JACK-Ardour-Jamin-Audacity

  • Pablo
Posted: Sun, 10/28/2007 - 16:56
Hi! We are recording some songs in Ardour. By the time being, the drums, bass and rythm guitars are recorded and we are trying to get a provisional mix to see how it sounds so far. The drumkit is electronic, from Roland, and we have managed to get a sound we like and we don't want it to be changed by further signal processing. On the other hand I think we should use Jamin to get an appropiate sound level for an audio CD. We use Audacity to record the final mix and export it to a .wav file from which we can burn a CD. So far we have tried the following connections in JACK: a) All the Ardour tracks to Jamin and from Jamin to Audacity b) All the Ardour tracks except for the drums track to Jamin and from Jamin to Audacity. The drums track to the Ardour Master and from the Ardour Master to Audacity. In case a), the drums, especially the cymbals, don't sound fine. In case b) the drums' sound is OK but there is a latency of 48 ms between the tracks being processed by Jamin and the drums, and the music does not sound well. It seems that it is the guitars that doesn't sound in the correct tempo but actually it is the drums which sounds a bit before the rest of the music. I think we shouldn't record to Audacity from two different sources with different signal paths and pretend that there won't be a certain latency between them. Maybe we can avoid using Jamin but then I don't know how to obtain the appropiate level in the final mix. Any suggestion is appreciated, thank you. Sorry for my poor English, I'm learning it little by little. Pablo
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ardour as mixdown environment

  • porisija
  • 09/29/07
  • Thu, 02/07/2008 - 19:10
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Using 32 bit samples is in my opinion the way to go with ardour to achieve best audio quality. Most often I create a stereo mixdown track in ardour and record jamin's output there. Then it is simply a matter of mixing down the whole setup and exporting the mix from ardour with "export session to audiofile". Downsampling can be done like this with sox: sox your_exported_32bit_file.wav -c 2 -w -r 44100 new_CDQ_version.wav Jackd is a brilliant piece of software!

Excellent!

  • Pablo
  • 07/11/07
  • Mon, 10/29/2007 - 22:08
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I was wrong. I see it clearly now. I was trying to get the mix through Jamin, but Jamin is the final step, isn't it. Moreover, in this moment I don't want to obtain the final mix, only a provisional one just to rehearse the guitar solos and the vocals, and by the way, see how it sounds so far. So, for the moment we'll skip Jamin and use ardour buses to mix and export the wav files. We will use Jamin when all the mixdowns are finished, either the way suggested by Quentin or by David. Thank you for your help! David, here in English. I'll post in the chat forum and introduce myself one day. Muchas gracias. Now, I'll keep on working. Pablo

My mastering way.

  • davidpucheta
  • 07/26/07
  • Mon, 10/29/2007 - 17:50
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I prefer doing mastering sessions separate from mixing so my workflow is more traditional: Once i have my ardour session ready and sounding as i want i bounce the mix to a file and move to mix the next song. When i have all the songs mixed down to files (i call this Mixdowns) i move onto mastering usually using alsaplayer-->Jamin-->Audacity, rezound or even timemachine then save it as a 44.1k @ 16 bits (i call this files masters) and then they are ready to burn or you can go into further CD editing and playlisting. A common problem with mastering is that there are engineers still trying to mix or worse, trying to fix the mix, I think the best way is not to move to mastering until you are happy with your mix. Since you need different set of ears for mix and mastering. I suggest you to try to do mixing in one session and mastering at another. Another advantage of this way is that you can always go back to your mixdowns or master files if some fix/changes are needed. As for the crappy cymbal sound my advice is to use compression/limiting wisely and carefully to not overuse it since it will kill your cymbal transients. By the way Pablo im also a non english speaker so if you happen to speak spanish we can communicate better. Saludos.

Workflow

  • Quentin Harley
  • 05/24/07
  • Mon, 10/29/2007 - 06:30
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I believe you might have a work flow problem. The way I work is: All input sources --> Ardour tracks --> Mixdown --> Ardour bus --> ambience effects (such as reverb) --> --> Jamin --> Ardour Master track. If you take a look at the ardour manual http://ardour.org/files/manual/index.html you will find out how to create a CD using the ranges. It will create a Red Book Master image as two files, export.toc (table of contents) and export.wav These files can be imported into GnomeCDMaster by opening the *.toc file that was created by Ardour. GnomeCDMaster will then burn a true red book master CDR of your project. Jamin is (as the name suggests) a Mastering suite, and should be used for final mastering only after you have a good sounding mix. Mastering is the art of making the music shine, while keeping all the individual track balanced with each other in terms of sound tone and level. The fact that the cymbals gets "not ok" by using Jamin, suggests that you are using the powerful features of jamin too aggressively. Again, get it right in the mix, down to the -3db+ peak level. If you then use jamin, you can lift sections of the music to get the polished sound you want, without loosing the essence of your good mix. Hope it helps a bit...