 Hey, I'm Anfa, and this video I will show you how to manage connections in Ardor. I've received some questions about it. It seems to be a confusing topic, so today I'm going to focus entirely on managing connections. Let's do it. So here is Ardor. It's an empty session. To manage connections, you first need to make sure you have this editor mixer strip inside of your editor. You open it up using Shift E. Shift E will open up this editor mixer strip. Of course, you can also go to the mixer view and manage your connections that way. Here is the connections button. This is for inputs and the other one is for outputs, but I'm going to use the in editor mixer view. So Shift E, you can also do this in view show editor mixer. Once you have this visible, we can manage connections. The mixer strip shows us the signal path that goes through the track from top to bottom. So on the very top, we have the track's name and we have the inputs. Right now there are no inputs because we have no tracks in this session, so that makes sense. So nothing goes into the master bus. After the inputs, we have a trim control, which is gain. You can make the inputs louder on quieter. We can flip the polarity. We have the processor box. We have Panor. We have Mute control. We have the fader and volume indicator. And after that, we have the outputs. Currently, output is set to monitor. And that is an internal Ardor bus, which is used for monitoring. And here it is. This is a special Ardor bus that is used for listening to what you're doing. You can apply some volume changes or make it mono or send it to a different output than the normal master bus output, whatever you want. The processing applied for the monitor bus is not applied to your exports, so that's useful if you want some plugins to be applied just for your monitoring. But that's not the topic of this video. The topic of this video is managing connections. There are two basic ways of managing connections. There's the simple way where you can just left click. That is just regularly click on the button to manage inputs, which is on top, or click on the button to manage outputs, which is on the bottom. When you click it, Ardor will show you a context menu containing various options available to you. For example, you can disconnect all outputs. And now you can see this little hyphen shows us that there are no connections. Nothing is receiving output of the master bus. Similarly, nothing is receiving the input right now. If we create a track, let me right click and add an audio track. You can now see that Ardor crashed. Okay, I'm back. I've switched to Ardor 7. It's unstable, but maybe it will work better. Alright, so we have an audio track. And you can see that the inputs and outputs are not disconnected. We have something connected to them. So, for example, here we have an input connected. If I try to record, you can see that there is signal coming in. Huh! And it is that microphone. Testing! So I can record. We have input. Now, to change this input, we can click on the button and select one of these inputs if the names are enough to give us information on what we are looking at. That currently doesn't tell me much. There is also options to add audio port and add mini port. What that means is we can add extra inputs into our track. This is a mono audio track. That means it has a single audio input. And that is indicated by two things. One, we have this flip polarity button and there is just one of them. When I switch to my master bus, you can see there are two buttons to switch polarity. And also, there are two green stems going through this fader item. If I go back to my audio track, there is just one stem on the middle. Okay, but adding ports is not necessary if you want to just manage connections. So let's manage some connections. I'm going to resize this just to have it nicer. If I want to select a different input, I can just do this. That's probably going to be a secondary microphone. Yes, it is. Now, there is also a second way to manage connections. If you right click on an input output button, you open up what is called a routing grid. The window is a bit small. I'm going to make it larger. All right, and what we have here is a matrix of inputs and outputs that we can easily manage. Here we have a few tabs. This is hardware. So these are all the hardware inputs that we can send to our track. So on the left, on the horizontal axis, we have the ports we can connect, which will give us signal. And vertically, we have laid out the ports we can feed the signal into. Because this is an audio track, which is one port or one channel, we only have one input. And that is the mono input. You can see that I have my audio interface, UMC 202 HD, and it has two inputs. It has two microphone ports. So this was the first one, which is this microphone right here. That's the second one, which is an auxiliary microphone over there. And you can see we have probably previously we've had this one active by default, and I've just switched it to that one. You can also see that the name here changes. And Ardor tries to smartly determine what should it put here, because it's very, very little room. So you see it strips the last part of this name after the underscore. If I select this one, we have AUX1. Again, this is AUX1. These are not unique names, unfortunately. Similarly, this will give us FL, just like this one. So it's not perfect, but it's something. So to create a connection, you simply click in the appropriate box, and an existing connection is marked as a green circle. You can also click and drag to create or destroy multiple connections. If I click and drag like that, I have just rooted all the possible hardware inputs into my audio track. So I'm going to record from all the audio interfaces present in this system and all of their audio ports. And there's a few of them, because there's my audio interface. There is the... Actually, what is that? I think that's like monitoring ports of the HDMI outputs from my graphics card. There is a webcam input, which is this one here. There is... Oh no, sorry. That is the capture from my camera over HDMI, and this is the webcam. Anyway, we've created a bunch of inputs. If I want to destroy them, I can also click and drag to remove these connections. Now, let's look at these tabs. There is tabs here. We have hardware. There is also Ardor Misk, so miscellaneous, and we have some special things here. There is Auditioner Output, Click Out, LTC Out. These ports are special ports that Ardor uses to provide certain features. For example, Click is the metronome. And we can route it to the track if you really want. There's LTC, which is linear timecode, I believe. It's used for synchronization over audio connections for video sync. There's Auditioner, which is used to playback sounds from your... When you're importing files, you can play them back and monitor them. So we can route that special output somewhere. Then there's Out Audio Ardor Tracks, and you can see there is Audio One Out. So this is the exact track we're currently working on. So we can feed the output of this track into its input. Now, that's a dangerous thing to do, and you can see Ardor shows us this feedback indicator here, and it's blinking in red because it detected that we've routed output of a track into its input. And that is very dangerous, because this is a feedback loop which can cause extreme volumes and unpredictable behavior. So let's disconnect that. You can now see Ardor shows no Align. Not sure what that means. It's no longer feedback, though. There's other things we can source our signal from, Ardor Bosses. And we can see Master Output here. That's the Master Boss. We can send the Master Boss Output to a track. For example, if you want to bake your signal from the Master, including your Master Chain, and just have that recorded onto a track, you can do that. You shouldn't then send the output of that track back into Master because that's going to be a feedback loop again. And there's other. Other is everything that in your current system feeds an output but was not categorized by Ardor into any of these previous categories. So here are some things that are on my system. This is a background music playback for my live streams. This is monitoring outputs of OBS, which is the program I'm recording this right now with. ANFA Studio is a Carla preset I'm using for managing connections. Again, this is here. I don't know why these are split, but okay. Yeah, there's a bunch of outputs which are not particularly really grouped together. This is monitoring of my main audio interface outputs. This is HDMI outputs. No, these are actually monitors of the HDMI outputs. Yes. And several things. So we can feed any of that into my track. And you can see now I've rooted my background music system into this track. And you can see we have inputs. That's the background music that just plays over and over, which I use for my live stream warm-ups. And it's just going to play our music. Actually, I've missed an important thing. If you right-click on the port header, this mono in here, you'll see a context menu with very useful things. For example, you can add and remove ports or disconnect them. You can also uncheck this show individual ports checkbox to group the ports into stereo pairs, which is very useful. And you don't need this control-click trick that I'm going to teach you in a while. All right. So that's managing inputs. What about outputs? Let's close this. We have no input, but that's okay. We don't need to record anything more. We have some audio to work with. I'm going to just reset this clip indicator, peak indicator. Now we have our output set up. So you can see if I hover my mouse, there is a tooltip that says output from audio one. And it also says what is rooted where. We have two output ports. You see, this is a mono audio track, but it has two outputs. That is because we can pan the track and we have this pattern right here. If we bypass the pattern, it's not going to do anything, but we still have two audio outputs. And it shows that audio output one from this track is sent to master input one. And audio output two is rooted to master output two. We can click and have a list of things. And usually master input is going to be on top, which is our master bus. Other buses, if you have them in your session, will also appear here. And there is out one plus two, three plus four, three plus four, et cetera. These are physical outputs. So output one plus two is most likely the physical outputs of my main audio interface. And that is usually the case. One plus two is the stereo pair of your main audio interface. But if you have multiple interfaces connected like I do, it could be something else. Now, I have so many outputs and inputs listed because I am using pipe wire audio server as a replacement for jack and pulse audio. So it aggregates all the audio interfaces present on my system, regardless of what they are, all the devices into a single pool. That's why I have all the audio interfaces. If you run jack, you're going to normally have only one audio input interface and one audio output interface, nothing more. And then your out one plus two is going to for sure be your audio interface. But when pipe wire is present and used in the system, there is more because your displays, your HDMI monitors may have audio input, they will. And if you have a webcam, it may have an audio input as well. And that's going to be present. And that's what happens. That's why there are so many ports. If I use jack, I'm going to have less of that. All right. So we have here different settings against similar to the inputs. We can disconnect our output. And that means our audio is not going to be sent anywhere. You can see I can play this back. Also, I could disable the record, this disarm recording so we can see the output levels on this level indicator. I can send it to the master bus. Now the signal level is present on the master bus as well. You can see that the signal actually goes through. We can also, oh, sorry, I clicked on the comments. Open the comment box. We can also route it to output like directly. And then I can play this back on my speakers. Yeah, I'm playing right now on my studio monitors. So that's working. And again, if we want to have some advanced stuff, we can click here and either click on the routing grid or we can just right click. And it will immediately open the routing grid for us. And it's a little bit small. I'm going to enlarge that. Now we have a little bit more interesting situation because this audio track has two outputs. We have two output ports to audio channels left and right. And so our matrix is looking a little bit more interesting because we have two columns. So again, this time vertically we have our inputs and horizontally we have our outputs. You can remember that previously with our inputs, we had our when our inputs routing grid, we had our inputs horizontally and our outputs vertically. I think this is done so that, you know, because we are like interpreting things from left to right and from top to bottom, this is done so that it's a bit more natural to think about what goes where. So when this is up above our outputs, then like with gravity, the signal will flow down to the output. And this red indicator also shows us what is going to go where. When we're routing inputs, the gravity will pull the signal, the gravity. It's going to pull the signal from our outputs of the track we're managing right now into different input ports. I think that's the logic behind it and it feels natural to me, but I can totally understand that it's going to look very confusing at first. I'm going to close the inputs for this track and we're going to focus on outputs of this track. So by the way, if I want to record the output of this track, I need to route it to OBS DAW. That's the port. Actually, no, I need to route it to ANFAS Studio inputs one and two and three. No, three and four. Okay, so this is three and this is four. And now if I play something on this track, you're going to hear it recorded. Testing. Or will you? Oh no, that's wrong. I made it inputs one and two just for convenience and I forgot about that. Okay, DAW, OBS, no, ANFAS Studio inputs, ANFAS Studio inputs one and two. I don't know why they are in such a weird order, but I think it's a pipe wire and order not being exactly on the same page. So now if I play it back. Testing. You are able to hear exactly this, the outputs of that. Okay, now again with the outputs, you can click and drag to assign your outputs to multiple tracks at once. However, with stereo pairs, usually what we do is like do with zigzags. Okay, I don't know why some inputs are not accepting outputs. I think it's a pipe wire problem. So we're doing zigzags. Now again, if you start clicking on an empty box and drag, you're going to create inputs. If you start dragging on a full box, you're going to start destroying inputs. So it depends on what you're clicking at. If I make some zigzags here and now I click on this one and drag down, I'm going to remove the connections. If I'm going to click here because it's empty and drag down, I'm going to create connections. There's also an options to create a stereo pair connection with a single click using control. So if you have, like, say, OBS inputs front left and front right, we can just control click here and it's going to create two inputs for us, left and right, and route them left and right. Similarly, we can click again with control and it's only going to work if you click on the top left in the square you're trying to assign, not on the bottom right. I wonder if you can do that with multiple inputs. No, no, okay. It just works for one, but control click will make things easier for you. Of course, we have our tabs this time on the right and we have other. We have order buses, which is master and usually you want to route to master. So I'm going to hold control. Right down below, I have a little indicator of what buttons I'm pressing and what keys I'm pressing as well. I can control click here to create a connection to master inputs, which is, again, the master bus. And the master bus is routed to the output of, to the recording. So it's recorded. You can also go to order tracks. Again, we can make feedback loops this way. Order MISC and that's LTC output. Yes, because order accepts LTC. Yes, it can sync the transport to LTC and hardware, which is, I've right now connected my track both to the master bus and to the physical outputs themselves. I'm going to control click here to disable this connection or pair of connections. Okay, let's create a bus. I'm going to make a stereo audio bus. All right, I think I'll cut it here. I've covered the basics of routing connections. There is a little bit more to it, but I think this is going to get you through most of your needs. And if you have any questions regarding this topic or maybe some suggestions as to what I should do next, maybe you need something else to be discussed, please leave your suggestions in the comments. I really appreciate them. I use them a lot. Many of the videos I'm making are based on your suggestions. All right, that's it. I hope you've learned something. I hope this was interesting and useful. If you have any needs for support, please go to my community chat at chat.anfa.xyz. I also want to thank everyone who's supporting my work financially. These people are what enables me to keep making videos. Huge thanks. If you would like to support me as well, you can go to patreon.com.anfa or liberapay.com.anfa where you can pledge for a monthly donation. And these monthly donations are really what helps me keep making videos like that, which is greatly appreciated. Also, if you would like to get a t-shirt like this one, this is green, by the way, but I have a green screen, so it's less green. You can either order one on Teespring or you can print one yourself because I've also released the design on my github. So you can get this t-shirt design and print your own or you can order on Teespring. All the links are in the video's description. By the way, if you want to support me, that's not the best way because I set the prices as low as they go. I get like one maybe two dollars per t-shirt, so that's really not a business for me. There are better ways to support me, like Patreon and Liberapay. Yeah, that's all. Thanks for watching. I hope that was interesting. I hope that's gonna help some people figure out their harder, similar rooting pattern because it's a little bit intimidating. The rooting grade is a little bit scary when you look at it first. I hope I broke it down for you and I even discovered this control click to create a stereo pair connection. That's really useful. Okay, that's all for now. Bye.