Hi,
I’m having huge problems with setting meters in a song going from a 4/4th to 6/8th and then back again. To be precise, I have two problems:
One is that I want to switch to the 6/8th measure at the 2nd beat of the previous bar. Well I can set this and it works, but ardour just won’t save it. When I load the project, after having saved and closed it, the change from 4/4th to 6/8th beat is moved to the end of the full bar. Well that’s the one problem…
The second is that I am not able to set the position for going back from the 6/8th to the 4/4th beat. I can create the marker close to the position where I want it to be, but when I intend to drag it to the correct position it behaves completely erratic. This goes as far as that the marker for the previous change of measure (i.e. going from the 4/4th to the 6/8th) also jumps to another position - very annoying…
(it’s pretty tough to explain the behavior I’m seeing - if you don’t understand what I just wrote, please ask; also as I am from germany I’m not that firm with the english music terminology)
I suppose (and hope) that it is probably me just not knowing how to use ardour correctly. Is there something I’m missing.
Oh, by the way, I’m using the Ardour 2.5 from the Ubuntu Studio repository.
Hope you guys can help.
Thanks,
Michael
There have been some improvements to this since 2.5. There is already a bug report on behaviour related to this, and that bug report has a patch too. I have tested the patch, as have many others. Some people report it being very satisfactory - my experience was not, which is why it is not in the release yet. It might have made some things better, but it made other things worse in my case. A real fix needs to just make it better, i think.
I know this is not much use to you right now.
Hi paul,
thanks for the reply. Just a short follow-up question. When you say “There have been some improvements to this since 2.5.”, does that mean these improvements are already part of version 2.7 or are you referring to the patch that you talk about afterwards.
In other words, would it make sense to try out the 2.7 version to see whether there is any improvement?
Cheers
it always makes sense to try out a newer version of ardour 
Hi packoman,
I’m not sure if this is off-topic, but if you want your 6/8 measures to start at the second beat of the previous 4/4 measure, then the previous measure cannot be 4/4 !
In my musical understanding new time signatures can only start at beat one of the new measure, so your example would be
…|1_2_3_4_|1_|123456|123456|…
which is 4/4, 1/4, 6/8, or even better: 4/4, 8/8 (or still 4/4), 6/8
In my opinion, ardour should only support time signature changes at full measures - which is no limitation at all, but probably easier to implement correctly. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Hi.
Yeah. I just realized, that that definitely does not make sense! Of course I will have to put one measure of 2/4th in between the 4/4th and the following 6/8th. My bad.
I will try, whether this is the reason that get messed up later on in the song. I guess I wasn’t really paying attention.
Thanks for the heads-up. And yes, you are right.
Ok.
So I just tried it. It was me I guess.
Inserting a 2/4th measure does the trick and all my woes are gone.
Thanks again and for this amazing program.
amazing. even i wouldn’t have guessed that. thanks robsch and packoman for an illuminating conversation.