Which is better Ardour or KX Studio?

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TVRO1964
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Which is better Ardour or KX Studio?

Post by TVRO1964 »

Hello! New member and a also new to Linux recording :)
I am working on moving my studio environment from WIN to Linux and I'm having a little trouble deciding which way to go as to software.
I have Ardour running on Lubuntu 13.10 but it seems a little picky to configure at times. My basic use currently is for 2 track demo and low budget 2 track masters.Possibly later on if platform remains steady some light multi track work from my other DAW. I have an extra M Audio 2496 that I would like to use here for experimentation purposes. SO my main questions are which program is best suited to my application and what sort of brick walls can I expect getting the sound card to work and interface with either program.

Currently I am operating on spare build PC's P4 2.8 2gb ram.. More powerful system in works but in hopes this one will show me the basics of the use .


Thanks in advance!

Wayne Thomas
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Re: Which is better Ardour or KX Studio?

Post by sysrqer »

Kxstudio and Ardour are not the same kind of thing and cannot really be compared. Ardour is a digital audio workstation and Kxstudio is a repo/distro for linux that has lots of audio applications, including Ardour.

Ardour does sound like the best thing for what you want to do, if you can get it running stable. You might want to look on the kxstudio website and look how to add the repo to your version of linux, and to see what it offers. You would generally add it to your repo list and install the applications you want from it.

Other than Ardour, you could try Qtractor or Non (timeline and mixer I suppose). Or perhaps Muse2.
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Re: Which is better Ardour or KX Studio?

Post by TVRO1964 »

Thanks for the information.Greatly appreciated. Since last posting I have gotten Ardour working fairly stable on my distro which is Lubuntu 13.10
I am sitting at 1gb of ram currently and the max for this older Dell Optiplex is 2Gb and I plan on maxing that shortly in hopes the overall performance will be better. I have got to learn the program's curve for exporting to a audio file :D First attempt was apparently out of phase terribly somehow as the vocal was eliminated LOL. I have been told that the mastering plugin or program for JACK is good.. any experience with that?



Thanks for the information!


Wayne
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Re: Which is better Ardour or KX Studio?

Post by sysrqer »

Hey Wayne, not really sure what could've happened with your vocals to be completely out of phase :shock:
I'm sure it was a simple mistake though and once you work out why then you will kick yourself, seems to be the way with most problems in Linux!

I know that more than a few people have stability problems with Ardour but if it is just audio you are dealing with you should be ok.

Which mastering program are you referring to? Also, what exactly do you mean by mastering? This has a lot of meanings for different people. Usually it is the treatment of a (usually) stereo file of your mixdown, after you have applied eq, compression, fx or whatever else to the track. For this process I use a variety of single plugins for a bit of mid/side eq, compression and limiting.

If you mean which plugins to eq, compress and make your individual tracks (inside the project) to sound good together then you can't go too far wrong with the calf suite, it offers pretty much everything you could need and they have nice user friendly guis. Other than that the Invada, C* and TAP plugin suites are good. Also have a look at ArtyFX by OpenAVProductions.
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Re: Which is better Ardour or KX Studio?

Post by TVRO1964 »

I haven't yet dug into the specifics of the actual "mastering program" but I am guess that it is one of those suites that has numerous plugins and allows for a bit of "sweetening" of the 2 track master. I'm thinking it may be along the lines of what is in Adobe Audition. I need to dig in to this and see what I can learn but usually if you take care of the small things in the mix there's not as much do to in the end anyway :D

I was playing with AVLinux on the same machine ( different drive) till the wee hours of the morning with still no audio passing anywhere..guess that's what I get for doing things half asleep LOL!

Thanks for the good info! I have several plugins ranging from BBE to Presonus but they are all WIN platform so I'm kinda starting off from the ground up here.. I never had much luck getting WIN programs to run under WINE for some reason :?:

Thanks again!


Wayne
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Re: Which is better Ardour or KX Studio?

Post by GMaq »

Hi,

In AV Linux and in Linux Audio generally all main programs of interest (Ardour, Qtractor, Yoshimi, etc) are using the JACK to handle the Audio, in order to have any success 'passing audio' you will need to be using JACK with 'Qjackctl' a program that gives you a UI to set up JACK with your Audio card . There is a quick overview of using JACK and routing both Audio and MIDI in the AV Linux User Manual on page 48. The manual should be on your AV Linux Desktop or you can read it online here: http://bandshed.net/pdf/AV603Manual.pdf
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Re: Which is better Ardour or KX Studio?

Post by TVRO1964 »

Thanks for the tips!
I have it working on a different sound card setup currently. I had planned to move it from the WIN machine any way but earlier today the WIN Machine BSOD'd on me and after I got it back up no output regardless... and that was the very same response I get under AV Linux,so it appears my card is bad. I'll try it in another WIn machine on the test bench tomorrow just to be sure :D I hope it is really good LOL! I like that card!

SO far it seems what little time I have had today to play with the setup on AV Linux it has done well. Now just a matter of shaking down all the little bugs and gremlins I suppose :lol:


Thanks again!

Wayne

BTW I mentioned earlier I had a phase problem in the export.. that turned out to be a problem in some out board gear in the chain..er the dummy at the patch bay plugged it in a wrong hole :oops:
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