Recording live performances with Ardour

Submitted by cliff on Fri, 08/03/2019 - 14:48

There are a few pointers one should keep in mind when recording live performances or festivals with Ardour. Especially concerning file sizes and old formats.

Last week we recorded the music festival 'Kanon van 't Balkon' (a music festival in Sittard during Carnaval), which is an event that lasts for about 8 hours. After recording it with Ardour (and my XR18 as input device), Ardour kept crashing when trying to open the session again. After researching it, i found the largest files having only 36 minutes of audio. Opening it in audacity as raw files showed the entire 8 hours of audio. The culprit of this was that Ardour defaults to recording to standard WAVE files, of which the header only allows up to 2 GB of data. The file it self has all the audio, but the small header value prevents it from opening the rest. 

The solution:

  • Configure ardour to use WAV64 format to save it's audio files.
  • Convert already recorded sessions to WAV64 with Audacity. Just put the files back in the interchange folder with the same names. Ardour will import them just fine.