Dose anyone have any tips on mastering with jamin, I have tried working with jamin before but my cpu is being use at 90% when running both of them at the same time plus some xruns here and their, I also am wondering how to get a final mixed master to have the same volume level as any other CD. Thank you for your time
Tone
For the record, Jamin has proceeded past the 0.95 tarball a LONG time ago. I have release announcements for various versions of 0.97 in my mail, but I seem to recall 0.98 somewhere. The catch is that it is very difficult to get these ‘versions’ and you really have to do a CVS checkout and compile from there. You are correct in that the last tarball on their website was 0.95. And while development of it is not speeding ahead, glancing through CVS some commits were done 5 months ago for example. There is other work I am doing, but it isn’t to improve it but rather to port it to OS X, however my work isn’t ready for public release yet until I fix at least one more rather annoying issue that I can’t find the cause of.
All this being said, there is nothing saying you can’t use other things in your work. Jamin just provides a nice packaged interface that works pretty well.
And personally I don’t believe it is within the scope of Ardour to provide a mastering interface. The reasoning is the same as the one why Ardour doesn’t have a default EQ in its tracks, everyone will like a different sound, and might like different processors(As evidenced in part above). There is no point to forcing one on people with a DAW.
SeabladeWhen mastering raise you h/w buffer this will help xruns and the DSP load.
Also watch this video, link below. He shows you a good trick to incorporate jamin into ardour for you final mix.
“Ardour 101 - Editing, Routing and Mixing Audio (Part 2)”
Hope this helps
Philip
mix all your songs down first. A good mix for all your songs is independent of the mastering process.
Mixing down means that when you’re happy about your mix for a song, export it to a single stereo wav file.
Once you songs are mixed down, create a new ardour session, and import each wav files (one song per track for example). The idea is that since the songs are mixed down, you should not apply ANY effects to the tracks. This will make ardour run without much CPU and most of the DSP processing will be jamin’s.
Then create an insert in the master bus pre-fader and connect jamin’s ins and outs to it. You should start jamin with the -p option in this case so it does not auto-connect its own ports to your system ports.
The connectivity goes like this:
insert_out > jamin_in
insert_in < jamin_out
You can activate the insert (middle mouse button click on the insert name to toggle activation on and off).
Now, in the pre-fader, before the jamin insert, add the LADSPA plugin “Jamin Controller”. This will allow you to automate jamin scene changes along the master bus timeline.
In jamin, tweak the dynamic effects to taste (overall level, warmth boost, compressor, EQ, etc). Save your tweaks in the different scenes. Each scene should make sense for songs or song parts. Be sure to rename them into something meaningful like song1_chorus_2 or song2_bridge, etc.
Then, automate this in ardour’s master bus:
click on the “a” button of the master bus header in the editor window. Pick the jamin scene controller automation, draw an automation curve in manual mode (the automation points will be floats but scene numbers are integers, never mind that, it just works). Then switch to automation “play” mode.
Playback the whole thing and enjoy jamin switching from scene to scene automatically according to your automation 
what thorgal said
Hell yea way better thanks again guys Ardour for life lol
Tone
Mastering… continued
You might want to think about not mastering your music quite as loud as tracks on some CD’s or on radio. It is a little known fact that broadcasters do an extra level of correction for radio, to be sure the music is sufficiently squashed… Your track should be fine on radio regardless.
Turning away from the wimpy load sound we are stuck with today is not so hard. All my masters are turn-me-up compliant, mastered in K14 or K20 depending on the source material using Fons’ jkmeter and jamin/ardour
Mastering - another viewpoint,
Jamin is OK, I personally don’t understand why people think it is the only mastering tool in Linux, Ardour has improved in leaps and bounds while Jamin has improved incrementally since 2005, last time I checked it’s stable tarball was still from 2005 and it will only work with current JACK if you build it or find a package from CVS.
I find using a combination of the LADSPA Stereo 10 band EQ’s (there are several, I like the LEET one) Barry’s Satan Maximizer and the Matrix Spatializer running on your master bus essentially does what Jamin does with no external inserting and far less CPU load.
If you want to patch in externals then linuxDSP’s Valve Compressor and EQ’s do nicely as well. Of course using FST and pulling in some VST’s like the 31band KarmaFX EQ and some of the numerous VST mastering compressors give you even more choice.
Jamin’ is a great tool, but I think it is due for an overhaul, it appears clumsy and resource hungry in light of more recent Linux developments,
Just an alternate opinion, of course take it or leave it!
I totally agree with U GMaq,
Dame good call Gmaq I completely agree although jamin is pretty fun as well it still just takes up to much of my cpu to handle nicely, hopfully they will come out with a new one, another thing I was wonder about was how to properly export a final mix to wav and start a new session with just that final mix, thanks again for all your insight, I see the end of the tunnel and the the view looks and sounds really nice.
Tone
I never realised Jamin was stuck at 0.95 and has been left alone since '05.
To my mind, the term ‘mastering’ is largely an obsolete throwback processing step that goes back to the days of vinyl. That’s not to say it’s unimportant. I consider it as a final part of a mix and don’t really understand why it needs to be done in another suite of software. To me, it means ‘now mix it so it sounds good on lots of output devices, not just the studio monitors & headphones’.
At the end of the day, mastering is surely just a few compression & stereo width tweaks to the digital signal. Nothing that Ardour couldn’t do already if the appropriate paths/windows/processes were organised.
Before too long, Jamin is going to look seriously outdated and will leave any Linux DAW with a big hole to fill. I know that Paul has plenty enough to do but is it within the remit of the Ardour project to incorporate some sort of mastering interface? After all, track sequencing & TOC naming are already there. As a DAW I think it would give Ardour a real edge over competitors.
(Maybe I should have written this in another section on the forum - pls move if so)
Thorgal-
I would strongly recommend creating a plugin based mastering interface personally rather than trying to build it into Ardour. This would not only follow Ardour’s current philosophy much more closely(Completely) but also would still allow others to not bother with it very easily. I just think building it into Ardour is the wrong solution to look at.
SeabladeHey guys, it’s open source and your free time so please go crazy.
But if you’re planning on creating something with the features of Jamin, that defaults to using Jamin modules, why don’t you jump aboard the Jamin train and start commiting patches/features/fixes to that instead of starting from scratch?
FWIW,my opinion on mastering is if you’re releasing mp3s on the intertubes Jamin is perfectly good enough but if you’re making a CD and expect to sell to more than friends and famliy you’d better have a professional, with suitable equipment, speakers, listening room and ears, doing the job.
Hi guys. I am just back from vacation, enjoying good time, food and weather in southern France! aaah, la France!
Anyway, I had a little chat a while ago about precisely this: add a mastering interface to ardour. I thought I could hack a jamin-like interface inside ardour. However, I have had no time until now. Don’t know if I ever will.
I partially disagree with you Seablade. I think ppl would be grateful to have a mastering interface, regardless whether it is needed or not. It would just be one of those things that some would use while some others would not. Having it is more a + than a - to my mind.
I partially agree with both of you… Obviously the philosophy of leaving the tools open to the user is right. However, I wonder if there is a way for Ardour to remember it’s sessions state (instead of relying on Lash)… especially with regards to to third party apps that need to be started on each session… such as jamin…
Seablade,
I haven’t yet thought about any specific design so it is still very opened. However, allank’s point was what I had in mind. I still think that it would be OK to have a sort of mastering interface template a la jamin.
One would be free to choose which EQ, which comp, which limiter, etc, to load in the relevant area of this interface. By default, each module would be the one jamin is currently using.
Note that it’s just a vague idea that I am musing with, nothing that I know for sure is doable.
What would be kind of mandatory would be a 'realtime" spectral display of what’s coming in to the master bus. The rest is more of the user’s decision since it would have to do with modifying this incoming signal.
For the record, could you remind us all about ardour’s philosophy so that any eventual external code contribution can comply to it ? Thanks.
FWIW,my opinion on mastering is if you're releasing mp3s on the intertubes Jamin is perfectly good enough but if you're making a CD and expect to sell to more than friends and famliy you'd better have a professional, with suitable equipment, speakers, listening room and ears, doing the job.
Having done just this, Jamin still gets the job done;)
I haven't yet thought about any specific design so it is still very opened. However, allank's point was what I had in mind.
Of course my response is, Plugins are managed like what is desired in Ardour;)
I still think that it would be OK to have a sort of mastering interface template a la jamin.One would be free to choose which EQ, which comp, which limiter, etc, to load in the relevant area of this interface. By default, each module would be the one jamin is currently using.
Honestly, this sounds like you just want to create a track template with the set of tools on it really. Not sure a separate ‘interface’ is needed so much for that, especially given some of the work going on in A3 IIRC in as far as routing is concerned etc.
But yea, this seems more like a track template functionality, that is obviously already implemented:)
SeabladeOK,
At the risk of getting beaten up…
In my Windows DAW days I used to run CubaseVST and do my Mastering in WaveLab, a few times over the last couple of years I’ve tried installing (Steinberg) WaveLab with Wine out of curiousity with no success, Although Ardour can go toe to toe with most DAW’s out there Audacity is not even in the same universe as WaveLab, To get to the point last week dug out my WaveLab 4 CD and voila a successful install, it runs quite seamlessly in Wine and hosts VST Plugins no problem, I then decided to push my luck and installed my Waves Renaissance Compressor which has yet to run at all in with any Linux VST Host and it also ran flawlessly. Obviously whatever they’ve put in the Wine is working!
I’m only sharing this so that in the meantime while we are waiting for the next wave of Linux Mastering tools, an oldie but goodie that I suspect many former Windows DAW users have tucked away in a drawer somewhere is now up and running well with Wine.
Yeah I quite agree, Wavelab and the Waves plugins are the only things I miss about the whole Cubase/Windows setup I used to have. There are whole heap of things I don’t miss of course Better find that old install CD