This chapter will explain how to use Ardour's automation facilities to make editing and mixing your sessions more productive.

Automation refers to Ardour's ability to remember changes you made to various parameters in the session, and at what point along the timeline playback had reached when you made them. Later, Ardour can make these changes happen automatically at the same point on the timeline, thus leaving your hands free to do something else. A typical practice when using automation is to work on one or two tracks while leaving others alone, recording the edits/changes. Once satisfied with the track(s), you can move on to adjust other tracks. As the overall mix changes, you can return to earlier tracks and adjust their existing automation.

You can automate all changes to track/bus gain control, panning (currently only for stereo output) and all plugin parameters. Future versions of Ardour will allow automation of mute/solo controls, non-stereo panning, and send gain levels.

Each parameter that can be automated has a button available to control its state of automation. Each button can be used to put the parameter into one of 4 possible automation states: Off No changes to the parameter are recorded, and any existing automation for the parameter is ignored. This is the default. Play Existing automation data controls the value of the parameter, and graphical/hardware editing of the value is disabled. Write All changes to the parameter are recorded as new automation data, overwriting any existing data for that point in time. Touch Existing automation data controls the value of the parameter, but new changes to the parameter are recorded, overwriting any existing data for that point in time.

Each track/bus has two automation control buttons for gain and pan in its mixer strip. For each track/bus that you wish to automate, click on the relevant automation button. From the popup menu that appears (showing all automation states) choose Record . As long as the automation state remains in "Record", then any changes you make to gain or pan for that track/bus will be recorded.

Many plugins have many parameters that you might wish to play while recording gain automation, so Ardour offers independent control of recording changes to these parameters. You can access the controls in either of two ways: open the plugin's editor window, and click on the appropriate automation control button. From the menu that pops up, choose Record make the automation track for this parameter visible (see plugin_automation_tracks on how to do this), and click on the automation control button in the track controls. From the menu that pops up, choose Record . To record edits to the parameter, click on the appropriate arec button. As long as the button stays pressed, all edits to that parameter will be recorded.

Each track/bus has two automation control buttons for gain and pan in its mixer strip. For each track/bus where you want existing automation data to control gain and/or panning, click on the relevant automation button. From the popup menu that appears (showing all automation states) choose Play. As long as the automation state remains in Play, you can no longer control the gain and/or panning from the graphical user interface or an external hardware control surface.

For each plugin parameter you want controlled by automation data, you need to activate automation playback which can be done in one of two ways: open the plugin's editor window, and click on the appropriate automation control button, and choose Play from the menu that pops up. make the automation track for this parameter visible (see plugin_automation_tracks on how to do this), and click on the automation control button in the track controls. Choose Play from the menu that pops up. You also need to enable automation playback for the plugin itself. This needs to be done in the plugin's editor window by clicking on the automation button in the upper right corner. Without this step, the individual parameter buttons will not enable automation playback. The plugin automation button also allows you to globally disable automation control of all parameters by unsetting it (clicking it so that it is no longer "pressed"). This leaves the individual automation control buttons in whatever state they were already in, but it stops the use of automation data for all parameters. This can be useful if you have a hardware control surface, and have automation-playback-enabled several parameters. You can override the automation playback settings and manually control parameter values from the control surface without having to click on each parameter's automation control button individually.

The editor window can display all automation data for a track. Each type of automation data is shown in its own "track" to make it easy to see the data, and to edit it.