Negative offset when recording ardours click

Hi all,

I am trying to record ardours click on a dedicated audio track.
The ardour click output is directly (software/jack) wired the audio tracks input.
The resulting recording shows a negative offset of ~40 samples (at 44.1khz) ahead of the exact beat positions. The click waveform starts ~40 samples ahead of the beat position.
This happens with version 2.8 (SVN 4918) as well as with version 2.8.11.

How can this offset be explained?

My setup:
ardour 2.8(4918) and 2.8.11
jack 1.9.5 at 44.1 khz with 1024 Frames, 2 Periods
M-AUDIO audiophile
linux kernel 2.6.34-12

Thanks,

kk

Thanks guys, this already helped a lot.

@chrisg: There are no other inputs connected to the recording track.

@roaldz: Thanks for the hint. The “Nudge fwd by recording offset” function corrects the alignment of my click track. I wasn’t aware of this function, since I did not know the purpose.

I would like to know, from where ardour is taking the “recording offset”. None of the values configured in jack is nearly a multiple or a fraction of 40 samples.

And in which cases one should consider using this function? With analogue audio material, an offset of 40 samples might not be visible (and obvious), but it might affect the mix. I would simply oversee it.

More information on that?

Thanks,

kk

Do you have any other audio sources (like hardware inputs) routed to the same track as you are trying to record the click onto, or is the click the only source on that track ?

I measured this too, don’t really know what periodsize and samplerate i got, but the offset is 94 samples ahead of the beat. If I right click the recorded region and click “Nudge fwd by recording offset” it places the recorded region exactly at the right position (clicks aligned to the beat grid).

Roald

I have exactly the same problem, Ardour 2.8.11. Not only the click is early on the grid, but unfortunately all midi stuff (Hydrogen, QTractor driven LinuxSampler) plays a bit earlier than Ardour audio. The amount of misplacement depends on Jack frames/period setting. To achieve perfect sync I have to record output of samplers and ‘nudge forward by recording offset’ in Ardour. It looks like Ardour playhead is a tiny bit late comparing to playhead in QTractor and Hydrogen. There’s no problem if Jack buffer is <= 128 but larger buffers make it quite noticeable.

Hi,

I also have this problem,

Any time I start a new project and record to a click the next recorded track is always offset from the previous track recorded to the click, and no I’m not recording the click, it is running directly to the outputs for monitoring only…

Further to that on another arrangement I imported a bunch of wave files from a previous project and synced them up with the proper tempo BPM, I then recorded the output of Hydrogen into a new track and it was offset from the existing waves/tracks in the arrangement.

In both cases it was fixed by dragging around the existing tracks to sync but this is a very annoying ‘idiosyncracy’ in a DAW as good as Ardour.

I did briefly talk to Paul on IRC about it one day but he seemed doubtful that it was a fault in Ardour… I don’t experience this issue in other sequencers so I’m glad to see I’m not totally delusional, and that others have the same issue.

“I did briefly talk to Paul on IRC about it one day but he seemed doubtful that it was a fault in Ardour… I don’t experience this issue in other sequencers so I’m glad to see I’m not totally delusional, and that others have the same issue.”

In that case it doesn’t sound like there’s much hope this will be resolved in future releases if it’s not being worked on. Has this been identified as an open issue?