I am avoiding answering the posts for right now as there is good conversation happening, and I am to tired to think at the moment, however I do want to address you last question. What you are seeing when you see the first words of your post repeated is a shortcoming of using Drupal for a forum system, where every post(And comment, and forum post) has a Title, as well as content, and what you are seeing is a title being automatically applied to the post that is equivalent to the first several words of your post.
Eventually I hope that a better system can be used for this, but for right now Drupal is working well in other ways, just forums are not necessarily the best part of it:)
I never suggested re-recording anything.
Routing two tracks through a stereo bus is a few seconds work: create a stereo bus, then change the output settings of your two chosen tracks to connect to the inputs of you new bus. If you have Ardour configured for sensible routing (the default) the bus will already have its outputs routed to master.
Now when you hit the “play” button, your audio will go through the two mono tracks and then through the stereo bus. You can insert plugins into the mono tracks, or stereo plugins to the stereo bus, or both. In that setup, you haven’t done any exporting and re-importing.
In your original post, you were talking about regions. If you need to create a stereo region (perhaps so you can do edits, cross fades, gain automation on the two channels in parallel), only then do you need the export/reimport technique. As Paul says, it’s much faster than realtime play/record, and if you export with no processing to a file in 32 bit float .WAV format at the same sample rate (all of which is what you need anyway) it’s very quick indeed because it’s a simple copy.
It’s pointless to compare Ardour with Audacity. Ardour can do thousands of things Audacity can’t, and all of Ardour’s processing and editing is non destructive. That’s good, but it imposes limits on the things you are allowed to do.
I can see that it would in theory be possible to prove UI tools to combine an arbitrary number of single channels to a multichannel track, (or even a special case for 2 x mono -> stereo), but it would be complicated to use, a lot of code to write and very few people would need it. You say you’re a new Ardour user and coming from Audacity: I suspect that you are missing something simple (I’m not sure what) that’s driving you to the incorrect conclusion that you need that feature.
I think I’m going to experiment a bit and do some stuff before saying anything else on this thread (Anahata do you have any tutorial recommendations that will make me do and understand what you have suggested?) but please someone tell me how to keep updated on threads without having to check them manually. Thanks
I find the “recent posts” link at the top of the page useful. You have to visit the site first, though - no email notifications.
Bookmark http://community.ardour.org/ - that’s the closest you can get, as far as I know.
Maybe this is an additional remedy:
Calf PlugIn Suite includes “Calf Mono Input”. The description says, “The Mono Input is a utility for splitting a mono signal into two channels. It is necessary for using the stereo processors of Calf on mono channels in programs like Ardour. Additionally it has some features to manipulate basic attributes of the audio stream like phase or delay of channels.”
Putting a stereo plugin in a mono track will do that split anyway*, but that’s not the same as getting two mono channels to behave as L and R of a stereo track.
Eyewright: Can you describe what is actually recorded on the two mono channels, and why you want them combined into a stereo channel? What you are describing is unusual, so maybe you don’t actually need to do what you are asking. Did you actually record the L and R channels of a stereo source onto two mono tracks? That is the only case I can think of where you would need to do what you are asking.
seablade: in that case I would consider it a session setup problem, and just take the few minutes per track to either bounce in freewheel mode, or export and reimport as stereo. Doesn’t take that long and saves these kinds of headaches later.
OK I’ve now watched some videos and acquired some basic experience with Ardour and after reading this thread again it impresses me how patient you all were.
I tried to pay as much attention as I could to what you said but it still looked like I was just ignoring your suggestions and explanations. That was actually because of my lack of experience and knowledge at that point.
However, there is one post I really did not read carefully: Paul mentioned the option of merging 2 mono files when importing to create a stereo track.
I just tried it and indeed it does join the two mono files without any apparent processing, with routing dependent of the filenames as Paul said.
Had I recognized what Paul revealed in that comment, the discussion would have changed considerably, for that’s precisely what I was asking for, only with material created/edited during the session instead of recorded audio.
As far as I know almost everything you do in Ardour generates a new region/file somewhere in the session folder. If I could find the files corresponding to two mono tracks edits I could join them into a stereo track via importing without having to export/bounce, couldn’t I? But if this is possible manually why not allow it from the region list, provided you rename those regions to make it clear which one will be left and right?
Just wondering. It doesn’t matter that much now because I have seen, like you said, there isn’t much use in being able to do that. All it does is simplify things a little and save visual space, doesn’t it?
Almost nothing you do in Ardour except for recording, importing, exporting and bouncing will create a new file. Regions are just “metadata” that refer to specific sections of specific files. There is no such thing as “importing a region”. Import is a file-based operation, not a region one.
Looks like I was way off in my assumption. Thanks for the clarification Paul. It’s very interesting, since the region list becoming longer gave me the impression of the session filling up with files, just as cleaning it gave me the impression of freeing up space. Now I know it doesn’t make any difference in the size of the session folder.
