New Ardour based professional recording studio

Hi,

I just opened my new Ardour based professional recording studio in Italy and wanted to share my happiness with all of you, and thank Paul and all Ardour devs that made this possible!

SonicStudio is based upon linux Ubuntu 10.04 and Ardour2 VST, with mostly linuxdsp LV2 amazing plugins, a few other LV2 and LADSPA plugins and even a few Windows VSTs (that run flawlessy) which I really couldn’t do without…

The system is stunningly fast and stable (36 channels @1.5msec latency with no xruns anyone?), and after a month and a half of usage I can really say I made the right choice, when I decided to base it upon linux!

The studio website is here:

www.sonicstudio.it

You can listen to a few records (only one at the moment) I did on the homepage, feedback welcome!

Cheers
Alessio

Very cool!
What motorized table are you using? Was it easy to make it work with ardour?

Thank you.

Thanks! I’m using 3 BCF2000 via usb on a single midi channel, had to remap every key and made a template to automagically assign each fader and panner and mute/solo button to the channels I wanted to be controlled by them, other than this it’s been very easy and straightfoward, also because all 3 units had the latest firmware already installed and worked out of the box.

@vervelover

Wow, your studio looks amazing! You’ve also got a very nice mic collection. I’m interested in the Behringer BCF2000 MIDI controllers your using. You said that they work out of the box. I’ve been thinking of picking one up. (Mostly because in the U.S. I can get one for less than $150). Were there any other controllers you were looking at as well? What made you decide to go with the Behringers? I’m a big fan of Behringer products.

Thanks

Your round trip latency is NOT 1.5ms with a Multiface II (and definitely NOT 0ms if you use hdspmixer). Most probably you won’t even get down to 1.5ms if you measure just one conversion direction.

ADC takes around 0.5ms in the Multiface II and then you have to fill at least one 64 byte buffer, which takes 1.33ms. So just getting the data into the machine takes 1.8ms if you measure from the analogue input to the moment the sound card buffer is passed on to ALSA. Then there’s jack’s processing (again one buffer) and the output (again around 0.5ms for DAC). So your minimal system latency is something in the range of 0.5+1.33+1.33+0.5=3.7ms with jack and 1ms with hdspmixer.

You can measure all of this for real with jack_delay.

or, as its know as part of the JACK package, jack_iodelay

@ isaacj87

Thanks, glad you liked my studio!
I decided to go for the Behringers mainly because they’re the most flexible solution available for linux, honestly I’m not really into Behringer products but those BCF2000 offer great features for an amazing price, I think there’s no other linux-compatible controller with a parity of features (motorized faders above all) other than super-expensive SSL Matrix or Mackie consoles.
Check also these:

www.smartmix.co.uk

Unfortunately they do not come with motorized faders.

@ faberman

I think that when you talk about latency in forums ect., what people normally refer to is the latency as stated in the Jack (or Asio) control panels, not the round trip one you mentioned. Also direct monitoring (the HDSPE mixer feature) commonly refers as a no latency monitoring option, thus not taking round trip latency into account. I don’t even think it’s possible at all to have a round trip 1,5 ms latency without using the direct monitoring option of the sound card with any existing system…