Sample accurate positioning of regions

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

Is there a way to set the start position of a region more accurately that the 1ms that is available from the region properties menu? I need to play out a number of tracks across two different audio interfaces which have different conversion latencies, audio arrives at the output of one ~355 microseconds (17 samples at 48kHz) behind the other, so I want to nudge the tracks that are played through the “faster” interface back by this amount so that everything is time aligned in the analogue domain. It’s possible to move things at this kind of resolution by hand, in the edit window at high zooms, but Ideally I would just like to select 16 regions and precisely set the start time at sample level (or at least nudge back or forward one sample at a time) but I have not found a straightforward way of doing this. Am I missing something?

Edit to add, I’m using Ardour 8.10 on Fedora 41.

#2

You can right-click on any of the clocks in Ardour to set it to display time in samples - see The Ardour Manual - Editing Clocks.

Having said that, you might be better off making a bus to feed your “faster” interface and adding a delay that allows specifying the delay time in samples there instead - something like the x42 Delayline would do the trick. That way, you won’t have to remember to nudge all the regions, and regions that line up visually will automatically be lined up audibly too.

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#3

That delay looks really useful - a bus isn’t really the thing in this case as the channels need to end up in the analogue domain separately, not mixed together, but I can just add an instance on each track that needs to be delayed…

#4

After changing clock-modes (as @colinf explained)

You could use nudge: set the nudge-clock, top-center in ardour’s toolbar to 17 samples, select all the regions and “Nudge Region Selection backward”.

Another option is to use Region Properties Dialog (double-click on a region, or Menu > Region > Properties). There are clocks for all region parameters.

Then snap the other 15 regions to that region (Preferences > Editor > Snap > Snap Targets)

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#5

Ah, I see. You could make a bus with as many channels as your interface has outputs, route all the tracks to the appropriate channels of the bus, disable the bus VBAP panner, and route the bus outputs 1-1 to the channels of your interface, but if it really is one track per output it probably isn’t worth the effort versus just having to set the delay for each track rather than once on the bus.