I'm convinced that Ardour is one of the best ways to make a professional recording these days while keeping your costs low. You hard costs need only be 1x decent PC & 1x CD with UbuntuStudio on it. (Remember, it's 100% legal to copy and share Linux with all your friends!)
With that said, check out this tutorial and see what you can do with Ardour...
http://www.out-of-order.ca/tutorials/ardour/
I've already learned how to:
- Record a track from any other program. (Usually Hydrogen drum-kit)
- Record from a hardware input. (My lightsnake USB cable)
- Mix the sound-levels so certain tracks are louder than others.
- Pan different tracks hard-left or hard-right.
- Fade in and fade out.
- Boost the gain in parts of a recording.
It took some time and fiddling but it's not actually that hard to learn and, with a tutorial, then you should really manage a lot with it.
Perhaps our (up-coming) merchandise store can sell UbuntuStudio disks (@ say R20 ea.)? Then you all can try this recording stuff for dirt-cheap on a spare PC or something? Maybe dual-boot if you don't have a spare machine?
Either way, enjoy the tutorial!
