Ardour Hydrogen Loop

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erlkönig
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Ardour Hydrogen Loop

Post by erlkönig »

Hi,

Ardour(7.1) and Hydrogen(1.1) are synced via Jack, with Ardour as timemaster. I try to play a loop, but the loop symbol in the transport section of Ardour is disabled. As soon, as i switch in Ardour from Jack to INT, it's enabled again (but then Hydrogen is out of the game). So: am i goofy, unworthy or have i overlooked something? To my understanding, looping should be possible, as normal transport works.

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merlyn
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Re: Ardour Hydrogen Loop

Post by merlyn »

No, you can't do looping when JACK is the time master unfortunately. This is due to the fact that this feature is not something that jack_transport does. If you think about it where would jack_transport store the loop information? The loop information is stored on the Ardour timeline, so Ardour has to be the timing master. It is a bummer, but it reflects that everything is becoming a plugin. I still like doing things the old way, with multiple apps synced through JACK, but that's not the way things have gone.

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Re: Ardour Hydrogen Loop

Post by erlkönig »

Thank you for your explanation, i wasn't aware of that.

Starting jack_transport on cli and giving "help" shows transport and location functions. Would be a nice little task for a rainy afternoon to refresh some python skills...

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Re: Ardour Hydrogen Loop

Post by Impostor »

I was going to say, looping works fine with MusE as master and Hydrogen as slave, but apparently there's looping and "looping", and Ardour does the former, while MusE does the latter...

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Re: Ardour Hydrogen Loop

Post by merlyn »

Ardour is now tending towards being a monolithic DAW. The idea is that you have one DAW running, and everything runs inside that. In version 7, the Ardour developers are addressing working with loops, and these are managed from inside Ardour. It's done in the new 'Cue' window. I've tried it briefly and it works. There is content available as .flacs, and that has not been working smoothly for me. Decoding the .flac seems to take too much CPU and causes xruns. But using my own .wav files it has been fine, and it integrates loops into Ardour.

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Re: Ardour Hydrogen Loop

Post by erlkönig »

Thanks for the hint, i'm going to try this.

Currently working with
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Fiddling with sequencers does not evolve into music necessarily and Mac users have smelly feet and guzzle little children.

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Re: Ardour Hydrogen Loop

Post by houston4444 »

Personnaly, I prefer to use Hydrogen as just a drumkit player. I make a midi track in ardour (without instrument), I connect its output to the hydrogen midi input. Then, no need to use JACK transport.

If the song is already written with hydrogen, you can export it in MIDI.

The main limitation to this workflow is that you can't use pitched instruments in hydrogen, or you have to use multiple hydrogen instances.

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Re: Ardour Hydrogen Loop

Post by erlkönig »

I think, that's the way to go for my task, or simply recording the hydrogen audio into ardour. It's simply for repairing some mistakes in a song, where i have to loop to do some punches.

Currently working with
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Fiddling with sequencers does not evolve into music necessarily and Mac users have smelly feet and guzzle little children.

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