Odd behaviour with Regions and Auto Punch

Getting Stuff Done How do I .... ?
#1

First off Hello Ardour Community!

I am fairly new to Ardour, but very excited to learn and hopefully contribute to Ardour and the world of Open Source in general.

Sorry my first post is a cry for help, as opposed to anything useful.

I am running Ardour 2.7.1 on Ubuntu Studio 8.04
SYSTEM: Pentium 3.2Ghz Duo, 3.2GB Ram, Echo Layla 24/96 sound

I am recording 8 channels no problem, 0 xruns, good latency etc. GREAT!

However I seem to have some fundamental misunderstanding of how regions are supposed to work, which seems to be causing some unpredictable behaviors in Ardour. I understand that a region is not a track, more that it references an audio track to allow for non destructive editing - GOOD!

The problem that I am having is that when I start editing regions (splitting, deleting, moving, etc.) I begin to start having some strange results that I cannot predict or understand.

For instance when I split a region, I wind up with 3 regions instead of the 2 that I would expect. In the regions pane I see a list of regions *.1, *.2, *.3 which seem to correspond in some way to the regions in the editor… but when I delete them, they don’t always seem to be linked directly? Sometimes a region will mysteriously appear way down at the end of my recording. Sometimes I will have regions on top of other regions, or deleted regions that seem to be in limbo somewhere? Has anyone else been confused by this when they started? I feel like I am missing some fundamental understanding of how Regions, Playlists, and Chunks are supposed to work, and have searched through all the documentation I could find on the manual, and in this forum, but still am unclear.

I am also only able to Auto Punch onto a raw track (when I try to punch into a previously existing piece of audio, the playback stalls about 2 seconds into the punch)… but I am thinking this might be resolved by getting a better understanding of basic editing with Regions, Playlists, Chunks.

If anyone could point me in the right direction, any posts, documentation, or tips regarding Regions Playlists and Chunks, I would be most appreciative.

Thank you muchly in advance
Sincerely -Dave

P.S. Am loving Ardour so far, and looking forward to learning more.

#2
  1. forget about chunks
  2. forget about deleting regions from the region list
  3. regions in the region list are not the same as regions in tracks. they represent a kind of “catalog” of all the regions that were ever in tracks. a region can continue to exist in the region list long after it ceases to ever be in a track. you can drag it (or “insert region”) a selected region from the list back into a track.
  4. did you read the manual section on playlists?
  5. your split behaviour sounds rather wierd. how are you splitting?
  6. regions are free to overlap other regions (some other DAWs like ProTools don’t really have this concept) - in general this will cause crossfades between them (but there are a lot of cases, and user options, to affect this)
#3

Some issues resolved, thanks for the helpful tips. Sorry so long for the reply, but I have been playing around figuring out as much as I can on my own before posting again. I have solved much through experimentation, just getting more familiar with the program in general, and with helpful hints from the Ardour Community. I am currently working on a few projects using Ardour now, and use it regularly enough to feel that it is quite fair that I should subscribe, which I just did moments ago. Hopefully I will have some music to post in the near future recorded with this great software.

That said I updated to version 2.8 and some of the persistent things I was unable to figure out (problem with the regions splitting into 3 went away). However I was still having a problem with the regions extending out to 27 hours in length (even after I would trim and save, they would be back to 27 hours long upon restart). I figured out that this behaviour only happened on the original 8 tracks that I had recorded onto. Then I figured out what had happened was I had originally built the template to have the first 8 tracks capture into tape mode. I don’t remember why I had done this, I think I just liked the sound of it (ha ha). So I switched back to normal mode, and now the regions behave. Does this make any sense?

Well, thanks once again for your help, and if I do figure anything out (many of my problems have been user errors so far) I will be sure to post it.

#4

Tape mode doesn´t affect the sound of the recording, it affects how the tracks are handled. This is better explained in the manual.

#5

Yes, I think I was doing multiple takes and did not want to deal with having multiple audio tracks, but honestly I can’t recall exactly why I built the template in tape mode… but that sounds like what I might have been thinking. If one take was simply no good, I could just zip back to the beginning and re-record into the same track, right? But what I’m wondering is do I have to then switch back into normal mode once I want to do editing? It seems that would be the best Idea I suppose.

#6

You cannot edit a tape track. They are not designed for the normal style of DAW workflow, but are there to allow people who are using a tape-style workflow. There are few concessions made to going back and forth between the two modes on one track, but all in all, i think you’re confused about to work efficiently in a DAW. You can just “zip back to the beginning and re-record into the same track” without using tape mode. I suggest again that you read the section in the manual on playlists.