That depends on disk speed, CPU speed, and how many plugins you have running.
With an SSD and minimal plugins and no loudness analysis maybe a couple of minutes.
You don’t have any existing recordings you can try?
Like a user manual?
Although I have to admit until you know, it may not be completely obvious that the OSC section is under “Control Surfaces” in the table of contents.
I believe you can also use OSC to trigger an export of recorded audio, or to launch a LUA script which could do an export.
Cheers,
Keith
I agree.
But, really, no-one was using the workflow you describe 40-50 years ago in the analogue era.
More specifically, there was hardly anyone who had access to (at the equivalent prices today) 10s of thousands of dollars of multi-track studio equipment and outboard processing gear, and who had a significant audience to distribute to, did this. People who had these capabilities would generally edit and post process the audio which, by definition, would take longer to do than exporting in Ardour would take today.
Anyone who was dong that style of recording were only doing so because they didn’t have the tools available (and large budgets required back then) to do that post-production work. And that meant they also probably didn’t have an audience of more than a few dozen people to distribute the result to.
You are, by the way, talking to someone who was doing recordings of, and for, low-budget theatre productions in the mid 1980s. If we had the capabilities (and audience) to improve the sound quality by post processing, we would have. And we would have loved to have been able to do multi-track.
We didn’t record like this because we didn’t want to, but because it was impossible for us to do anything else. Did it result in better recordings than if we had the facilities that are readily available and affordable today?
Absolutely not!
And even without those unaffordable studio tools, I forget how many hours we spent tidying up tapes with a razor blade to remove noisy or unrequired sections of a performance
I honestly think you have formed a romanticised, idealized view of old-school analogue workflows and practices which really only exists in your imagination.
These days, you can get studio quality compressors, reverbs, EQs, gates, and multi-track capability for the price of a cheap computer and audio interface. And it will, in many ways, exceed the capabilities of the gear available to high-end studios in the 1960s and 70s.
That is the setup you are using, complete with automation (OSC) that could only have been dreamed about 40 years ago and you are, effectively, trying to compare that to someone trying to record an amateur performance on a cheap Radio Shack cassette recorder and microphone.
The modern equivalent of the amateur setup you reference would be for you to launch the voice recorder on your phone and use its built-in mic. But that certainly wouldn’t work for the setup you describe.
I do understand that you want a setup that’s as simple to use as possible but it sounds like you have a very specific and unique use-case that you are trying to achieve.
There are ways to do this which include using more automation (LUA scripts and/or OSC control) to trigger the export either automatically at the end of the recording, or with a dumbed-down control.
Or you could just train the users how to perform the very straightforward export process within Ardour: if the session has been set up with a session template with the required export parameters, it really is as simple as CTRL-E, ALT-E to export the whole session and open the folder with the exported files.
Arguing that Ardour (or any other DAW) should do this is, IMO, a dead end.
Cheers,
Keith
I kept thinking that I had seen a stand alone mixing application before, and I just couldn’t bring it to mind.
It finally occurred to me that I was thinking of the “Non” family of tools. Not sure they are still being developed, because non-session manager (NSM) was forked into new session manager (NSM), but the pages are still up:
https://non.tuxfamily.org/wiki/Non%20Mixer
Yea Non-Mixer was one, never supported LV2 UIs IIRC, but I didn’t spend to much time on it. There are also other options like Software Audio Console (SAC - RML Labs) but that is Windows only. Or of course you could look at options like Waves LV1 (Pardon Our Interruption) on Windows and Mac. I am sure there are probably some options on Linux I am forgetting, but honestly I just use Mixbus at that point when I need it:)
But all that aside, a hardware mixer into a standalone recorder would still be my vote generally.
Seablade
The mixer has been forked
The original creator has “left the building”.
I wasn’t aware of the fork. Thanks for bringing it up.
Seablade
I happened to look at the original “Non” family just before it was forked and the original creator disappeared. I was looking for something that would put a couple of PEQ bands on a set of junk drawer speakers and otherwise disappear from view. So I wanted it to run on a Pi, as a fairly late part of its normal system audio chain. I had found a standalone GEQ that was made specifically to just slip into ALSA’s chain with some explicit routing in ALSA’s config file, but no PEQ.
The original guy behind Non was one of a few people on various single-developer projects, that struck me as, “Technically brilliant to have made all of that all by himself and done a fantastic job with it, but ALL of his smarts went to that and so he hurt every person that tried to work with him, including both potential help and users. And he had a hard time understanding that.”
From there, the paths are as varied as the people who take them. This one had his project forked out from under him, so he put a banner on his own site about it being stolen from him and the very future of open-source audio being in jeopardy, but nobody paid attention to him.
Of course. I’m just looking for a general feel, not mathematical precision yet.
Not like that. At least not yet. Especially if they have to run through the processing again that was also running live with the same signal. So it also depends on where the tap point is for the internal recording.
If it’s meant for a studio session with all scratch processing in the moment and then post-production with a completely different set of tools, I’d expect the internal recording to be dead-raw, pre-everything on each track, which would extend the export time for me because it has to recreate the signal that I really want and did exist in the moment, but wasn’t captured.
Easy solution though: create a new track to receive the live signal that I want, and record that one.
Though if it still takes a couple of minutes just to shovel samples from one file to another, it’s probably not going to work. These people leave quickly, and it’s hard to hold onto them.
It’d be a lot better if it took 90 minutes to create a 90-minute file as the samples come in, instead of taking 3 minutes or whatever after the fact to rearrange them.
Also, I just got the plugin recorder installed that was mentioned above - on my own machine, not the production one yet - so I can play with that and see how it works too.
Great! Thank you! Now where’s the obvious link to it in the program itself, that comes pre-installed with at least one operating system (Ubuntu Studio), so that a new user may not even be aware that there is a website to go to?
I still think spamming the settings with links to documentation would be a good idea. A first-run popup is reflexively dismissed, and therefore useless. I think the connection to the manual should always be directly in front of the user, but not intrusive. Spam the settings with links to the exact page that talks about each thing, and a tutorial button on the menu bar, for one idea. Likewise for the setup windows before you even get to the main one. Not a big button, just a hyperlink for each would suffice.
It’d be even better if that documentation were stored locally, installed together with the app itself. Maybe viewed with the system web browser or whatever, but still have those links work when I’m offline.
(not everyone has live internet all the time; for example, there are a couple of times a year that I’m in an RV with limited cell data and need to conserve it, so I just don’t connect unless I really absolutely have to)
Yes, that is the default.
That is just what I was going to suggest. You would have to setup the export correctly so that it only exported that track (or region export would likely work since a single recording to a track will just result in one region).
In that case there would be no processing occurring, so it should run nearly at disk speed (i.e. should only take several seconds).
In the “Help” menu, from the “Reference” link.
I still think that would be hugely annoying and make the menus cluttered and nearly un-navigable. There is a reason that no software actually does that.
The link to the tutorial is also in the Help menu.
… and also the reference manual:
Okay, what happened there? It does already exist, but I didn’t see it and asked for it to be added. Maybe this is why things overhaul their UI when it used to work just fine? Not asking for that here, but…things disappearing into the familiar scenery is definitely a real thing.
Anyway, thanks for all your help! And bearing with someone that came at all of this “sideways” and still has some “straightening out” to do.
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