDraw an automation curve for that parameter. Don’t forget to set the automation state to Play.\n In the image above, the pitch shift of the sound is now changing over time, controlled by the curve.\n Tip You can hide an automation lane by clicking on the “X” at the upper left corner of the automation lane. Note that a hidden automation lane continues to function even when it is not visible.\n  Adding Better Visual Resolution to Automation You can achieve a greater amount of vertical precision by increasing the height of the automation lane. Move your cursor near the lower edge of the automation track. The pointer turns into a vertical double arrow. Drag it down to increase the height of the automation lane. Notice that the parent track and the automation lane heights are independent, so while working in your automation curves you might set them up like this:\n  Tip Remember that you can also zoom in and out to increase resolution in the horizontal axis.\n  Working with Automation Points There are several ways to adjust automation points, depending on the editing mode you are in:\n An automation point can be dragged in any direction with the mouse (works in Grab, Draw, and Edit modes). To remove an automation point, hold down the Shift key while right-clicking on it (works in Grab, Draw, and Edit modes). Edit mode only: any segment of the automation line between automation points may be dragged vertically, affecting both end points at once, without affecting their horizontal position. Simply click somewhere on the line between two points, and drag up and down. How to delete multiple automation points at once (Grab mode and Edit mode only): select multiple automation points by dragging a box starting on the track background around the points. Then the selected points may be deleted by hitting Delete (not Backspace). If you are on a Mac and do not have a true Delete key, try Function + Backspace.  After an automation curve ends, its value will stay at that level for all subsequent regions, whether or not you have drawn a continuation of the curve.\n In the example above, the last point of the curve is at -23dB. That same level will be kept for the remainder of the track, even though the line is not drawn until the end.\nMoving Automation Moving a region to a new location will automatically move the automation data that might be aligned with it, as we can see in the following screen shots.\nBefore moving:\n After moving:\n You can change this behavior if you like. In other words, if you want automation curves to stay where they are even when you move regions around, go to Edit \u003e Preferences \u003e Editor and uncheck Move relevant automation when audio regions are moved.\nRegion-specific Gain Automation There is a way to create a gain automation directly bound to a region. When you select the Draw mode, you should see a flat line on the top half of each region rectangle:\n Click directly on that line to create automation points. These will be drawn directly on the region itself, unlike fader automation which is drawn or recorded in the automation lane. Region gain automation is separate from, and in addition to, fader automation.\n As with the automation lanes, a gain automation point can be dragged in any direction with the mouse. To remove a gain automation point, hold down the Shift key while right-clicking on it.\nDeactivating and Removing Gain Automation Gain automation can be reset or deactivated from the region context menu, which is reached by right-clicking on the region.\n Here, the gain automation is referred to as the envelope:\n Reset Envelope removes the gain automation points you have drawn in the region. Envelope Active toggles the gain automation envelope on and off.  When should I use region Gain Automation or Track Fader Automation? As seen above, both are very similar. With practice you will notice situations in which one is more convenient than the other. Here are two examples:\n If all you need to do is a little touch up (cut or boost gain) in a specific portion of a region, and you are otherwise happy with the level for the rest of the passage or entire track, use the region-specific automation.    If you have a more complex track with crossfades over regions, and/or need to shape a longer dynamic curve across several regions on the same track, use fader automation.   The screenshot above shows a simple gradual fade starting from the first region in the track, and ending at the last region. It’s very straightforward to do this with fader automation, but but it would be much harder to do it using region-specific automation.\nContinuing Once you have your automation in place, you are just about ready to export your stereo mix to an audio file which you can listen to or share on a website. Please continue on to the next section to learn the different ways of doing this.\nNext: EXPORTING A SESSION\n","description":"How to create and edit automation in Ardour","tags":null,"title":"Using automation","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/mixing-sessions/using-automation/"},{"content":"Regions can be stretched or shrunk in length without changing their pitch by using the Stretch/Shrink Regions tool (T shortcut, for “Time-stretch”).\n A small adjustment to the length of a region may not cause noticeable sound artifacts. However, the more extreme the change in length, the more obvious the effect of processing on the sound.\nTo use Stretch/Shrink Regions, place your cursor on top of the region, and then click-drag left or right. While dragging, you will see a highlighted area which represents the new duration to which the region will be shrunk or stretched when you release the mouse at the current position. Ardour will also display the new duration of the region next to the highlighted area in units of the primary clock.\n Time-Stretching a Region to Fit the Loop In the image below, we’ve added another sound sample—this time, a synthesizer line from freesound.org to the rhythmic passage we composed in the Creating Looped Sections chapter.\nAfter importing this synth line, you will see that the length of the new region doesn’t match the existing rhythm we’ve already created. It’s too long to be one bar and too short to be two bars. More importantly, while the first note matches the beginning of the kick drum’s sound above, the second note is clearly off-beat.\n We can correct this by using the Stretch/Shrink tool. Select the region you wish to stretch, switch to the tool, click on the right side of the region, then drag the cursor until the newly created highlight area matches the new length, that is, all the way to the second bar (again assisted by the Grid settings).\n When you release the mouse button, the Time Stretch Audio dialog appears. You can experiment with different settings for the Time Stretch operation. Each will affect the sound in a different way. It’s a good idea to try different stretch settings to find out which one gives you the result you’re most happy with.\n Click Stretch/Shrink in the Time Stretch Audio dialog to start the operation.\nWhen the operation is complete, the region of the synthesizer line will now be exactly two bars long and should fit in with the rhythm we already created with the drum samples.\n Continuing This was the last chapter of the Editing Regions section. Next we go into Mixing.\nNext: MIXING SESSIONS\n","description":"Stretching and shrinking regions in Ardour","tags":null,"title":"Stretching \u0026 shrinking regions","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/editing-sessions/stretching-shrinking-regions/"},{"content":"","description":"","tags":null,"title":"Categories","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/categories/"},{"content":"Ardour v7.0 tutorial Ardour is a professional, full-featured hard disk recorder and Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). Ardour is Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS). It features unlimited audio tracks and buses, non-destructive, non-linear editing with unlimited undo, and anything-to-anywhere signal routing. It supports standard file formats, such as BWF, WAV, WAV64, AIFF and CAF, and it can use LADSPA, LV2, VST and AudioUnit plugin formats.\n This tutorial provides a beginner’s introduction to using Ardour for basic sound recording and editing tasks. It assumes you already have Ardour up and running on your computer. Please note that this tutorial does not (yet) cover any MIDI functionality.\nFor information on how to install Ardour on Linux and Mac OS X, please visit the Requirements page. For Linux users, distributions such as KXStudio and UbuntuStudio offer a wide selection of useful music software, including Ardour.\n Download latest Ardour  Contents:\n Introduction Getting started Recording Editing sessions Mixing sessions Exporting sessions Saving sessions Appendices  ","description":"Ardour v7.0 tutorial","tags":null,"title":"Home","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/"},{"content":"","description":"","tags":null,"title":"Tags","uri":"/ardour-tutorial/en/tags/"}]