Need help starting

Hello!

I am an absolute beginner with Ardour but have some experience with SoundForge and Waves plugins on Win32. I also have Linux experience (text mode).
I installed Ardour on my Linux DAW and started the program.
In the manual I found I can load files by dragging and dropping. This does not work (nothing happens, no tracks appear, etc).
So I must be doing something wrong.
I want to load an existing stereo track (WAV) and play it back so I can test if my hardware is working.
Later I want to test if I can use e.g. Jamin to apply effects to the track.

The Ardour manual is work in progress, it could not yet get me to succeed in embedding a WAV file.

Who has tips so I can proceed? WHat exactly can I do to load a file, play it back?

I can add that the menu’s (Session, edit, etc) don’t work: either they do not open and/or give no response (nothing happens).

many menu options remain ‘greyed-out’ when there is no open session. make sure that you’ve created a new session before trying to add audio files, etc. hopefully, that helps.

If you can’t click on menu ‘Session’ and then ‘new’ then something is wrong with your installation of ardour. To create a session you have to give it a name…it won’t start one without a name and call it untitled. But basically, you should just start a new session, once this is done you click on the menu ‘Session’ and select ‘add track/bus’ then choose how 1 stereo/mono track…depending on the wave file you are planning to insert. Now right click (and hold) on the panel on the right that says Regions/name, and select ‘Import Audio’. Find your file and click on it, and select ‘import selected region to list’. Once it is in the list you can drag it onto your track and see if your hardware is working.

Thanks for the help! I managed to import a file into a track.
Dunno exactly what I did but on a second try Ardour started converting the same track (although it had the right samplerate etc). Disk became full and the errorhandling was bad… (the cancel button did not work!)

So what was the difference that caused the conversion attempt?

How can I zoom in on the waveform?

What is the correct order of starting with Ardour, Jack, etc?