Transistion from Adobe Audition/Cool Edit to Ardour

Now I’ve always used Cool Edit/Adobe Audition and would consider myself a little more of a power user where I use multi-track features and plugins and things. AA is reasonably a fairly simple application to get your head around when seeing it for the first time. It was a long time ago when I first used it, but I haven’t really tried anything else since.

I guess being the fact I like to try out new softwares and things, and having compiled kernels in the earlier days from version .9, I’d sort of think I’m a little nerdy at times. These days though I try things on a needs basis. When looking for free alternatives of multi-track audio software, there were definitely limited options available. As I used Windows XP as my primary operating system there were even less options, and of those that were available most have been fairly unusable.

Along came Audacity, and it was great for what it was. I jumped on board early in version .82 to try it out and for what it is being free, it’s pretty good. But, there are limits. I think generally speaking you get what you pay for and as with a lot of freeware, this is the case. But, there are exceptions.

Years ago when using Linux in my testing phases of ‘look what this can do’ scenario and never actually using it for any real purpose, I discovered Ardour and realised it had a lot of potential. After installing it and importing a few MP3 files, I had a quick play and thought, yeah that works, but never took it to anything further.

Well, since getting a little Mac laptop and getting ready to retire my pc laptop, I’ve been in need of something that is going to do the job properly of multi-track audio recording and editing. So, this is where Ardour comes in to play.

Since downloading it from www.ardour.org I’ve had only a few dramas. I’ve now got a little Behringer UFO202 device for my stereo recording, which the unit itself hasn’t caused my any dramas, but for a new user from AA, getting these devices and Ardour working together is rather confusing and at times frustrating. This is partly because I was sold a hardware device (from an Apple
Genius) that couldn’t do stereo recording. I returned that after a week and a half of trying everything, but that learning curve has since helped me in getting Ardour working properly.

So the biggest challenge for any new user of Ardour is the whole Jack Audio thing. Having read a little, I discovered that Ardour is one of a hand full of Jack-Native programs, whereby support for the Jack program is basically built in to it. Why does it matter? Well, Jack is like a way of taking care of the audio traffic. Internally, the audio data is transported and routed around the computer in and out, to each specific program. This is very very different to Windows computers, where you have 2 audio level windows – Audio In, and Recording Out, where you just select which device, of wav, line in or microphone as your recording device. It’s really different in a way. But, the basics of it are the same.

To get it working in Mac OS X, go to Applications, Utilities and run Audio Midi Setup. Now, I got Ardour working without using Jack and the Core Audio driver, but it is easier and the recommended method to use Jack OSX (http://www.jackosx.com/. Follow the instructions there and you should be right.

Having just posted on the Ardour website, I got a couple of replies straight away, which was great. But I think I may be going about using Ardour in the wrong way… But we’ll see. If I can use it the way I’d expect or find a way, I’ll be trying… http://ardour.org/node/3769