I’m a total novice with ardour and could use some help in configuring a session to work to both record and function as a PA. I will be monitoring based on speaker output, not headphones. Please forgive my “language”, I’m not particularly up on proper terminology.
My sound card is an MAudio Delta 1010 which does support hardware monitoring, but I need to be able to control the volume of, and mute, specific sound sources. I assume that hardware monitoring is not directly controllable from ardour.
I can record and I can play the recording through the speakers. When I create a session, if I use the “advanced options” and check the ‘monitor’ box, I get a “monitor” track, which qjackctl shows as being connected to control inputs from ardour and to playback outlines 1 and 2.
But when I record, I get no sound through the speakers. And, when I play back the recording, both the master and monitor track have active “action” bars.
you can set the output of each track to whatever you want and however many outs you want. If you are mixing with ardour’s mixer, you are going to want to set the master out to on out on the card and then plug that out into the PA. However, latency is going to be a BIG problem.
I think you’ll have to use “Ardour does monitoring” if you want to
control the live mix with Ardour; if you use hardware monitoring,
you’ll have to use envy24control to do the live mix, and won’t
hear the effect of any plugins. You’d want to route Ardour’s master
bus to the PA, rather than the monitor outputs.
Thank you for your input. However, I’ve considered a number of different options and this is the only one that has a chance of working for the physical environment I have to deal with.
Besides, whether I manage an alternate setup or not, I still have a problem with knowing how to get monitoring to work the way I think it should be.
Would you perhaps have an idea about how to make that work?
Thank you. I guess the thing I’d missed, up to now, is the mixer window business.
As I’ll be using 64Studio for the work, with a realtime kernel, I’d thought that I’d be able to control latency enough to eliminate obvious sync problems. Am I wrong?
Part of the reason for going this way is that the system will be in a very small (3x4 foot) closet that’s located right behind the podium. I want to be able to do the usual mixer volume adjustment and muting, but don’t have access to the hardware since that would disturb the event.
So, I figured to use wireless networking, using remote desktop software, to access the recording system using my laptop.
The Delta-1010 does have “hardware monitoring”, which would eliminate the latency issues, but there’s no control for that (that I can find) within Ardour. And the envy24control, which is supposed to give me access to the hardware, does not appear to give me access to the hardware monitor, just to the in/out controls (in other words, the 8 inputs are supposed to mix in the card to the 1/2 outputs as stereo, but I can’t access that with the Linux software. In Windows, it works very well with the software supplied by MAudio).
sounds like a great way to screw up a live event. If your computer hiccups, you could lose the live sound while the computer comes back up (if it does). Not that it’s likely, but you should get a dedicated mixer for live sound and send the audio some other way to the computer.