Back in the day, oh, about RedHat 9 or so, I ripped my entire CD collection to .mp3. Now that I have a Fedora Core box, I noticed something different. It appears that there just ain't no more .mp3 support, plain and simple. Of course, there is a reason for things being this way, that being copyright. Fine. I re-rip my entire collection to .ogg format, since that seems to be the preferred format for Linux folks, and also, I can find a few players that work with .ogg and other devices.

Using grip to rip to ogg is easy enough, but the .m3u files that are created are per-cd. The particular player I am using on my pda doesn't do multiple .m3u files, so I need to create one fat .m3u from all the individual .m3u files.

So, here is what I found to be an easy solution for me.

I'm using FC1, so I drop in a blank CD and up pops the "Burn:///" window. I drag in the folders of music, and toss in the individual .m3u files at the root level. This gives me all the individual .m3u files so I can play a cd at a time. But now for the big one. I open another file browser window by picking "Home Folder" from the "hat" menu (which seems to be a blatant rip-off of the "start" menu in Windows, but of course Linux folks never steal ideas, they just innovate, right? Riiiiiiiiiiiiight.). So, with this new window open, I navigate to the /tmp directory and make a new folder "temp", so I got a /tmp/temp.

Okay, so I got two windows open, one with the burn:/// files, the other an empty /tmp/temp window. I drag the .m3u files from the burn:/// folder over into the /tmp/temp folder. This does a copy, not a move. Good.

I pop open a command-line window, and navigate to the /tmp/temp folder I just made
cd /tmp/temp
I then create one big EVERYTHING.m3u file by copying all the little .m3u files.
cat *.m3u > EVERYTHING.m3u
I close the command-line window.
Drag that EVERYTHING.m3u file from the /tmp/temp folder over into the Burn:/// folder
And burn the CD.

Ardour is supposed to be the end-all of Linux audio applications; the closest you can come to simulating a standalone digital mutitrack recorder/mixer system. Well, that's exactly what I'm looking for!

Let me tell you what, though, for the Linux beginner, such as I, getting Ardour lit up is a challenge. I don't have it working yet, and so I bring to you this log, in which I want to document what it took to get here.

First off, I have installed what I would call the "Planet CCRMA" package; their recommended setup, Fedora Core 1 with a customized low-latency kernel.

I've installed JACK, at least I'm pretty sure I have. I've got a wad of other stuff installed, too. I think I understand how to get JACK started.

Back to Ardour. I have it installed, fire it up, and hit the red "Record" button. Nothing happens. Nothing. I have audio coming through my sound card, cuz I have the line input hooked up to a CD, and the line out to a speaker. I hear music. Sound is flowing through the soundcard. Just not into Ardour. Argh.

I'm feeling pretty helpless, so I take a look at the Ardour documentatin PDF. The fine makers of Ardour want to charge for the documentation, and I'd gladly pay, if it actually showed a beginner how to use Ardour! To my frustration, the docs start out with "Plug in a microphone, record something, and we'll get started." Well, if I could get Ardour to do even that much, I would be a very happy guy. I've done plenty of recording in Audacity, so I'm not totally green at this; but I've never dealt with JACK, LADSPA, or all that other stuff. I'm pretty new to all this.

So for those of you Ardour pros out there, here is a screenshot of what I have in Ardour. All the other screenshots I see on the web show the Mixer panel having stuff to mix. I got nuthin'. I don't see where the items get added into the mixer, etc.

So what do I do folks? And yes, I did read the manual!

Below is a screenshot of what I see when I fire up Ardour, and pop open the Mixer panel. Folks, can somebody tell me what to do next? I'm not seeing anything obvious.