 Hey, I'm Anfa. In this video, I want to give you a quick start into Ardor 6, which is an open source digital audio workstation working on Linux, Mac and Windows. I assume that you have already installed Ardor and will go through the first run and some initial configuration and the process of adding tracks, recording audio and MIDI, editing data and exporting. So by the end of this video, we should be able to complete a simple project. And hopefully that will let you evaluate if you want to learn Ardor more or not. Let's get started. Alrighty, so I will run Ardor. And this is what you will see when you run Ardor for the first time. By default, it's going to give you a little initial configuration wizard. We can choose the default place for our projects. I'm going to go with defaults. Now with monitoring, if you have an external audio interface like I do, you might want to choose for Ardor to not monitor your inputs. Now this is a bit dangerous if you're recording on a laptop and you start Ardor when it is set to monitor the input via software playthrough. What might happen is that your laptop might record from its microphones and playback from its speakers creating a feedback loop. So it is safer to use this option instead. However, I am using headphones and I have my speakers turned off, so I am sure there is not going to be any feedback. So let's use the default. Now there is an additional monitoring section that is very useful for mixing and mastering, but we're not going to use that because it's advanced stuff. And now it's going to ask us what we want to call our first project. So I'm going to call this Ardor 6, quick start. Now we need to configure our audio and MIDI input-output devices. So default option is ALSA, which is Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver. And you can see I have a few audio devices. This is my audio interface. But I am running a Jack Audio Connection Kit audio server, so I'm going to choose that and just say Connect to Jack. Now it will scan my system for audio and MIDI plugins that it can use. And once that is done, this is the screen you will be greeted with. It's a new empty Ardor session. So the first thing is we're going to add the track. You can do this by a few different ways. You can go to track, add a track bar or VCA. Let's add a monophonic audio track. Here it is. Now if you want to record, I just press record. And you can see there is input from the microphone already registered. Now something I enable every time I install Ardor is View, Show Editor Mixer, which shows you a mixer strip for the currently selected track or bus. Also, you can see my keep strokes and mouse presses in this widget right there. So you can see that by default it has assigned the first system input, which is my microphone input, this microphone. There is another one because the interface I have is stereo, which is a different microphone. It's that one. Now for the sake of recording, I need to alter the signal routing from the master bus. By default it goes to the system output stereo, 1 plus 2. Now if I go to Routing Grid, on your side it should look quite more simple, but I am running quite a few things in the background to record this video. So now I have assigned the output from the master bus not only to the hardware playback, so I can hear it in my headphones, but also to my recording setup. So now if I enable monitoring, you can hear what Ardor hears. Okay, so let's record some audio, shall we? Next you need to arm the track you want to record on for recording, and then I will press Shift and Spacebar to arm the whole session and start the transport. Okay, that's some basic audio we have that we can work with. Now another thing you might want to do is import audio files from outside of your Ardor project. And you can do that by either dragging and dropping a download file onto a track or onto the empty space, or you can use Session Import and you have this nice import dialog. Now I can choose an audio file and it's going to give me a few options. Mapping is how it's going to treat the individual audio channels. By default it goes to one track per file, which means if we are having a stereo file like this one, you can see this file has two channels, it's going to create a stereo track for us and we are adding files as new tracks. Let's click that and we have our background music. Let's maybe make it a bit quieter and I'm going to play the back. All right, now let's perform some basic audio editing. Let's say I want to record a podcast and this is my jingle, this is my background music, and I also need another track. You can add a new track by right clicking in this empty space and I'm called this Voice. You'll notice that the second audio track I've added has the second audio input assigned by default, so I'm going to change this to the first one because that's the main microphone I want to use. If you add multiple audio tracks at once, Ardor will cycle through all the system inputs. So if you have a 16 channel audio interface and you add 16 tracks, Ardor will assign each track a different audio input so we can very quickly record all 16 inputs without having to manually assign them. All right, let me record some speaking. Welcome to the Test Ardor Podcast, the source of Ardor information. So in this first episode we're going to learn how to create a new session at tracks, edit and record and all that good stuff up to exporting a first audio project. So bear with me now. Let's begin. Okay, so this is the podcast we're going to record in this session. I'm going to rename this first track as a jingle. Now I'm going to play this back and listen. Welcome to the Test Ardor Podcast. The first problem is that the audio overlaps right here, so we need to perform some basic editing. For that we have a bunch of tools. They are here on the toolbar. The basic tool is the grab mode or the grab tool. With it you can select different audio or media regions and move them around. You can drag them to change their position on the timeline and now you can see we have a situation where here we're still overlapping but this is a continuous region so we need to split it. And for that you can use either the cut mode to create a cut and then go back to the grab mode and you can now move the region or we can press ctrl z to undo that operation and while being in the grab mode you can simply hover over what you want to cut and press s for split. It's a shortcut here. Split or separate in edit and this is very fast because you can just hover your mouse over a part a bunch of places and make a bunch of cuts very quickly. Now to delete a region you can press delete after selecting it or you can press shift and right click with your mouse which is very fast because you don't have to reach out through the delete key which is quite further out on the keyboard. Now we have removed some unwanted parts of a recording. You can also hover over an edge of a region and drag it in. Now audio and editing in order is completely non-destructive so you can always go back and reveal what was there before. Unless you explicitly bounce the tracks and bake in your edits all the audio material is stored on the disk and not altered and the editing is simply telling order which parts of the recordings to use and where. Now I'm going to move these regions further forward so they don't overlap with this jingle I have and let's listen and see how that works. Welcome to the Test Ardor podcast. Your source of Ardor information. Okay we have a bunch of unwanted noise right here so we can hover our mouse over the edge and simply drag in. Another very useful thing we can do is add cross fades or fade in's and fade out's. You can see we have these rectangles in the corners appearing when we hover our mouse over a region. If I use the top one I can drag in to create a fade in. Let's listen cast. Okay that's a bit let's try it again I'm going to make it more noticeable by making the fade in longer. You can hear that our region is starting quiet and getting increasingly louder as we progress. This is very common and very useful because we can create soft transitions between different parts of our recording. I'm going to make the same thing at the end. Your source of Ardor information and I would like to start the background music here. Now let it play for a second or two and then we're gonna start with the actual program but what we need to do is make the music go quieter after a while. We can do this in many many different ways. What I'm going to show you is using gain automation on regions. Let's make this larger. Now I'm going to go to the internal edit mode and you can see all the regions have this little green line with two squares at the sides. This is the region gain automation. To edit it double click on the line to insert a new point then click and drag to move it. Also you can right click and type in a specific value. We can click somewhere to create a new point. So I'm going to create an automation that will reduce the volume to negative 11 or 12 decibels. Now with control and mouse wheel we can zoom out and you see the point at the end is still at zero decibels. I'm going to move it down also and let's zoom in. Let's listen. Your source of ardor information. So in this first episode we're gonna learn how to create a new session. Okay that's almost there but not quite entirely. I'm going to hover my mouse over this part of the gain automation. I'm going to move it down. You can see that it's selected both start and end point of this particular section. So this is a nice way to edit the volume of an entire part. So in this first episode we're gonna learn how to create a new session. Add tracks, edit and record and all that good stuff up to exporting a first audio project. So bear with me now. Let's begin. And now of course you would like the music to go up for a while. So we can do this by double clicking here and here and at a certain point we would like to our volume to go back down. So I'm going to grab this part and move it up to zero decibels. We can also right click on one of these points and select edit and here we can explicitly type a number value for these points. Oh looks like it works only for one of them. I need to do the same for the second one too. Bear with me now. Let's begin. So that's basic tools you would need to create a simple podcast show. Now we need to add some audio effects to that and to do this I'm going to use this jingle. Let's add some reverb. So I'm going to you see we have this little processor box and we can right click in it to open this context menu and there is new plugin plugin manager. So we are going to insert an audio effect. Now there are a bunch of plugins here that I have installed from different sources but let's see if we can find the built-in Ardo plugins. They start with a dash and there is a dash reverb created by the Ardo team. Let's insert it and now we can listen to our track. You can hear we have reverb but it's all very narrow in the center of the image because you see we have two that the plugin processes a stereo signal but this track is mono so it just feeds one signal one channel and feeds out another channel. We can fix this by clicking on the name to open up a context menu with settings of the track and disable strict IO. What that means is the number of channels processed in the track will be adapted depending on what plugins you have here and now our reverb is splitting the signal into stereo so it should be nice and wide. Perfect! Okay another thing we would like to do is make the voice a bit louder. So let's select the voice track right click here, new plugin, plugin manager and I'm going to find a dash compressor. There are two variants of that plugin a mono variant and a stereo variant because our voice track is mono we're going to use the mono one so let's double click and click insert plugins. Now you see I have by mistake added it after the fader so I'm going to click and drag up to insert this plugin before the fader. The fader is what happens here which is our modification of the volume. I'm going to shift alt click to reset it to zero so with this a compressor if I double click it to open the user interface we can make the voice louder. I'm going to enable auto return so that when I play back your source of ardor information your source of ardor. And I stop playback your source. The playhead which is the red line will automatically jump back to the starting place which is going to allow me to repeatedly listen to the same part of my session without manually rewinding the playhead and also losing focus of my plugin window. So first thing we can do is lower the threshold your source of ardor information to make sure that our compressor actually reduces volume. Your source of ardor information. And now I can use the makeup gain to make everything louder. Your source of ardor information. So in this first episode we're going to learn how to. Nice there are a few things we could fix but this is a quick start guide not a comprehensive tutorial. I don't want to make this too long. Okay now let's add a MIDI track. I have right clicked here and let's choose a MIDI track. With MIDI tracks you can use virtual instruments to create electronic music or orchestral music if you use sampled instruments and do all various kinds of things. So let's use the general MIDI synthesizer. You can see there's quite a few different plugins I have installed. You can use the general MIDI synthesizer and call this piano. Let's add this track and close the dialogue and here we have piano. Now let's record some MIDI. If I press record and use my keyboard nothing happens and that is because we need to configure the MIDI input. I'm clicking on this input button here and you can see we have MIDI through and MPK mini. MPK mini is my MIDI keyboard present on my desk right here so I'm going to choose that. Now if I press any key you can hear we have a piano sound. Nice it would be good if we had a reverb effect so we can just go to our jingle and copy this one. Let's right click on this effect and use copy. Now I'm going to go back to my piano track which is badly named I know piano yes and I'm going to right click here and paste it. Now our piano should have a nice reverb. Great we can try and record some MIDI now. I'm going to also make this piano track a bit quieter because it's quite loud. Let's rewind our playhead to the beginning. I'm going to arm this track for recording and now I'm going to press the record button here and press play on the transport. An alternative way is just by arming a track and pressing shift and space which will both arm the whole session for recording and start the transport. So let's do that. I'm holding shift as you can see here and now I will press spacebar. Welcome to the Test Ardor podcast. Your source of Ardor information. As you can see we have a bunch of notes that I pressed on the keyboard and they completely fail to mesh with this recorded saxophone because of course I didn't know what I'm going to play with the piano when I recorded it. That's no problem we can fix that. Now let's solo our piano track with this S button so we can listen to it alone. It's a very simple jingle but it will work however I need to record my saxophone performance. So I'm going to select my jingle track arm it for recording. You can see that the audio is being fed into it. Now you can also see that this is using the second audio input which is not what I want. I want the first one which is this microphone and also I will disarm the piano track for recording because we don't need it. Now I want to arm the whole session for recording press play and try to perform a new line. But first I'm going to listen so now I'm going to arm the whole session for recording press play and try to perform a better part. Okay you see I've done that but we've having the piano track in solo so that the voice and the old recording would not distract me. If I un-solo it now we can hear Ardor monitoring my saxophone playback. Let's rename this track to sax and now I'm going to move this piano track up. You can do it by pressing the control key and app arrow on the keyboard. This helps us rearrange the tracks. Now we want to actually want to have the voice track at the top because it's the most important one. You can also use the track move selected tracks up option in the menu. Alrighty now let's listen to the whole thing. Welcome to the Test Ardor podcast. Your source of Ardor information. Well it's not perfect but it will do. Let's press G on the keyboard to go to the grab a mode so I can remove this little bad start and you can see that our old take is still there. We don't really need it so I'm going to delete it. I'm also going to truncate this end. All right and now it's just time to fade out the music. Let's go and select this track. Let's press the E key on the keyboard to enter the internal edit mode and we can see that we're fading out about here. So I'm now going to click on this ruler to place my playhead right here and I'm going to press the enter key on the numeric keypad which is in going to insert a marker. This marker is going to help me orient myself in the session. Now I'm going to go back to the grab mode by pressing the G key again. You can see we're back to the grab mode now. I'm going to hover my mouse over the music track and press S to split the regions. And now I want to mute this not delete but mute this region so let's go to the region menu and choose gain mute. Now we can see it's gray it's not playing. I can also add a fade out by just dragging this box into the region itself. Let's listen to the fade out. Oh I mistakenly enabled the click so that's a nice fade out. Now we want to export our project and to do that I'm going to control and mouse wheel to zoom out and I'm going to move this end marker right at the end of my music. And here is the start marker. Now the start and end markers are important because they mark the default range of our timeline we want to export to an audio file. Also when you press home on your keyboard Ardor will jump to the start marker if you press end it will jump to the end marker. This is very useful if you want to go to start your project. Just press home on the keyboard and you're at the start marker. Press end and you're on the end. Let's listen to the start of our project. Welcome to the Test Ardor podcast. Perfect. Now let's use the master bus and see what are the actual audio levels. Welcome to the Test Ardor podcast. Your source of Ardor information. We're way below the yellow area. It's a good idea to be around the zero with the usual content and have peaks going even into the red maybe or yellow. So we are a bit quiet and we can fix this by adding a limiter. So let's right click go to plug-in manager and I'm going to type in limiter. Oh limiter. There's multiple different limiter you might use. It's a good choice. It's a fast look ahead limiter. It's a very simple but effective limiter. We can simply add input gain let's say eight decibels. Let's listen it's going to be loud so make sure you're able to turn down the volume right now. Three, two, one. In this first episode we're going to learn how to create a new session. Add tracks, edit and record. Nice. We can limit the output volume to negative one so we are safe from any clipping and lower the release time to say 0.1 second and that should ensure our project is a bit louder. And that's a very crude way of mastering you might say. Okay let's explore our project. I'm going to go to session, export, export to audio files. And here we need to choose the export format. There is a bunch of presets. We can use MP3 with extreme quality. We can use AUG Vorbis. We can use broadcast wave or flag. So let's choose AUG Vorbis and you can see it has normalized peak enabled. You can edit this preset here and you have a bunch of options. It will normalize the peak to 0 decibels full-scale which is going to ensure our file is nice and loud which is good. And here we can also change the quality. Let's go with high. I'm going to save this preset and now let's go to the time span. You here see we have one range in our session and it's the session range and it's selected to export. Channels, we have the master bus exported as channel left and right or one and two. Let's go to the file format and here we have the export directory. This is where the file is going to be created and the name of our file. We can choose the name of the session or the name of a snapshot. Let's leave it out for now. I'm going to use the session name. We can use the time span name which is this thing here so session. We can also add the date and I like to do that. And finally we can check analyze exported audio which is very useful. Let's hit export and see what we get. All right, you can see that order has normalized our track and added another 5.3 decibels of gain to make it louder and that gives us integrated loudness of negative 17lufs which is pretty okay. For context, YouTube's reference level is around negative 14lufs and that's the level I master my music for. And this is our final export. You can see the waveform and the spectrogram of our entire export. Now we can go click and open the folder and you can see here is our exported file. Now we can open it with an audio player to verify if the file is actually there and if it's placed there. Welcome to the Test Ardor podcast. Your source of Ardor information. So in this first episode we're going to learn how to create and this is how you create a basic Ardor project. Start to finish. I hope you've enjoyed this video and found it useful. Thank you for watching. If you have any questions please leave them in the comments. I have quite a few other videos about Ardor but usually they are a bit more advanced. So I thought I should go back and make something very basic to help the new users get started with it. Also big thanks to all the people who support my work financially. If you the reviewer would like to join them please go to patreon.com slash anfa or liberapay.com slash anfa where you can give me a buck or two every month. And with that being said you can also download this Ardor project in the video description. The link is down below. Now go and make some recordings.