I’ve been trying Ardour and Jack for about two days now and my experience has been very good so far.
My previous daw experience includes Cubase, Ableton Live, Tracktion and Reaper, so I’m not a newbie.
Still, the sheer power of Jack and Ardour’s audio engine have impressed me a lot. Also, I like that the interface is not cluttered up like with certain other daws. And it has OSC support! That alone has made me forget about Reaper for the moment. So, I seriously consider donating whatever I can afford.
But before that, I have three questions and a bug report (was there a movie with that name?):
Is there a delete key that works on all objects? I’ve learned that I can use fn+backspace to delete regions but this doesn’t work with tracks or plugins
Where are the midi control maps stored?
Is there a way to run Ardour without gui? I plan on among other things using it as a Mixer/Recorder for Supercollider and I fancy it would be cool and freeing some cpu recources though probably kind of dangerous.
A bug: If you right click in the prefader section of the channel strip, select an action and immediately after that right click there again, the menu pops up but you can’t select anything. After you’ve clicked somewhere else it works again.
Anyway,
thanks for Ardour and Jack and if I ever get my Firewire interface to work on Linux I’ll try that too.
Is there a delete key that works on all objects? I've learned that I can use fn+backspace to delete regions but this doesn't work with tracks or plugins
No intentionally. If you have delete mapped to delete tracks, every time you try to delete a region you would end up deleting a track. That being said you can remap keybindings however you wish, I haven’t looked for those particular ones, but you can check int he keybindings window to see if they are listed to map whatever keys you wish to them.
Where are the midi control maps stored?
In Ardour 2 they are stored in the session file IIRC. That is why it is recommended that if you have a default set of midi bindings you use, to create a template session to use anytime you create a new session to ensure that your new sessions all have those midi bindings loaded from the start.
Is there a way to run Ardour without gui? I plan on among other things using it as a Mixer/Recorder for Supercollider and I fancy it would be cool and freeing some cpu recources though probably kind of dangerous.
Not anymore. There used to be code for this specifically for visually disabled people, but it was so rarely used it languished and no longer works to the best of my knowledge. Actual benefit you would get from this would be minimal though to be perfectly honest.
A bug: If you right click in the prefader section of the channel strip, select an action and immediately after that right click there again, the menu pops up but you can't select anything. After you've clicked somewhere else it works again.
To ensure developers actually see the bug report and that it is not lost, all bugs should be reported in Mantis(the “Issue Tracker” link above) and not here. This being said, this bug is already fixed in Ardour’s SVN and should be included in the next bugfix release when that happens.
But I realize now this is a feature of Ardour 3 (well, the url says it)
Somehow, the keyboard commands don’t work well. Some do, some don’t. I’ve tried my native german and a US layout mode.
For example, I have mapped my left and right arrow buttons to jump-to-previous/next marker and it doesn’t work.
Also, I’m trying to assign midi commands from my (connected and routed via midi patchbay) Akai lpd8 to, e.g., the stop button by control + right click which is suggested here