Ardour 2, a first look

Ardour is a long running multi-track audio workstation project by Paul Davis and others. Davis is also the lead developer behind JACK, the Jack Audio Connection Kit, which allows multiple applications to share the same sound card.

Ardour can be contrasted with Audacity, a much simpler multi-track capable recording application that was examined in the LWN article Multi-track recording with Audacity.

Installation of Ardour is a complicated process. Your author decided to take the easy path to getting the application running by installing the current version of the Ubuntu Studio distribution. Ubuntu Studio comes with Ardour 2 rev 1762 and includes a Linux kernel with real-time support, JACK, and numerous other useful audio applications:

A multi-track soundcard is highly recommended for getting the most out of Ardour. The M-Audio Delta 44 card was selected. The system uses an Asus A7V 333 motherboard with an Athlon 1800 CPU and 512 MB of system RAM. The system has two hard drives, one for the operating system and another for storing the audio data. The system's video card is an ATI Radeon 8500. Ardour will function with a 1024x768 resolution video display, but a 1280x1024 or higher resolution display is highly recommended so that the main window and mixer windows can be viewed simultaneously.

An external mixing board adds a lot of flexibility to the recording setup, a Behringer Eurorack UB1202 was connected to the Delta 44 card to provide microphone preamplification, tone control and an effects loop. The UB1202 only provides two outputs, a four channel mixer would be a better choice for use with the Delta 44. The first two channels from the Delta 44 were connected to a stereo's aux inputs to allow high fidelity monitoring of the audio.

These screenshots show the Ardour main window, mixer application and the qjackctl GUI interface to JACK.

With this system, Ardour 2 is able to do basic sound-on-sound recordings. Two primary tracks can be recorded, two more tracks can be added while listening to the first tracks, and more tracks can be added later. The Ardour user interface is fairly intuitive, it did not take long to figure out how to record tracks, add new tracks, extend existing tracks and zoom in and out with the audio waveform display. A nice feature is the automatic highlighting of clipped audio samples with red dots on the waveform display. Ardour takes a while to master, but that is to be expected is an application that takes on such a complicated list of tasks. Ardour has a good online manual that is helpful for learning the application.

Initially, it seemed that the system's hardware was not quite up to the task of running Ardour reliably. While playing previously recorded material, moving the mouse between windows on the screen caused small, but highly annoying clicks in the audio stream. Moving the mouse while recording resulted in clicks on the recorded tracks, badness 10,000. Adding another 256MB of RAM to the system did not change the behavior, the top utility supported this by showing 0MB of swap in use with the 512MB memory configuration. Switching to an Athlon 2200 processor reduced the clicking somewhat, but the problem was still present.

After much poking and prodding, the problem was eventually traced to JACK not being configured for realtime operation by default. The fix was easy, it involved clicking on the qjackctl setup button, selecting the realtime button, and restarting everything. No more obnoxious clicking.

Ardour's recorded audio quality using the Delta 44 sound card is quite good. In boutique audio lingo, you can hear lots of subtle nuances in the sound and the hiss is minimal. Ardour 2 shows many improvements over earlier versions, it is truly a nice application. Ubuntu Studio is also a huge step forward. It is possible to go from a blank box to a system with a functioning multi-track recorder in under an hour by answering a small number of installation questions and waiting for the installation to complete.