In a recent post I described a few problems encountered in my first experiences with Ardour. This time I decided on a different test/approach. I started by making a grove track, using Hydrogen, which by the way has some awesome kits. Then I double tracked it, a total of two stereo tracks. I then began to add clean mono guitar tracks (no plugins this time). In all I managed to add twelve guitar tracks before it began to be unresponsive. I must admit I’m quite elated, as this means I can currently get 14 tracks of simultaneous playback, including the master track. I called my little 40 second project: ‘Sibelious RockManicov’s Cacophony of Utter Bollocks’ and hopefully it shall never disturb the eardrums of any respectable listener!
The good news is that the Edirol UA-25 interface, which by the way is USB, works beautifully with Ardour and Alsa. I’m so glad as I really like Roland gear. I have a Roland guitar synth, the GR-33, which I affectionately call the Vulcan guitar, and I’ll be testing it on Ardour in the near future. Furthermore, the DSP load never exceeded 9%, which indicates the CPU is up to the job. Now I’m beginning to get very very excited, as I love Ardour down to its very aesthetically pleasing colour scheme, Vive la Révolution !
However, ideally and in a perfect world, I’d like to have twenty audio tracks as I’m a mere proletarian popular music composer/performer and have no intention of recording the London Symphony Orchestra. Twenty tracks and the possibility of adding the odd plugin here and there, plus the inclusion Jammin would suffice. I have quite a lot of outboard gear, including a weird collection of stomp boxes, so I’d adding effects at the input stage quite a lot. My system currently consist of:
2.2 GHz Athlon64 dual core 4200
Maxtor 250 sata hard-drive
Edirol UA-25 interface/souncard
1GB DDR2 667 Ram
To be honest and in my capacity of humble aficionado, I know sh#t about these matters. However it seems to me that the RAM memory in my system is the weakest link. As I read the motherboard’s manufacturers booklet, it says that DDR2 667Mhz Ram gives it a memory bus speed of 333Mhz. Is that enough? Also, it says that it supports DDR2 800Mhz Ram, would this improve matters. If I had two 1Gb cartridges of RAM, instead of one, would this give 20 tracks of ABSOLUTE AUDIO POWER? Hopefully someone can tell me, as I believe you Linux Beings have expanded your grey matter in these darker ethereal regions of the mind and my shopping for pc components equates to my vague trips to the fruit and veg market. With no further ado, yours sincerely RR.