To this date there’s no function to delete a plug-in effect preset in Ardour. A feature request has been filed and you can follow the status here. In this case we will delete an obsolete duplicate that has been saved under the same name.
Open the file:
~/.ladspa/rdf/ardour-presets.n3
On my system the .ladspa dir is located in the user home dir. If you’re using a file browser make sure you enable the “show hidden files” function. Before you edit the file remember to keep a back up.
In the image below the highlighted part represents the duplicate preset.
When the highlighted part is removed the preset is also removed. Open Ardour and have a look.
This works for every preset and to find the desired preset to be removed, start by searching for the name of the preset (line including #hasLabel). Then select everything from two lines down (line including #hasSetting) up to the line below including next“#hasSetting” and delete selection.
I’ve created some presets of the effects I usually use on vocal in Ardour, distributing them here as screenshots. Presets aren’t something that should be treated as perfect settings for your needs but could be a place to start. As the saturation is highly dependent on the signal level of your tracks, adjustment of treshold for compressor and blend/dry/wet for reverb/delay effects is the first move to be carried out.
To get a reference to the processed examples, first take a look at the raw unedited vocal track.
SC4 mono: Vocals with presence
I wouldn’t have thought of using this high ratio of compression on a vocal track. But, by letting the attack off a bit, allowing the early amplitude peak to pass trough uncompressed it actually keeps some of the natural sound.
SC4 mono: Light compression
These settings gives more dynamic sounding vocals compared to the earlier preset. I’m adjusting the treshold only to touch the loudest parts of the track, leaving the main part unaffected.
Delayorama: Short Vocal Delay
The delay effect can be used as a trick to add some fatness to the vocals. The delay range should be set to somewhere between 0,08 – 0,15 (s) and the saturation of the effect should barely be hearable in the mix.
I found a free script that lets you determine the status of an icecast channel. You could use it to display the online/offline status to listeners. From the downloaded files the interesting one is mnt_check.php. Try the demo below to get a demonstration of the functionality.
This article is an idea of live streaming with instant feedback from listeners. There are quiet a few source clients that can generate direct streaming from OSS, ALSA audio devices. When using more advanced musical softwares in Linux, especially when running them in sync the sound engine and routing is handled by Jack. Therefore you need a source client capable of dealing with Jack to forward the sound to the streaming server. Internet DJ Console fulfills the requirement. Furthermore it delivers an ogg output stream, which enables you to easily embed it on a website with the audio tag implemented in the html5 standard.
To enhance the user interaction you could implement a chat/shoutbox on the station website. Bumpin is an alternative but I’m not fully satisfied with it’s loading time. If you know of any service similar to Bumpin, please direct me to it. Optimal would be something that can be installed on LAMP.
The tempo is something you should already have set before you came to the editing part of your recording. If you’re importing loops you can use BPMdetect to find it and with the metronome adjust the project tempo.
Grid
With the grid you can define the points for your editing and the resolution can be set with beats and bars for fast and accurate editing. You can see it represented by the vertical lines in the project window. With the signature 4/4 we get four editing points within one bar if the grid is set to beats. To get more accuracy, adjusting the grid to beats/4 gives us 4 editing points within a beat and 16 within a bar. The most accurate we can get is by choosing beat/32 witch gives us 32 predefined editing points within one beat.
If that just isn’t good enough for your needs then you can turn the grid off to find an absolute point.
Split
To split a track hover the mouse pointer over the area where you want the separation to occur. Then press the key “s”. When the track is split we get two parts, which in Ardour are called regions. You’ll see they individually get different names.
Trim
At the bottom of a region there is a coloured area. By hovering it you’ll discover a double arrow. Dragging it along the base line will let you adjust the size of the region.
Fades
There are fade boxes in the top corners of a region if you hover it. They enables you to handle fade in/outs.
If you have regions overlapping each other the default Ardour configuration will apply a crossfade between them to smoothen the transmission. However this functionality can be disabled in the options menu, crossfades → active.
Layers
If your regions are overlapping and the crossfade functionality is switched off, only the top layer will be played throughout the overlapping section. To control the playback the regions can be brought to the top or background layer under the region menu.
Gain
The fast way of adjusting the volume of a region is by accessing the region menu where you find the function boost and cut gain. This will change the gain of the whole region.
If you want a more dynamic change there is the possibility to automate the volume change. If you right-click the region and look under it’s individual name, you can make the volume line visible by choosing “envelope visible”. Draw the desired gain curve with the drawing tool and make the automation active or inactive by turning it on and off with the function “envelope active”.
I was at the point when I wanted to master a recording made with Ardour so I connected the master_outputs from Ardour to the audio mastering interface JAMin. When I had achieved the desired sound I wanted to export it to be the final master. With sound quality in mind I thought… I don’t want to process it further by recording the output then exporting and so on. To keep the quality i wanted to just grab the output from JAMin and record it and get a stereo track. In my mind I recalled Ardour splitting the stereo track into mono files L and R. I started to look if there was some program working as a taperecorder. I thought about Audacity but it won’t offer any inputs with JACK. Finally I decided to route the signal back to Ardour and record it. And as I recalled, when looking in the project/sound folder the recorded stereo track where split. Well no other choice than making an export of the track. I “soloed” the track and made the export. But what about the sound quality, how does all this processing affect it? I brought the issue to IRC. Look at the conversation and your thoughts will be brought into clarity.
Here’s the chatlog from the conversation I had at:
#ardour at irc.freenode.net
<neitcho> I use ardour and passing the signal to Jamin then back to ardour to record it on a stereo track. This track would be my final master. When I go to the project folder and browsing the soundfiles the track are splitted into two files L and R. Is there any way to set it to bee one stereofile instead?
<PipeManMusic> neitcho: Why not export them as a Stereo wav?
<neitcho> than I have to export the maser track and process it once again.
<PipeManMusic> No you can select specific tracks to export.
<PipeManMusic> It’s selectablel in the export dialog.
<neitcho> but is’nt export processing the track?
<PipeManMusic> Whay do you mean by processing?
<PipeManMusic> You would just have to turn off any plugins.
<neitcho> i mean play back and record
<PipeManMusic> Another option would be to use a command line utility to combine the two tracks. or import those into a new project and export them from there.
<neitcho> doing that that severat times I’m not sure about the sound quality
<nick_m> neitcho, with the master fader & track fader @ unity gain (shift-click) there is no processing on export. so once you have recorded, export the session. another way would be to connect jamin as an insert on the master buss.
<nick_m> neitcho, ..and the expor if everything sounds good
<PipeManMusic> There is no loss in quality unless you are transcoding the track.
I wanted to rip a song from an audio-CD to use as reference listening when mixing. A quick search in the repo and I found this little program called Audio CD Extractor (Sound Juicer). First I fired it off, just to notice the default output was ogg. Second I spent some time figuring out the options and found one predefined profile for wav. This time the output was 22050hz mono. Since I waned better sound quality I had to make a modification of the options as listed below.
Change output format by adding a new profile.
Name it CD Rip and add this properties.
Gstreamer pipline: audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! wavenc name=enc
File extension: wav
Activate it.
Close and reopen the extractor and chose CD Rip as output.
With the command “$ cat filename > /dev/dsp” you can convert any image to music. It works best with uncompressed files. Thanks to Dingbats for the tip.
If you want to make an audio-CD mixed with a video clip it’s possible with K3b. From project choose “Mixed Mode CD”. There will be a predefined folder for drag and drop of audio files. Before you add the video clip create a new folder to separates it from the audio-files which will result in correct playback of the CD.
This is a Jack tool for visual inspection of the signal chain, identification of drops in peak amplitude. For ex. if you suspect the output is low run “meterbridge -t ppm alsa_pcm:playback_1 alsa_pcm:playback_2” and compare it to the output meter in your playback application. In ppm, 1= -12dB, 4 = 0dB, 7 = +12 dB. More Jack meters can be found at Jack Meterbridge.
If this is your problem. You have Rosegarden synced with any other application and are recording with a midi-keyboard. When you play along with the music in the synced app the monitoring is in sync but when you play back the recording the midi-track is out of sync in exact one or more measures. Rosegarden by default comes with a count-in of 2 measures. This can be changed in Settings -> Configure Rosegarden -> General -> Behavior and the parameter “Number of count-in measures when recording”. Set this parameter to 0 and use this settings when recording.
To find out the tempo of an audio recording there's a useful application called BPMdetect. The usage of the application is very straightforward, just add a file or directory and press start. Here's the source-code and a Debian package.
