Not sure if this is possible?

I’m still on 6.9 btw

I know the Ardour team has worked extensively on the time domain on recent releases. Has this ever been suggested or considered or is it possible and I’m overlooking it?

What I would really find useful is if there was a way to move/drag/slide the time origin, ie zero point on the timeline, to the right along the timeline, thereby assigning some bars/beats to negative time? As in:
| -3 | -2 | -1 | 0 |1 | 2 | 3 etc.

Sometimes you want to leave the cue notes at the start of a song in the final work. Some songs start on the third or fourth beat. Sometimes, when you’re working, you may want a count-in hard coded into the project rather than using the count-in in the normal way. ie we have “Record with count-in” but not “Playback with count in” or “Loop with an initial count-in”. In this way you can play a project back while accompanying it, or have an audible, timed gap between hitting play and stirring your coffee and picking up your instrument.

Happy audioing!

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It’s possible to move the “session start”-marker to anywhere on the timeline, maybe that achieves what you’re looking for?

Also, you can SHIFT-left-click and drag the first time signature marker to start anywhere you need. See the tempo and time signature section in the manual

In Ardour 7.x, you do this by placing a BBT marker in the BBT ruler, labelling that point with an arbitrary bars/beats time (in this case 1|1|0). You could also move the start marker there, though for different effect. Yes, that’s right: there can be any number of 1|1|0 (or any other BBT times) on the timeline.

Note that in 7.0 and 7.1 BBT marker use is a little buggy; we plan to release 7.2 next week with some important fixes in this area.

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More details about Paul’s answer:

To create a BBT marker, you right-click in the “BBT Ruler” at the very top of the editor.

Then immediately to the right of the new BBT marker, you can cmd+click (or ctrl+click on windows/linux) to drag the tempo left and right; this has the effect of moving the beat&bar lines to the right of the BBT marker and you can usually see exactly what tempo lines up with your recorded transients.

You can advance through the song and add additional tempo markers, whenever you see or hear that you are getting slightly out of time with the metronome. And if you get really stuck (like: if the song has a very complicated rhythmic section that you don’t care to figure out) you can always drop another BBT marker and say “bar 16 is here” then continue tempo-mapping.

As Paul said, there are still a few bugs to be resolved but we think this is a UNIQUE feature for any DAW.

-Ben at Harrison

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