Sync Hydrogen and Ardour

Is there a “proper” way to sync hydrogen with an ardour session? Please go easy on me . . . I have no idea where to start.

  1. open ardour.
  2. in the main window, there are some buttons on the upper right side.
    set time-master, and over this button, there is a drop-down, set it to jack
  3. open hydrogen.
  4. beneath to the right side of the bpm value there is a button “jack transport”, activate it.
  5. ready to rumble!

you can sync as many programs you want, with this method, but be careful to have just one time master.
the bpm settings are kept for each program, so if you want to have hydrogen the same bpm than ardour, you’ve to set that in both programs.

with this setup you can control the jack-transport also via qjackctl. (play/pause/back/… buttons.)

the settings for jack transport are in some programs a little bit hidden, but i think that every jack capable program is able to sync via jack-transport.

regards, harald

i have been able to record hydrogen to ardour, but is there a way of working it so that when you puch record in ardour, hydrogen will start playing automaticly?? thus being in the same place every time??
cheers.

Yep, make sure in Hydrogen the “jack trans.” button is highlighted (it’s near Hydrogen’s transport controls). Then in Ardour you need to change the drop down that probably says “Internal” (next to the clocks and the punch-in/punch-out buttons) to “Jack” and make sure the “Time master” button is highlighted.

Once that’s done hitting play in Ardour, Hydrogen or qjackctl will start everything. Note that if you put Hydrogen into song mode and you turn off looping hydrogen will stop the transport at the end of the song, which can be pretty annoying. I usually keep a blank pattern handy and add an extra blank measure at the beginning and end of the song while programming the drum parts so I can loop a part of the song in Ardour without Hydrogen stopping the transport on me.

I made a tutorial based in part on this post! Thanks everyone, now in technicolor :

http://www.ubustu.com/globe/2007/09/19/how-to-sync-hydrogen-with-ardour/

One more great thing on this would be how to teach hydrogen to understand tempo changes out of ardour…

THANKS so much I have been trying to get my head round this for ages and everyone else seemed to explain it in ways only scientists would understand this thread just uses simpe english love technico lor tutorial too. :slight_smile:

Ok, just found the option of setting Jack instead of Alsa when opening the session, that brings up the option of choosing Jack Transport. Now I can hit play and I see both Hydrogen and Ardour start playing, problem is nothing can be heard : s

Sorry, got tabs mixed up, was posting to this thread:
https://community.ardour.org/node/8348