Well, that was a colossal waste of time

[solarbird]

So on and off - mostly off - for a while, I've been reading documentation for Ardour, a digital audio workstation with all sorts of neat but somewhat complicated stuff, and that's meant figuring out JackOSX, a virtual plugboard system that hates lifehas issues with OSX 10.5.6 but they're working on it, and that's meant trying to get it to talk to my little Geffen iMic, a low-noise high-fidelity USB external sound interface, and that's been an unending clusterfuck, because nobody wants to talk to the little hockey puck if it can avoid it. When I finally do get JackOSX to talk to it, it insists that the iMic is a 6400bps device, and that's just useless and wrong.

But I did at least get everything talking to each other, so tonight I finally decided, "okay! Maybe JackOSX's interface is just wrong, and it's really a 44.1K device, and I can just make it go." So I actually try to do some test recording...

...and Ardour decides that my hard drive is too slow to record anything (from a 6400bps device, presumably) and promptly tells me to DIAF.

I'm pretty sure given the system requirements that my hard drive is not too slow, even if this is a laptop. C'mon. Nothing else is running here. Et tu, ardour?

Comments

[hubbit.livejournal.com]

Something you may not know but should: Ardour and JACK were written by the same person, Paul Davis.

If you're just recording from one mic, grab Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/mac). It will record and play just fine, and will also do multitrack. I don't know how well it will do multitrack editing, though.

I have found JACK to be a kludgy pain, and I'm betting that Ardour is dependent on it since they were written by the same author.

[solarbird]

I've also played with Audacity some. I really would like to use Ardour; I do intend to do a lot more than one-mic recording.

I really like the idea of JACK and I'd like to get it working. But that's also true for Ardour.