This page needs massive work It is very important that you check your system is connected and configured correctly before attempting to record. See Hardware Installation for more information on this topic.

It is of course possible to use Ardour on a single-disk system, but you are more likely to have performance problems this way. If you have more than one disk available, we highly recommend using one "system" disk and one or more "audio" disks.

The "system" disk is the main disk on which your operating system and (usually) all your installed software reside. If you have any other disks available, it is usually not advisable to put your Ardour session and all its soundfiles on the main system disk. The reason is that this disk may be used at any time by the OS or other programs and, if Ardour is trying to play a large amount of disk data at that moment, in the worst case this can cause Ardour's playback to stop completely. (insert screenshot of error dialog here) Even so, if you have only two disks (the system disk and your audio disk), it is possible that a large session will reach the performance limits of a single dedicated audio disk. In this case, it may be better to put some audio data on the system disk as described in the Soft RAID section below.

You can of course use a normal RAID disk array to spread data across multiple disks. This is beyond the scope of this manual.

It is possible to spread the resources for your Ardour session across multiple disks. This can increase the number of tracks or regions you can work with at once. There is no reason to do this if your computer has only one disk. To use the "soft RAID" feature, manually create a new directory on another disk. Open the Options Editor window. Click on the Paths/Files tab. In the "session RAID path" text box, you will see that the default value is the path to the directory where your current session lives. But this Session RAID Path can actually be a colon-separated list of directories. To add your new directory to this list, type a single colon after the existing Session RAID Path, followed by the full path to the new directory. Ardour will now record new tracks to either directory. (question: how does ardour decide which files go where?) You can squeeze some more disk performance out of an existing session by following the above procedure, then manually moving some files from the sounds/ subdirectory of the existing session into a sounds/ subdirectory of your new directory. Be very careful when doing this! If you accidentally delete these sound files, Ardour cannot magically fix it for you. If you use the "soft" RAID feature described above, take care to remember this when making and restoring session backups! You will not be happy if you forget to back up one of your data directories; and restoring a backup won't work if you don't make sure that the "Session RAID Path" setting corresponds to the directories where you actually put the restored files.

When creating tracks, there are 2 different options: Normal tracks and Tape tracks. Tape tracks implement a "destructive" style of recording that is useful when you will be making multiple recordings to the same track, and you don't want to keep a separate "region" on disk for each take. There is no undo function (yet) and there is no way to edit a tape track (yet). So what is this good for? Well, consider the case where you are doing a final mixdown of a project. You could record-enable two Tape tracks, and send the master bus output to these tracks. Every time you play through a section of the project, the resulting mix will be recorded onto the continuous tape track. Once you reach the end of the project, you can send the resultant wav file directly to the next production step. There is no "rendering" step required. The utility of this increases when you are using an outboard, automated mixer. This type of recording is very common on a film dubbing stage.

Enabling the click Routing the click Specifying click sounds Default Meter Default Tempo

manual tempo tap tempo