Trying to understand the basics of Cues/Looping in Ardour 9

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

Hi all,

I was really excited to see that Ardour 9 has reached release candidate stage. I am trying out the Cues/Looping, and I am immediately running up against things that I don’t understand. I don’t know whether these are bugs or my lack of understanding.

I got as far as to figure out that I need to arm a Cue (I don’t know if that is the right way to describe it), then start the transport. At that point, I get a countdown in the bottom (Properties?) area, which seems to indicate how long I have until the clip will start recording. From there, I am befuddled.

My confusion primarily stems from two places. First, I don’t understand the function of the Play and Record buttons in the Clip Properties section. I have not found any way yet to engage these directly. Second, even though I have changed the selection for “Record” to various settings, such as “4 bars”, “8 bars”, etc., this does not seem to impact how long is recorded. Instead, I seem to be consistently getting less than 1 bar of recording.

I have been waiting for this version of Ardour to give looping a solid go, so I could be making any number of extremely bone-headed mistakes. But, I am eager to keep poking at this, especially if it means that I can actually help make the end product better.

So, does anyone know what I might be doing wrong, or another explanation for this? Has anyone posted any early videos trying out this functionality, perhaps?

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#2

I also can’t get them to work consistently.

You are getting exactly 4 beats of recording by default. Here is where you need to change that:

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I agree that as of rc1, this is rather confusing.

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#3

I am in the same situation. Really need to be able to record clips live to make it fit my workflow.

I don’t understand the logic either. Running 9.0 RC2 104

What is more, when I change the clip’s launch style to toggle (which is the most useful one to me), it crashes Ardour. Toggle style worked fine in 8.12.

Trying to control the trigger slots through a midi controller is finicky as well. Sometimes it takes a couple of tries to make it work (right clicking, clicking midi learn and pushing a button on the controller).

The cue track’s record button seems not controllable by midi (no control + middle click midi learn popup) and isn’t synced with the record button from the corresponding track in de editor or mixer window (these ones are midi learnable). The solo and mute buttons on the other hand, are in sync in the different windows (and you can use midi learn in all of them).

I also hoped that by midi learning an empty trigger slot and arming the track for recording, it would start recording when I press the corresponding button on the controller. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to work yet.

So I’m also a bit confused at the moment and don’t know how to make it work properly.

#4

You might imagine that there are huge numbers of people out there, doing this sort of thing, and so of course we would know this. But you’d be wrong. We can’t fix bugs we don’t know about, and the bug report for this was filed only today …

More replies & info to follow.

[ EDIT: the crash is now fixed ]

#5

Currently, clip control is not MIDI learnable, and that is partly by design, partly by omission. Full control is possible using a MIDI binding map, though the actions are not documented yet. I still have not implemented any hard-coded support for clip recording into any of the surfaces we explicitly support where it would make sense (eg. Push, various Novation devices), that will happen in some 9.x version.

The rec-enable button for a track on the cue-page is not synced to the rec-enable button for the track on the editor or mixer pages because the buttons control an entirely different style of recording (there is absolutely no relationship between them, they use none of the same code, and result in entirely different outcomes).

Clips/cues are documented to quite a reasonable degree, but a lot of that is in the v9 version of the manual, which will not be online at manual.ardour.org until we release v9 (which is imminent).

#6

This seems to be a parallel control to the play or record button against the clip:

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And it seems to function in the same way: if a slot is empty, then you can record arm the slot to record a new clip. If the slot has a clip in it, then only the play can be used.

The difference is that the record/play button against the slot is either record or play. The buttons in the Clip Properties are always there.

As Paul says, this is separate from the rec-enable on the track. I’ve not fully worked out the logic around this yet, but it seems to be that you can record enable the track in the cue page, but only the specific slot that has been record enabled will be recorded. Presumably this means, whilst the playhead is running, you can leave the track record-enabled and just toggle individual slots to record when you want to record into them.

The record-enable on the track at the top of the cue page seems to just be to enable/expose the individual slot record capability. Note that Track record-enable in the Cue screen does not record enable the track elsewhere (e.g. edit screen).

I’m not sure if any of this is correct, or helpful. And I’m certainly not going to comment on whether the design choices here make sense or not, because I simply don’t know.

Cheers,

Keith

#7

What does the “Record:” button do then?

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Cheers,

Keith

#8

It seems not to change much at this stage.

Would it make sense to have the option to sync the recording to multiples of say 1/2/4… bars until stopped?
I mean, you intend to record a multiple of let’s say 4 bars, but you don’t know how many yet. So it could end up being any of 4, 8, 12, 16… bars. Would that be possible now? If not, you really need to plan ahead your live clip recording behavior. That would make it more difficult to improvise.

#9

So it would be possible to change the session file to include those?

I use some djtechtools devices. Like a midi fighter 64, 16, twister. I even have an old monome 40h lying around but I don’t think I’m able to make it work in linux these days.
If I can be of any help creating any mappings, I will make the time for that! It would be nice to have visual feedback on them.

Wow, that is quick!
I can confirm it is working as expected now! Thanks!

#10

After some more exploring, that is what seems to happen if the “follow length” is not enabled. I think the confusing thing is that the Record: option is still active when the “Follow length” is enabled which makes it look like it does something.

When I disabled it, I could use the Record: option to select different numbers of bars or “until stopped” and it worked.

As the Follow Length seems to disable this option, I would suggest that the option to set the record length should probably be visibly disabled in the GUI when the Follow length is enabled.

Cheers,

Keith

#11

This all changed last week in the run up to 9.0.

The duration of the recording is now always determined by the dropdown next the rec-enable button in the clip properties, and follow length no longer plays any roll in this.

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#12

OK, that makes sense.

For reference, I was using Ardour-9.0.rc2.155-dbg

Presumably the Follow Length only then applies to subsequent playback of the recording. I can see that it would be possible to do some odd things like record 8 bars, but only playback 4. But in a live looping context where the initial recording is part of the performance, this may be entirely valid.

I’ll download a new nightly and play again tomorrow.

Cheers,

Keith

#13

OK, so using nightly Ardour-9.0.rc3.8…

Yes, I see the function of the clip record length had changed, and I think that’s far better than it was on the previous version I used.

I was, slightly, surprised that the follow length is tied to the recorded length. So (for instance), even if I set the follow length to 4 beats, if I record 8 bars, the follow length gets adjusted to 32 beats (obviously talking about 4/4 here).

I guess that makes sense and, personally, I’m fine with that.

I have had a couple of odd situations where the clip record seems to have got stuck: the record light in the clip properties is on, but not flashing and recording doesn’t seem to work. It’s not until I toggle the track clip record off and on again that it seems to start working again. I’ve not worked out what triggers this though. I’ll play a little more and report back if I work it out.

EDIT: 0010139: Stop and Forget Capture causes inconsistant state on clip recording - MantisBT

An interesting (to me) capability is that you can arm multiple slots to record across multiple tracks (only one slot per track):
image

This would allow you to record multiple instruments or something like the left and right hand of a keyboard part separately into different clips at the same time.

These also don’t have to be in the same cue:
image

Moreover, it is possible to set the record length of each slot separately. So you could have (for instance) the slot in track 1 being 8 bars and the slot in track 2 being 4 bars. I tried this out and it worked, resulting in a 4 bar clip and an 8 bar clip.

However, most of the time I try this is causes a crash with a segfault.

EDIT: 0010138: Parallel recording of clips with different record lengths often causes crash - MantisBT

Cheers,

Keith

#14

Is there a way of doing a follow-on recording into another slot?

What I mean by this:
For playback, you have the option to click the play button on a slot in advance and, subject to quantisation settings, “pre-launch” the clip by clicking on the play button, so that the clip plays in the future.

You also have, of course, the follow options.

I wondered if there was something similar for record so that, for example, you could chain slots to record. Clearly there’s no follow option for this, but I wondered if there was a way to pre-arm the next recording slot like you can with playback?

I’m not necessarily saying this is needed, but I just wondered if there was something there I had missed.

Cheers,

Keith

#15

Yes, I haven’t really resolved what the options ought to be for what happens after recording a clip. It isn’t clear from reading the manuals for Bitwig & Live and watching videos of people using them that they have either (though that seems unlikely).

Right now, there are no options; the track drops out of record and the recorded clip starts playing. But I’d welcome input on this.

Keep in mind though: even in Live, clip recording is not a substitute for actual live looping tools, so the goal here is not to evolve things with that as a final goal.

#16

What’s the reasoning behind this? Will it become too complicated?

I personally would love it if this would be so flexible as to become a versatile live looping tool. In combination with all the other features Ardour already has to offer, it would just become the ultimate!

Don’t wake me up too fast plz :upside_down_face:

#17

I’m taking my cue from both Live and Bitwig, and the way those DAWs, with all their deeply-builtin looping workflows, still tend to push users towards looper plugins (or even hardware) for your typically full-on live looping stuff.

Of course, nothing is absolute. If you want to reproduce, say, Elise Trouw’s workflow, that’s in scope. But the sort of workflow you can do in Sooperlooper, or Moebius or a BOSS loop pedal … that’s out of scope.

#18

I do think a lot of people use the Clip capability in Live for Live Looping, and not necessarily using the looper plugin as Elise Trouw does.

Here’s an example:

Some notable things here:

  • The clips do seem to autoplay after recording and I didn’t see any setting which changed that
  • There is the ability to overdub clips, possibly something for a future version

I do wonder if Ardour is poised (with further developments) to offer a hybrid approach which combines the Elise Trouw approach (using a timeline to fire MIDI events at the looper plugins) with clip launching. We already, for example, have the ability to place cues on the time line and launch them in in a linear fashion. Imagine if this could be extended to include markers for recording.

Of course, lots of complexity here and definitely something for v9.x or even v10, but I think it’s worth considering.

Cheers,

Keith

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#19

Don’t want to hijack the thread, but it seems to fit.
In Ardour9.0-rc3.3, after double click on an empty slot, the lower zone midi editor pops up, as expected.
But it is just blank, without a grid to draw anything inside.
Only after adding the first note, the grid shows up.

I guess this doesn’t matter in a recording situation. But for the less realtime folks, it forces to blindly place an event somewhere before doing what I really wanted to do.

Edit: And another question: Is there a way to set the default clip properties and settings such as length, loop length etc.?