I’ve got the raw material of my first Ardour multitrack project down! The RME HDSP 9652 hardware and software are all working beautifully. Thanks, Paul and others!
Stuff I’m doing is a live recording of a church concert with chorus/orchestra/soloists with just front and back pairs, so just four simultaneous channels, but anyway…
Now I seem to have made a stupid decision in creating a single 4-way audio track instead of two stereo tracks. I will obviously need to adjust the relative volume of the ambience pair and mix to stereo, but I don’t see an obvious way of doing either. So far the only way I’ve been able even to listen to what I captured is to let Ardour feed it out to four channels of D/A and mix in analogue. It’s fine for now, but in order to print a stereo CD I need a method that works entirely in Ardour. Am I just a moron for not seeing the obvious?
Select the 4-channel regions and then from the menu click Region -> Make mono regions. This will only add the corresponding mono Regions to the region list. Now create four mono tracks and simply drag&drop the new mono regions to those tracks.
Another way would be to create 4 busses and then route each output of the 4 channel track to the individual busses wich you could now use to mix the individual channels. [edit] Of course this way you could also create two stereo busses instead.
Creating two stereo busses turned out to be the most sensible solution. I doubt I will need to mix the left and right channels of front or ambience separately, they’re inseparable stereo pairs, really.
I’m only just beginning to learn to use the program. It must be the best thing to come along since sliced bread… As a token of my appreciation, I’ve put in EUR 100 in the beginning of Nov 08 - more to come as resources permit.