Welcome to Ardour. Ardour is a powerful digital audio workstation that gives you everything you need to record, edit, mix, and arrange professional audio.
This manual uses a few conventions to indicate key commands, menu choices and other user interactions:
Key commands such as Ctrl+a mean "Hold down the Ctrl key and press the 'a' key". New and important terms are written like this.
The names of on-screen buttons are shown like this
The name of a menu item is shown like , and nested menu items will appear like →
Admonitions are set apart from the main text and are meant to draw your attention to pieces of information. In the order of how critical the information is to you, these items are marked as follows:
A note is typically information that you need to understand the behavior of Ardour.
A tip is typically an alternative way of performing a task.
The important admonition is used to draw attention to parts of the interface that may be overlooked or certain settings that are vital in determining the behaviour of ardour.
The warning admonition is used where an action may result in consequences that are unintended or permanent such as changes to the session that can not be undone or the removal of files.
You might be used to terms like "right mouse button", "left mouse button" etc. These are widely used, but they can be very confusing for left-handed people, or people using mice with many buttons arranged in an unconventional way. Ardour is typically used with mice equipped with at least 3 buttons that can be remapped for left- and right-handed users, making it hard to unambiguously define "left" and "right" in a useful way.
If you are right-handed and use a conventional mouse, then corresponds to "left mouse button", to "middle mouse button" and to "right mouse button". Otherwise, the numbered button nomenclature refers to the same button numbers as defined by your X Window configuration.
If you see instructions to use Ctrl+ , it means "Hold down the Ctrl key and click ".
In conventional English, "select" and "choose" are often used as synonyms. In this manual, we use them to mean quite different things:
When you select something, it will stay selected. Putting a check-mark in a box, for example, would be referred to as "selecting" that box. This is also true for menu items that enable or disable options ("select Big Clock from the Windows menu", for example) and various editing functions.
"Choosing" involves clicking or using the keyboard to accomplish a one-time action. A command to save the current session might be described as, "Choose Save from the Session menu.