Export and solo/mute

Hi,

I’m (obviously) new to Ardour after using Cakewalk, Reaper, Cubase etc for many years.

Everything seems to be working fine, except:

1: The quality of the exported file (Cd quality) is inferior compared to listening “live”. All the tracks seems to be mono/ centerpanned. How can I get the exported wav-file to sound as good as “live”?

2: It seems impossible to solo/mute tracks.

/AMC

@AMC

Your description seems to indicate something very screwed in your routing in the session, like your matter track left and right now being what is selected for export, or not being what you’re hearing.

It seems that the exported file is not mixed at all - no panning, no fades, no nothing - only a bunch of tracks thrown together in mono. I actually exported stem files, imported them to reaper, mixed them, and rendered to wav with perfect quality.

I forgot to mention that I am trying out Arbour 4. It seems easy to use, it’s got all the functions I need, and the best thing - I don’t need to run it via Vine - so I would very much appreciate tips on how to fix my export/solo/mute problem.

/AMC

First start by upgrading to Ardour 5.10 and be sure to download it from this site. Don’t use the version that comes with your distro, it might not work correctly.

You did not mention which version of 4.x line you are using, the only good version is the latest 4.7, but 5.10 is better and fixes many bugs.

The exported file should sound exactly the same when you play the session. If not there is something wrong.

@AMC

As mhartzel mentioned I would start by upgrading to 5.10, but even without doing that something is very screwed up there. If you are insitent on staying with A4 (Not recommended honestly) then I would sayit honestly sounds like something is very screwy in either your routing or export dialog. If you can, grab a screenshot of your audio matrix (Ardour Tracks -> Ardour Busses) and your export dialog and post those somewhere and link to them here for people to look at. Note for your export dialog along with the first dialog that you see, make sure to grab the other tabs as well.

But honestly, download A5.10 from here and reimport your tracks and see if you have the same problem.

          Seablade

You should also describe whether you’re exporting JUST the master bus or whether you manually assigned track outputs to the export file.

@Paul this the requested screenshots

Thus, dang autocorrect on phone…

Thank you all for your time and advice.
Upgrading to 5.10 took care of the export problem.

However, upgrading didn’t resolve the mute/solo problem. In editor, the “S” button turns green when clicking it, but it doesn’t make the track play in solo. The “M” does not turn green. All the other buttons seems to be working just fine.

/AMC

… screenshots …

Maybe all the tracks are mute-locked ? That would explain why no solo mutes other tracks implicitely, and why no explicit mutes work either ?

Ah, I misremembered. Isolate (what I wrongly called “mute-lock”) doesn’t prevent to engage mute, just the implicit muting. I don’t understand why the “M” wouldn’t engage (it won’t become green, but yellow of course with the default theme)

“grab a screenshot”/“post those somewhere and link to them here for people to look at”…

I think the real problem is that I am New (with a capital N) to Ubuntu and Linux related software. I don’t know how to do any of these things. But, I really appreciate your time - at least the most annoying problem, not being able to export, is fixed.

/A

Regarding the solo issue. In the toolbar top-middle there’s a “Solo” button (which blinks when some track is soloed). Press it: That does reset the complete solo/mute state (incl implicit upstream/downstream solo). Does the issue persist afterwards?

As for taking a screenshot. Just press the “PrtSc” button on the keyboard (assuming you do have a PC keyboard). Upload the file to dropbox or some image-sharing site http://imgur.com/ http://picpaste.com/ etc, then give us the URL here.