A couple of quick questions

Hi Guys,

I have a couple of quick questions. I come from an Adobe Audition background, so my questions are going to be ‘I know how to do it in AA, how do I do it in Ardour?’. Yes, I signed up many years ago, but that was when I was just playing around with Linux and not actually using the program for any serious nature, or more than a quick “Let’s see if it runs” type senario. I’ve just bought a 13" Macbook Pro and it only has a single 3.5mm in/out plug, :frowning: so I’ve gone with a little USB audio device (Behringer UFO202) which works ok. So, now that you know my quick history; on to the quick questions.

My first question is that in AA, When I select audio and hit the delete button the audio is deleted, and then the whole track shifts along to the left, back to where the audio was cut out leaving no gap. Final Cut does this well, can Ardour do this? Am I missing something, or is it technique/mode/settings?

I found out how to the the playhead to where the mouse was, that was a great (and a wanted feature), (thanks to here: http://ardour.org/node/3687)

Also, does Ardour have a destructive editor mode, or similar where basically I double click on an audio track and the audio file pops up in to it’s own window and I can only see that file to edit. Or, would this have to be done in another editor, such as Audacity? I do have Soundtrack, but coming from an AA background, it just lacked many features. Is there an “Edit track in…” feature?

I know these questions are probably asked plenty of times, but I didn’t see an “Easy transition to Ardour from Adobe Audition” document. :slight_smile:

I want to be able to use Ardour properly, but I just need a few quick steps in the right direction.

Thanks for your help,
Steve

Without directly answering your questions, I will point you to this nice resource: http://en.flossmanuals.net/ardour/#

Paul

Hi Steve,

at first, the most important matter to understand is the difference between the design of AA and Ardour.

AA is an audio editor, mainly designed to destructively edit one single soundfile. You may be able to do some multitracking with it, but it’s not very sophisticated. If you used it for multitracking, then it’s time to use a real DAW = Ardour :slight_smile:

Ardour is a digital audio workstation (DAW) designed to do non-destructive multitracking. Here, you can always revert to the original recording, as no edits, no effects etc. are applied to the actual audio files on your harddisk and can always be undone.

Therfore, the two programs aren’t comparable, or at least a transition from one to the other is not the best idea if you want to perform the same task with both.

If you want to switch to Linux and have the same functions as AA, try Audacity a bit more. IMHO it’s not as good as AA but it is designed with the same concept in mind.

If you want to use Ardour: The two functions you asked about are not available. There is an edit mode which would leave no gaps between the audio files (regions in fact), but it is not recommended for use currently.
The editing of a soundfile in another window or program is not there due to the non-destructive design I think.

Best
Benjamin

Hi Ben,

Thanks for your honest opinion and quick response. I’ve used Audacity, and wasn’t really impressed, probably more the interface. So I know what it does. I was just hoping to use a ‘full featured’ editor like AA and was hoping that Ardour would do that. But from what you are explaining to me, it sounds like I should be using a 10 channel device and recording all channels at the same time ready to master it and that kind of thing, rather than doing voice recording, such as radio shows with extra music beds under it etc.
I’m not particularly worried about the edit in an external program, but I thought given the nature of the program that maybe it would have that facility.
I haven’t figured out that special audio mode properly yet, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out.

@PaulRH, yes, I’ve already been through much of the manual. It doesn’t explain or answer my questions, thus the reason I posted.

Cheers,
Steve

Hey there! I’ve encountered about the same problem when it comes to edit things destructively.
First, here’s the thread that I started a few weeks ago because of this: http://ardour.org/node/3702

I don’t like using separate programs for editing and mastering because this would mean too much complicated importing/exporting (I record 8 tracks in Ardour, export to Audacity, edit and then reimport to Ardour again).
Since I record very long takes during our rehearsals and mostly there are only a few minutes in an hour-long take that I really want to keep while all the rest should be deleted (from the disk as well!), I was looking for a quick way of editing things destructively.
This is how I prefer to do this at the moment:

I edit the regions (cut out unwanted parts, put regions together with crossfades, normalize levels etc.) the way I would like my wav-file to be. When I’m done, I select the range(s) (can contain multiple tracks simultaneously) that I want to keep (with all the editing), then right-click and select “new region pre-mixer” or “new region post-mixer” (to add effects).
This creates a new wav-file which is then named “-bounce1” while the “old” set of regions is automatically transferred from the editor into the “unused regions” list on the right side of the editor window. This way I have this new file that contains all of the changes that I want and still, the original data is preserved.
When I made sure sure that I don’t need the original wav files anymore I hit “session -> cleanup -> cleanup unused sources”, then quit, re-enter the session and hit “cleanup -> flush wastebasket”. After this, only the new and edited wav-files are left in the session’s folder.

For the record, Adobe Audition/Cool Edit Pro was in my opinion the best single file destructive editor out there(The last version I used was 1.5). Audacity isn’t bad, but Audition did at least blow it away because it really was that good. So you are starting at a disadvantage in looking for a replacement for it in my opinion because you already used the best.

All this being said, the good news is Audition is coming out on Mac eventually… http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/audition/ and I would say if you want a single file destructive editor, it is worth looking at certainly.

But if you want to do multi-track work, it was always weak in the versions of Audition and CEP before it compared to Ardour, and Ardour is a much better choice for that in my opinion. As was stated earlier they are primarily two different programs, it isn’t speaking bad about either, just depending on the task you want to do, one may be a better choice than the other.

Seablade