50 Things you did not know you could do with Ardour

Well ALL features would be a Sisyphos task.

In the “50 things” presentation I intentionally focused on some more obscure features, but there are already some bit-sized video for more common features at

Thanks for the great examples, Dr. Robin. For my target case (home videos) I had decided to dry record because I don’t trust my abilities to set the wet correctly with one chance. The example of a podcast with multiple guests makes perfect sense.

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Varispeed with pitch correction seems to require a plugin that is not bundled. Or am I looking in the wrong place?

Correct. That’d be x42 Vari Speed Anti Pitch

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Thank you for all the free plugins that are available! They are useful, efficient, simple, and dependable!

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Wow, didn’t know that one, thank you !

Watching on here the UbuntuOnAir logo obscures your counter :rofl:
Not if you watch directly on YouTube though.

VCAs was a very helpfull thing to know! Now i can use one fader on my midicontroller to use multiple faders!

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Great presentation!
But I have one little question on topic 7.
@x42 You mention the recording modes but I still miss one :wink:
I think layered mode (or soundonsound?) lacks the possibility to cut up all stacked takes and create a new “take” by muting and unmuting certain region fragments from the individual takes. At the moment it only plays the take on top, so you’d have to move things around and I still consider this workflow a workaround.
It’d be awesome to manually select the fragments I want to mute or play in the final “take” and even have multiple fragments play at the same time like in soundonsound mode, just by clicking on the desired fragments.

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Right click on the Track header and choose Layers -> stacked mode. I am not at my audio computer ATM, but IIRC the shortcut is SHIFT+CTRL+] (or other modifiers. It is a toggle, very useful to quick check what is happening “under the hood”.

Edit: Link to the manual: The Ardour Manual - Track Layering

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Thanks for your reply :slight_smile:
I think it is not exactly what I meant. I think stacked editing is flawed in Ardour.
The function “choose top region” for example messes things up and wouldn’t be necessary if you could just click the regions you want to play or to mute without rearranging (becaue that messes up the whole track by creating new layers and moving regions around beyond recognition)
All the functionality is already there (slicing regions, greying out muted parts, playing multiple layered regions). IMHO what’s missing is the feature to simply select fragments of stacked regions to be played or muted, regardless of their vertical arrangement in the stack. No need to move around regions or create regions, no need for extra clicks in dialogs.

@dingodoppelt:

If you just want to ‘audition’ the region without moving it, you can use the Audition action. Just click to select the region, and click the ‘A’ shortcut. That will:

a) temporarily solo the track you’re on
b) temporarily mute all regions except the one you’ve selected, regardless of their layering
c) roll the transport.

When you stop the transport, A and B are reset to the prior state before the Audition action.

-Ben

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Ah, but I see that’s not what you meant :slight_smile:

You’re right, layered mode does not lend itself well to that “swipe to top” kind of editing, because the layers can get very complicated. Layers are best used for things that you want to ‘layer’ … perhaps a stack of harmony vocals, or a bunch of bird noises that will overlap each other. Layers are also convenient when you want to replace one drum hit, note or riff on top of an existing track.

BUT … if you are dealing with multiple ‘takes’ then you almost certainly want to use Playlists, which is a convention from other DAWs. If you create a new Playlist for each take, then you can quickly switch playlists, swipe the best bits, and paste them to the final playlists. Here’s a video:

It’s tempting to use Layers for everything, but this might be a case where you should “use the right tool for the job”

Best,
-Ben

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i think the confusion comes that the ‘layers’ look like comping in Ableton Live and/or Bitwig. In Bitwig comping is really seamless, click+drag portion of sample to ‘promote it to top layer’. You can record several iterations of looped region, comp and proceed… just by making range, press rec and record… In Mixbus/ardour it gets tedious to do the same thing… you cannot loop-record continuously (for several playlists with single action). You can record one iteration, stop, create new playlist, name it, play-rec, and repeat. You have to juggle playlists to hear different takes at ease, you have to use copy/cut/paste actions. Time domain for takes is fixed per playlist - if you want to nudge/move all playlists at once, you have to juggle again with playlist selector…
Also all takes in Bitwig are within the single clip (read region for ardour:)) - so you can move region, all takes are following. No juggling between playlist editor/menu… just select parts which you like and proceed…
No complications for end user (playlists, region opacity etc) How Comping Works in Bitwig Studio | Bitwig

EDIT: video with adjusted start for comping rec+edit https://youtu.be/DANWf9gG8Vg?si=c56F6e6Mvk504z55&t=118

for example, Playlists are great if you have a band which is going to record song X times… But too tedious on the micro-level. The smaller the comping part is - more tedious editing is.

Comping implementation (be it using playlists or layers) is a bit convoluted (compared to other implementations). And i think it can be greatly improved for the end user…
Of course, on the other hand - Bitwig lacks many other tools that Ardour/Mixbus has…

just my 2 cents about comping

Hey Ben,
thanks for your clarification.
I finally think I know what I meant as well:
My workflow is a different one. I want to loop record takes on top of each other and do not want to stop in between takes to create playlists.
Auto generated playlists for each take in the loop come to my mind :thinking:
I still think that comping a virtual take from fragments of stacked regions while not moving them around, just muting and unmuting regions as desired with the mouse should be given another thought. The time and hassle that feature would save users is worth it. Creating playlist inhibits the artistic workflow by forcing the user to stop playing music and do computer things all the time :wink: And copying, pasting and creating things in an extra dialog seems unreasonable compared to quickly clicking your mouse on things you like or dislike.
Another thing: The video introduction to the new feature could be as short as 30 seconds compared to 17:53 minutes for the playlists feature :wink:

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If you are in ‘stacked mode’ (see my previous post) it is actually quite simple to do exactly that: click on a region then press

  • ALT+1 to mute/unmute it
  • ALT+0 to make it transparent/opaque

If region is muted, it is also transparent (i.e. the region under it will play). If a region is unmuted and transparent, both it and the region(s) under it will play.

No need to rearrange positions.

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Most excellent sir, could we have 50 more at the next opportunity. I have been using Ardour almost 10 years now and somehow I never got round to reading the manual. The favorite window will now see intelligent use, drag drop with preset to selected tracks is why I should have read the manual.

Thanks!

Thanks for the hint!
That’s actually almost perfect :wink: I noticed that in snd on snd mode I could only make the top layered clip audible. Shouldn’t that mode mix all unmuted regions? Does it depend on the mode while recording the takes? (in layered mode that is)
So many questions, but I feel I almost got it :slight_smile:

It is indeed a ‘recording mode’, and it doesn’t change what has already been recorded.

When you record ‘snd on snd’ the region(s) you are recording will be transparent. You can however also doing it ‘after the fact’ with a keyboard shortcut, or you can select a bunch of regions and change all of them to transparent or opaque.

You can also check in the regions sidebar (SHIFT+L and click on ‘regions’) on which state are all of the regions, and change it with the O checkbox on the far right (screenshot below)

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Thanks a million! NOW I got it :smiley:
This community is awesome, so is ardour!

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