See the Master bus? You will always have a Master bus. There you are, the default Ardour screen in a stylin’ dark theme. Go back to the New Session tab, click New, and you should see something like Figure 2. Don’t change anything on the Audio Setup tab, with one exception: if you have more than one audio interface, for example an internal sound card and a USB audio interface, then pick the one you want to use from the Interface selector. The Open Session tab is for opening existing projects. What the heck do you do with that? Not much, really! First fill in the Name field this is your project name, something clever and descriptive like “test”. Let’s fire up Ardour without starting JACK first and see what happens: You can start JACK first and tweak the settings, or start Ardour and let it start JACK for you. How use PulseAudio and JACK? will help you sort it out. JACK and Pulseaudio often clash, depending on your distro and how old it is. Pulseaudio is also an audio router, so it’s redundant with JACK. ALSA provides sound card drivers and a basic mixer, and JACK does the routing. I am not a fan of Pulseaudio for audio production because it gets in my way. I’m using Ubuntu Studio 10.04 LTS because everything works and I plan to keep it that way. Fedora with the CCRMA packages is a great audio platform, and so is Ubuntu. If it isn’t with your distro, then install it separately. When you install Ardour JACK should be a dependency. With JACK you can have Hydrogen playing and recording at the same time you play your guitar, and have individual control over routing all inputs, outputs, and monitoring channels. A simple example is recording a single instrument, say a guitar, and using the wonderful Hydrogen software drumkit for a backing track. With JACK you can fine-tune latency and throughput, connect software audio applications, and connect audio hardware in all different ways. (In an amazing coincidence, my “Book of Audacity” has a chapter on using JACK.) JACK is a real-time low-latency audio router. If you’re going to use Linux for serious audio production then you must become well-acquainted with JACK. JACK, the Jack Audio Connection Kit, is required to run Ardour. You will need a computer with a sound card, even a cheapo on-board chip, and a microphone or instrument to plug in to your sound card. Follow along as we learn the basics by making a simple recording. Ardour is one of the shining jewels of FOSS, a robust professional-level multi-channel recorder, editor, and mixer. When you’re ready to move up from simple audio recording applications like GNOME’s Sound Recorder, take a look at the excellent Ardour digital audio workstation.
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