Well, I was very pleased to find Ardour. I have licensed copies of Cakewalk (now Bandlab), Pro Tools and Mixbus 32 and am very impressed with the UI of Ardour.
I was super impressed when I installed it on my 24.x Ubuntu, plugged in my Behringer X18/XAir and, having set the inputs as it found the 18 channels (USB) from the mixer, it showed signal on the inputs. Right, I thought this is great.
So I went and played a 2 hours gig…Set everything up, input monitoring looks good…2 hours later with 1.2GB files for each track, no sound. So despite it saying it could see the input audio apart from 1 second or so of initial burp it did not record anything. Very sad. I guess I will have to spend more time figuring out why…
Also, I found that the Gain trim on the channels was not effective.
That said, it looks like a great piece of software so I will invest some more time in it and try to figure out why I did not get any recorded sound.
If you have 1.2GB files then it is quite possible you have recorded sound but currently do not have it routed to the output.
Do you see waveform displays in the track editor? If so then check the audio connections window to make sure all the tracks route to the master bus, and the master bus routes either to the audio interface, or to the monitor section and the monitor bus routes to the audio hardware.
Just to be clear on one little detail: the only license for Ardour is the GPL and you do not pay for it. The only thing you pay for is the service of us building it for you. Anyone can give you a copy of Ardour, and you can give a copy to anyone else. We just ask that if you are not going to build it yourself, you help support our continuing work.
The demo version should be perfectly capable of recording, even when it has “gone silent” for playback purposes.
Typically the signal flow is direct from input to disk, the channel controls only affect signal coming from the disk when mixing.
The only other thing I can think to check easily is open the files in another application like VLC and verify that there actually is audio data. You can also use something like sndfile-info to verify how many data frames are found, total file duration, and maximum signal level.
The recorded audio files are in the project folder/interchange/project-name/audiofiles and are floating point wav files.