Ardour vs. Audacity?

[thomas fisher]

> On 1/3/08, Darrin Goodman <darrin.goodman at gmail.com> wrote:
> > As a bluegrass musician, most all of the music that I am recording is
> > acoustic.  Sometimes I might have a simple microphone plugged into the
> > sound card on my laptop, and other times I might be using high quality
> > condenser microphones which are powered by my mixer (the mixer would
> > then feed to my sound card).
> >
> > My needs for audio recording are fairly simple and can be broken into
> > two categories:  (1) I might be recording the band in a live setting
> > and will use the mixer as my input, and will record a single track
> > while playing live.  (2) I would also like to have the ability to
> > record multiple tracks (private recording scenario, not a live
> > performance).  For instance, if I am making music by myself, I would
> > like to record the mandolin, then record the banjo, then record the
> > guitar, vocals, etc..., and then be able to mix the tracks so that it
> > sounds like a full band is playing.  At most, I would probably only
> > have 6 or 7 tracks (bass, banjo, mandolin, guitar, fiddle, vocals).
> >
> > What I would like to know are these two things:
> > - is Ardour really all that better (over Audacity) when it comes to
> > this sort of multi-tracking, or is there another tool that I should
> > look at?
> > - is Ardour better for just recording a single live track with a full
> > band (or would Audacity be a better tool for this use)?  So far, I've
> > had good results with Audacity when recording a single live track, but
> > have not had that great of results with trying to mix multiple tracks.
> >
> > I have looked at Rosegarden and some other tools, but it seems (and
> > please correct me if I am wrong) that many of the other tools are for
> > recording midi devices.  Jokosher also looks interesting as an audio
> > recording tool, but I'm not sure if it's there yet.  Any thoughts?
> >
> > Thank you for your input.
> >
> > - Darrin
  Darrin it seems there are many on this list who cannot get Audacity to 
cooperate with Jack. For that reason you may want to check out ReZound which 
is Jack smart.  This relatively brief article by Dave Phillipswill answer 
about the significance of "Jack" and Linux audio.
http://w3.linux-magazine.com/issue/67/JACK_Audio_Server.pdf

Hope that helps
Tom