by Ben Powers

Introduction

Ardour uses the JACK Audio Connection Kit to route audio internally between tracks and busses, and externally to and from other software and hardware devices. Refer to the JACK Quickstart Guide if you don't have JACK set up already.

Starting Ardour and Creating a New Session

Make sure JACK is running at the sample rate you require for your project, and then launch Ardour from the Sound & Video menu. The session control window will appear and present you with a number of options. For now, just choose a name for your session and a directory to store it in. Your session will be saved as a collection of files and directories, inside the directory you just selected from the drop-down menu.

Figure 1: Ardour session control window: new session

It's best practice to keep your audio projects on a separate hard disc from your system disc. This is because the root filesystem is often accessed by the system, and when dealing with the large volumes of data you can expect to use in an Ardour session, throughput can suffer. Having said that, a single hard disc works fine for small to medium sized Ardour projects, as long as your system is fast enough.