Archive for the 'Audio' Category

Compile Ardour 2.3 in Ubuntu Gutsy

Published by ubustu on February 10, 2008 in Ardour. 15 Comments

Recently we were shoked to find the version of Ardour currently available in the official Ubuntu repository was more than six months old. Since August 8th of 2007 (the release date of Ardour 2.0.5) many goodies have been added, existing features have been upgraded and improved, and entire tools have been redesigned. Long story short, if you’re still using 2.0.5, you really need to check out Ardour 2.3

Ardour

Some of the most notable features include mouse scrubbing, an improved JACK control dialog, time stretching via Rubber Band, the beatslicing tool RhythmFerret, LV2 support, not to mention several interface improvements. Here are the official feature lists for 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3.

Downloading the source code

Luckily, compiling Ardour 2.3 in Gutsy is rather straightforward. First things first, you’ll want to download the Ardour 2.3 tarball into your Home folder.

You can also achieve the same results by using the terminal command wget. Just remember that you must use Shift+Ctrl+C and Shift+Ctrl+V to copy and paste from within the terminal to install:

wget <Paste URL Here>

Now, extract the contents of the source code:

tar -xjvf ardour-2.3.1.tar.bz2

Finally, change directories into the newly created ardour-2.3 folder:

cd ardour-2.3

Fetching dependicies and compiling

Before we can compile, we must download a few libraries and compiling tools. Simply paste this list into the terminal:

sudo apt-get install scons build-essential libjack-dev libasound2-dev libglib2.0-dev liblrdf0-dev libboost-dev liblo0-dev libgnomecanvas2-dev libsamplerate0-dev fftw3-dev

Now that all the dependicies are met, we can get down to business. The next command could take anywhere from 10-20 minutes to complete, a perfect time to steep some tea or have a smoke:

scons

If you’ve made it this far without any errors, you are now ready to install:

sudo scons install

Remember, Ardour requires JACK to run, so if you don’t have it already :

sudo apt-get install jackd qjackctl

qjackctl is a simple GUI interface for JACK. So load it up, configure it, and then fire up Ardour 2.3 :

ardour2

screenshot-about-ardour.png

You can add a shortcut to Ardour 2.3 to the panel by using the Custom Application Launcher. The Ardour icons can be found in /usr/local/share/ardour2/icons

How to uninstall

You might want keep the ardour-2.3 source code folder around. We created a unique folder called sourcecode to store such things in. Whatever you do, it can be useful for uninstalling Ardour later. Simply change into the source code directory:

cd ardour-2.3

And run this command to uninstall:

sudo scons -c install

Please leave any questions, suggestions, hints, or tips in the comments below. Thank you!

How to Sync Hydrogen with Ardour

Published by ubustu on September 19, 2007 in Ardour and Hydrogen. 7 Comments

We’re going to skim over a few things we’ve already discussed in the last Ardour tutorial, so if things get confusing please go there first.

This tutorial will show you how to sync up the digital audio workstation, Ardour, and the advanced drum machine, Hydrogen. This will allow you to have a full featured drum machine playing in perfect time with your Ardour session. Or, one hell of a fancy click track.

Learning to play nice

First, start up JACK. Open Ardour and create a new session. Near the top of the window in Ardour, make sure that Time Master is enabled (green) and is set to JACK rather than Internal:

Ardour Tutorials

Now, open Hydrogen. For simplicity’s sake, go ahead and load of one of the demo tracks from the File menu :

Hydrogen Tutorials

Continue reading ‘How to Sync Hydrogen with Ardour’

How to Create a Basic Loop in Ardour

Published by ubustu on September 14, 2007 in Ardour and Audio. 7 Comments

This tutorial will show you how to create perfectly timed loops in Ardour. Along the way we’ll learn how to edit the tempo, enable a click track, switch track inputs, set the quantinization/snapping, and how to fill your track with your new loop. We’ll be recording a short rhythmic loop of handclaps as a substitute for the sqeuaky, dull, yet indespinsible click track.

The Click Track

After you’ve created a new Ardour session, the first thing you’ll want to do is enable the click track. The click track consists of two tones, a high and a low. For example: if you are recording in 4/4 time, the first, or accented, beat will be the high pitch, and the remaining three will be the low.

Test it out now by pressing play :

Continue reading ‘How to Create a Basic Loop in Ardour’

Keeping Time in Ubuntu Studio with Gtick

Published by ubustu on September 10, 2007 in GTick. 3 Comments

GTick is a slick little metronome app with a few extremely useful features. It supports all the common time signatures but also includes a custom field allowing for uncommon meters such as 5/4, 7/4, 16/4, and so on. It can handle tempo speeds anywhere from 10 to 1000 beats per minute. Perhaps the most striking feature of GTick is the ability to tap out custom tempos with a few clicks of the mouse.

Continue reading ‘Keeping Time in Ubuntu Studio with Gtick’

How to Configure JACK in Ubuntu Studio

Published by ubustu on May 29, 2007 in Ardour, Audio and JACK. 36 Comments

Here are the steps we took to get JACK up and running with Ardour. The following was done on a clean install of Ubuntu Studio using the M-Audio Delta 44 sound card. We understand that different sound cards may require different settings, but this guide will at least give you a general idea of what needs to be done.

Getting JACK Started

First you’ll want to run JACK Control from the Applications menu. Here we see the default JACK panel :

JACK Audio Panel

Select the Settings button to configure JACK for your sound card. Here is the default JACK configuration :

JACK Default Setup

Continue reading ‘How to Configure JACK in Ubuntu Studio’

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