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Old 03-22-2013, 05:25 AM   #15
Lawrence
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: Mar 2007
Posts: 21,551
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I say all of the following having not yet read the manual, so that caveat should be noted... but there is - no scenario - where I'd ever imagine choosing Ardour 2.x on Win over Reaper or S1 or similar to record or edit on Win. It's just (comparitively) way too unweildy and slow, even though the track and clip editing features are setup very, very well (really they are, basic edit stuff, the smart tool works really well and editing clips is really, really fast) the UI is glitchy and it's way slower at way too many other things.

It took a - long - time for it to load the 75 44/24 stems after I chose them to import and no, there was no sample rate conversion or anything going on. No direct dragging of channels and tracks. Renaming console channels is by dialog, which kinda sucks, but again I only used the top field. Channels don't really highlight on selection or follow between arrange and the console. When you select an arrange track or console channel it doesn't scroll to the other like you'd expect so finding things between the two things is a good deal more work, scrolling around, searching for channels.

Without (I guess) the skinny mixer channels of A3, the channels take up a lot of space on my monitor so even at full screen you can't see very many channels at once.

Ardour 3 might be much, much better in regards to some of that but A2 in this case kinda really, really bites in those areas, workflow wise. I expect things like it's window drawing is probably much smoother on Linux though. On win it feels like a port, the graphic redraws are kinda slow.

It scanned my VST plugs with no issue but Altiverb wouldn't pass any sound at all. The bundled Harrison verb isn't bad though, sounded pretty good, and I kinda like that bundled 3D delay plug. I assume those plugs will show up in my other DAWs though I haven't tried yet.

But ... man ... those channel strips and bus DSP and all that sound really good. They smoothed over the digital tracks much like you'd expect from the hype. Vocal tracks that needed de-essing before with rather heavy compression (which typically accentuates sibilance) didn't need it at all there, on the contrary, I boosted the hi-end afterward and it still sounded good. The high end on the EQ is really, really smooth. Might be the best I've heard recently.

I'm not yet a fan of Ardour but Harrison has a clear winner in that DSP. Especially at that price. Literally the only thing missing from the channel strips is gating.
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