Start 2 functions of apps at same point of time

[Rolf Krüger]

Am 22.08.2010 18:14, schrieb lrspares45:
> On Sun, 2010-08-22 at 16:28 +0200, Rolf Krüger wrote:
>
> <snip>
> > 
> > What I like most about this setup is, that you can route all your
> > instruments (yes, every single Drumsound from Hydrogen) through
> > Busses(!!!!! not Tracks!!!!!) in Ardour and use the effects and mixer
> > section of Ardour for the complete mix.
> > 
> > 
> > HTH
> > Rolf
> > 
>
> Hi Rolf,
> could you expand on that please? I think it's what I want to do  - is
> there a tutorial anywhere?
>   

No, AFAIK there´s no tutorial on this. But it´s very easy. First start
Jack (with GUI), Ardour and then Hydrogen. Now have a look at the
options dialog of Hydrogen. There´s an option "ceate per instruments
outputs", make sure this is checked. Then have a look at Jack´s
connection window, there you should now see all instruments of Hydrogen.
Disconnect Hydrogens "out L and out R from the system outputs (otherwise
you will find strange effects later on). Now, say you want something
easy, like just Kick, Snare and HiHat signals "flowing" through Ardour:
Add three Busses (not Tracks!!!) in Ardour and name them e.g. "KickBus",
"SnareBus", "HiHatBus". Now edit the inputs for each bus and assign the
appropriate Hydrogen outputs. Make sure the busses outputs are routed to
Ardours master outs. That´s it. Now you can easily add effects like
Gate, Compressor EQ, etc. to each drum sound separately and you will be
able to edit everything in Ardour´s mixer panel, pretty cool, eh?
Depending on the drum sounds it might not be necessary to use stereo
busses. I always worked with mono busses and received pretty good
results so far.

Another thing one could do is to do use Tracks instead of busses and
really record the drum sounds to single tracks in ardour. From that
moment on you could close down Hydrogen. I first worked like this too,
but it´s a hassle, if you find later in the mix, that you must have to
change some of the drums stuff. As long as your machine (and sound
server) has enough performance headroom, I would not recommend this.

I also do this with midi-files in Muse. For each instrument I open a
Qsynth instance, load my soundfonts, connect the Qsynth instances from
Muse, and again, route the synth outs to Ardour busses. In Muse it´s  a
little tricky to have it sync with Jack, but a little trial & error
should end up with a working solution.

In order to have all apps synchronized correctly, make sure that you
have enabled Jack as the TimeBase and Ardour as the TimeMaster (see my
last post for details).

If you are diving into the nitty gritty of Ardour I highly recommend the
so called "Floss Manual" (http://en.flossmanuals.net/ardour/), this is
the source where I learned all I wanted to know about ardour (This is
also the #1 resource if you do not know how to assign in-/outputs in
Ardour).


Ah wait! Here´s something which caused me a lot of trouble in the
beginning: The Jack connection dialog wouldn´t refresh properly after
adding new instruments, tracks, busses, .... Someone posted a patch for
this a few months ago on this list. There was also a fix, that lets you
minimize the sub-windows of Jack´s GUI (which is very helpful). I don´t
know, if the Jack Version that you use, has this problems too.



HTH
Have Phun!
Rolf