Was thinking that it’d be great if ardour had a dumb mode that would efectively turn a system into a Hard drive recorder similar to radar or multitrack tape machine. You could make a simple shortcut layout for a standard keyboard and maybe provide some basic editing capabilites. This would make ardour very popular as there seems to be a growing trend amongst the industry to track sessions without having to screw around setting things up in front of a computer. Standard recording software is starting to make musicans lazy and keeps the engineer from being able to just choose a track hit record and get it down.
can’t this be done with templates and setting tracks to ‘tape’ modes? i’m not sure if this does what you want, but i’d say that it is pretty simple that way. i think the new builds may have a ‘one click record’ mode which i assume automatically adds a new track and records on it, making things even more simple.
do you perhaps mean a ‘restricted’ interface version that hides all the complex functions? i think that may also be a possibility, as i think that was one of sae’s (ardour’s major sponsor) requested features.
hope this helps a bit
porl
“one click record” just removes the need to click the rec-enable button and then the transport roll button.
destructive recording is almost never what recording studios really want.
the SAE version has quite a number of capabilities removed from the user interface, but not the point of being “just” an HDR. you can see the result by setting ARDOUR_SAE=1 in your environment.
almost nobody really wants just an HDR. they think they do. then they ask “oh, but can i do that?” and then “oh, and can i do this?”
if there are specific areas of ardour’s existing functionality that you think get in the way for such use, please talk about them, and we can consider ways to tackle that.
almost nobody really wants just an HDR. they think they do. then they ask “oh, but can i do that?” and then “oh, and can i do this?”
This is true, but that is not what I am getting at. The hardest part of any session is getting the right take down as quick as possible. This is getting harder and harder because a lot of musicians tend to be lazy and request that the engineer fix it later. It also doesn’t help if the musician is standing there ready to go and you are fumbling around on a computer creating tracks, assigning routing and then getting your position in the track before you can even acknowledge them. Although this doesn’t really take long it seems some engineers are starting to notice a big difference between tracking the same bands on different formats (tape vs. DAW). Tracking to DAW’s also seems to be playing with client’s heads. I have seen many clients help do a mix/edit and are only concentrating on the visuals (this is starting to happen with engineers too). My idea was to create a dumb mode that uses shortcuts on the keyboard and basically can be run without a screen or have a screen with basic editing. This allows tracking to flow without any distractions and eliminates the fix it later attitude. Once tracking is done you could then switch to full functional mode and take things from there.
This definitely isn’t a new idea in the sense of technology, but there is no software package that allows you to do this. There are companies that are starting to become very popular that sell high end dedicated HD recorders and will only continue to gain momentum when people realise the benefits of using hybrid setups. There are even a few major production houses installing these systems and loving it. Although is seems like an insignificant feature i think that it could potentially be a launching feature for Ardour. Anybody would be able to construct a DAW/HDR system with whatever hardware they like and that is a very big drawcard.