Dumb question on mastering in Ardour

[Rainmak3r]

Hi all,

I wanted to group a few songs in an EP to publish somewhere, but it's not exactly clear to me how I should approach the mastering process, which would be a new adventure for me.

While the songs are separate, I'd like to add some simple transitions from one to the other to make them flow more naturally. Since I use Ardour for mixing, the obvious solution for me would look like creating a new Ardour session, adding the exported audio for each song there as separate stereo tracks, shifting them to where they need to start in the album, and finally implementing transitions using whatever sound effect I want as an additional track to glue them. In theory, I guess this should also help me take care of consistency among tracks, as with the analyzer of the global session I can spot where I need, e.g., to limit something.

What isn't clear to me is how I can then export this global session as different tracks at marked times, as the start/end markers apply to the session globally AFAIK, which means I would only be able to export the audio of the whole album. I know there's ways to export single tracks, but that wouldn't help I guess, unless I manually move the start/end and specify which tracks to export (e.g., track 5 + transitions 3 and 6) for every song to export. I see there's ways to set CD markers, but I doubt that's what's typically used for the purpose: unless maybe you can export a single flac + CD markers, which you can then split externally somehow.

Am I way off the mark? Is there anything obvious I'm missing? I tried searching around in different places, but most "ardour mastering" searches lead to quite old (>10 years) results talking about Jamin, which unfortunately doesn't seem to even start on my Fedora 34. I'd rather not use other DAWs, since Ardour is what I've grown accustomed to, but in case there's dedicated tools just for mastering that I'm now aware of I'd be happy to try those.

Thanks!

[MyLoFy]

Hey @Rainmak3r!

I'm not a mastering engineer or anything, but I think the process needs a lot of practice and experience to get it right (like mixing or playing an instrument). No wonder mastering engineers charge good money to do that. However, most of us "bedroom producers" do it ourselves and the results can be quiet good and also a great learning experience.
Ardour is perfectly suitable for mastering and your described process looks fine; Ardour let's you export marked sections or a CD or whatever you want. There are excellent modern plugins for mastering on Linux like the LSP suite, x42-plugins and many more. Jamin is very much outdated and I always found it awkward to use; all the modules there are in Jamin (EQ, multiband compressor, limiter) can be found as separate plugins in much better quality.
There's a ton of resources out there to learn; I like this video series below, it is nice for understanding the basics (not Linux/Ardour/FOSS related at all, but everything is transferable):

https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques ... -mastering

If you need feedback on your work I'll be happy to give some and surely others will, too. I checked out some of your stuff on SC and it already sounds pretty great.

Cheers!

[milo]

When I mastered my mini-album "Pity Party" I used a workflow pretty much identical to what you describe. I exported the whole thing as one song because all of the movements blended into one another, so I don't know whether the CD markers in Ardour would give you the ability to export the songs in batch form. I've never used them. That would be a cool feature.

According to the Ardour manual (https://manual.ardour.org/exporting/edi ... t-profile/) I don't think the CD markers will do what you want them to do.

If not then you can do one if the following: 1) Move the start and end markers one at a time as you export the songs. Make sure you snap to grid with the markers or else you might overlap or cut out some time. 2) Export the whole thing as one track and then use any wav editor to cut it into pieces. Audacity would do the trick. I guess Ardour would work too.

[Rainmak3r]

@MyLoFy @milo thanks for the insight and suggestions! I see that there is indeed a way to use ranges marked in the session as indicators for the export process, so that should make things easier. I'll also have a look at the plugins you suggested. Hopefully I'll have something ready soon

[Rainmak3r]

@MyLoFy @milo thanks for the insight and suggestions! I see that there is indeed a way to use ranges marked in the session as indicators for the export process, so that should make things easier. I'll also have a look at the plugins you suggested. Hopefully I'll have something ready soon

PS: I watched the first mastering video from that course, and it was quite interesting! I'll have to watch the others too.

[Rainmak3r]

I eventually managed to take care of the multiple tracks in Ardour. I didn't use the multiple export feature in Ardour using ranges, because it would apply a different normalization to the separate tracks, and so would end up with inconsistent levels across them. What I did was add CD Markers to the Ardour session, tell Ardour to export a .cue file besides the .flac for the whole album, and then used a tool called Flacon to automatically split the single FLAC file using the CUE as a reference, which did the trick for me!

I used this approach for a short EP I created as a test: you can find more info in this post I created in the "Original Scores & Recordings" section, if you're interested in the end result. I didn't do a lot of mastering here, besides some tweaks to keep loudness consistent across tracks: I plan to finish watching the course and do some more studying in the next few weeks, when I'll have to start tackling a longer album instead.

Thanks again for the tips!