This page needs massive work It is very important that you check your system is connected and configured correctly before attempting to record. See Hardware Installation for more information on this topic.

While monitoring is a broad term, here we use it to refer to the signal a track delivers to its channel for further processing. There are two available monitoring states. These are 'input' (the signal being delivered to a track for potential recording), and 'off-disk' (material you have already recorded, or silence in the absence of a region).

Some multichannel audio interfaces have the ability to route an input signal directly to an output with very low or no latency. This is useful if your computer hardware is connected to the tape sends and returns of a mixing console. Whenever monitoring is set to input on a track, the track's input port is connected to its output in hardware (as would happen on a multitrack tape recorder). Hardware monitoring provides the best quality assurance for an engineer, as the signal path is exactly the same for input and off-disk monitoring. Level differences can be heard immediately, as can other gremlins that may ruin your recording. The hardware monitoring setting is only useful for interfaces supporting this feature.

Software monitoring uses software to perform input monitoring. When set to monitor input, a tracks input signal is passed to its channel as if it were coming from disk, allowing plugins to be heard while recording. This introduces an inevitable processing delay, or latency, to the input signal. The size of the delay depends on the current JACK configuration, which should be set to as short as possible while recording.

External Monitoring will silence the output of a track whenever the track is set to monitor input. It is useful if you are listening to the input signal using a path outside your computer (eg a mixing console).

Nearly all traditional tape recorders use the same monitoring model. Normally only tracks that are record-enabled will monitor input with the transport stopped. Tape machine mode emulates this behaviour. Some simpler machines (like a famous product by Alesis) switch all tracks to input on stop when auto-input is enabled, regardless of record-enable state. Disabling Tape Machine Mode switches to a behaviour that mimics this type of recorder. Be warned that if you disable Tape Machine Mode, many tracks sharing the same input (in software monitoring mode) will sum that input through the master buss (potentially including several plugins) whenever the transport is stopped. Since setting up a sound usually involves listening to the input with the transport stopped, you might not be hearing the sound you are about to record! Disabling this mode can also lead to surprising acoustic feedback. Tape Machine Mode is off by default.

When a track is record-enabled, it is set to monitor input regardless of the transport state. Auto input switches to off-disk monitoring when play is engaged. When Ardour is actually recording, the track will be set to monitor input again. Auto-Input is useful for performing punch-ins. Disable auto-input when performing 'dry runs' of an overdub to allow a performer to hear themselves while the transport is rolling.

It is of course possible to use Ardour on a single-disk system, but you are more likely to have performance problems this way. If you have more than one disk available, we highly recommend using one "system" disk and one or more "audio" disks.

The "system" disk is the main disk on which your operating system and (usually) all your installed software reside. If you have any other disks available, it is usually not advisable to put your Ardour session and all its soundfiles on the main system disk. The reason is that this disk may be used at any time by the OS or other programs and, if Ardour is trying to play a large amount of disk data at that moment, in the worst case this can cause Ardour's playback to stop completely. (insert screenshot of error dialog here) Even so, if you have only two disks (the system disk and your audio disk), it is possible that a large session will reach the performance limits of a single dedicated audio disk. In this case, it may be better to put some audio data on the system disk as described in the Soft RAID section below.

You can of course use a normal RAID disk array to spread data across multiple disks. This is beyond the scope of this manual.

It is possible to spread the resources for your Ardour session across multiple disks. This can increase the number of tracks or regions you can work with at once. There is no reason to do this if your computer has only one disk. To use the "soft RAID" feature, manually create a new directory on another disk. Open the Options Editor window. Click on the Paths/Files tab. In the "session RAID path" text box, you will see that the default value is the path to the directory where your current session lives. But this Session RAID Path can actually be a colon-separated list of directories. To add your new directory to this list, type a single colon after the existing Session RAID Path, followed by the full path to the new directory. Ardour will now record new tracks to either directory. (question: how does ardour decide which files go where?) You can squeeze some more disk performance out of an existing session by following the above procedure, then manually moving some files from the sounds/ subdirectory of the existing session into a sounds/ subdirectory of your new directory. Be very careful when doing this! If you accidentally delete these sound files, Ardour cannot magically fix it for you. If you use the "soft" RAID feature described above, take care to remember this when making and restoring session backups! You will not be happy if you forget to back up one of your data directories; and restoring a backup won't work if you don't make sure that the "Session RAID Path" setting corresponds to the directories where you actually put the restored files.

When creating tracks, there are 2 different options: Normal tracks and Tape tracks. Tape tracks implement a "destructive" style of recording that is useful when you will be making multiple recordings to the same track, and you don't want to keep a separate "region" on disk for each take. There is no undo function (yet) and there is no way to edit a tape track (yet). So what is this good for? Well, consider the case where you are doing a final mixdown of a project. You could record-enable two Tape tracks, and send the master bus output to these tracks. Every time you play through a section of the project, the resulting mix will be recorded onto the continuous tape track. Once you reach the end of the project, you can send the resultant wav file directly to the next production step. There is no "rendering" step required. The utility of this increases when you are using an outboard, automated mixer. This type of recording is very common on a film dubbing stage.

Once you have recorded material onto a track, the simplest way to punch in (or drop in as it is known elsewhere) is to roll the transport and press the master record button at the desired in point. Assuming the desired track is record enabled, its monitoring state will be switched and recording will begin. Pressing it again disengages record. If repeatable punch-ins are required, you may use auto punch.

Enabling the click Routing the click Specifying click sounds Default Meter Default Tempo

manual tempo tap tempo