Multiple master and monitor buses

The monitor bus is a great feature, way too overlooked in most daws! Great work!

But!

Is the restriction to having just one single monitor and master bus there for any specific reason or could users possibly be free to add as many as they need?

Never mind the practical use of several master buses (there are many), having an arbitrary number of monitor buses is very useful when mixing to several cues/zones/whatever. They would all need a selectable “source” param, of course.

Thanks for your inspiring work!

“multiple master” makes no sense, since it changes the definition of “master”. You can create any number of busses and route tracks to them in anyway you want, as well as freely routing the bus outputs. that doesn’t make them “master” busses, but i’m not sure quite what you would mean …

cue mix setup will receive substantial attention in some future version. you can do it all already, but it is more work and less covenient than it ought to be.

Maybe being able to pin particular busses to the monitor area would be useful?

The monitor buss is very specifically about feeding the speakers in front of the person operating Ardour so multiple monitor busses don’t make much sense. What would be useful is an ability to select what you are hearing through the monitor buss. By default that is the master buss, or, AFL/PFL’d things. If you could temporarily replace the master buss with any other definable sources (other busses, I/O etc) that would become more flexible and useful.

As for multiple Master busses, as Paul mentioned, you can have as many busses as you like and freely route them where you like. You could feed the Master Buss into a number of other busses and use those as level controls to different zones. Ardours busses are really a generic thing, they could be “Aux Masters”, “Audio Subgroups”, “Cue mix Masters”, or any kind of Summing Point you can think of.

Cue feeds are traditionally pre fader sends from the channels, as you may wish to have subtly different mixes going to each cue, and be distinctly different to the mix that is on the master buss. Ardour already allows for this, including the ability to add a pre-fader send to each channel with the send level matching that of the channels main fader, ie instant starting point for your cue mix. You create a bus, then from the right click menu of the Aux button select “add pre fader send to each channel”, then from the same menu select “copy channel fader levels to sends”.

As Paul said there is still work to do here, but a lot of what you want is already there.

Is there a way to pin some mixbuses into the section with the master bus/vca/monitor?

No there is not.

However since this discussion started, Ardour now features foldback busses (dedicated, individual mix busses for each musician). They are in a separate pane.

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