[ardour-dev] Mono switch

[David Gatwood]

On Apr 8, 2005, at 11:23 AM, Mark Knecht wrote:

> On Apr 8, 2005 11:16 AM, David Gatwood <dgatwood at mac.com> wrote:
>> On Apr 8, 2005, at 8:56 AM, Mark Knecht wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>    Well, I've got the 002 Rack up for sale. We'll see how soon it's
>>> gone. Anybody here thinking of going the other way? ;-) I wish I had
>>> some way to capture all the session work in Pro Tools and bring it
>>> over. That will be hard to recreate later if I need to.
>>
>> Write a tool to import AAC XML.  Then export as OMF, download the
>> \AAC SDK, which IIRC includes an OMF to AAC converter if you're
>> running on certain platforms....  Convert to AAC.  Download the the
>> AAC XML (XAAC? AACX?) SDK, which IIRC includes an AAC to
>> AAC XML converter.
>>
>> You now should have a human-readable EDL that could be parsed
>> and converted into something Ardour could read without a great deal
>> of difficulty if someone were willing to write a tool to do so.
>>
>
> Damn...I need to go back to anacronism school! I don't understand a 
> bit of that.
>
> I guess to start, what is AAC XML? I recognized the XML part. I guess
> some special version of XML?

Urgh.  Sorry, AAC is a codec.  I meant AAF, Advanced Authoring Format.

Regular AAF is basically a binary edit decision list (EDL).  (An EDL
is essentially the same thing as a project file, for most purposes,
though it may not represent all of the data such as plug-ins, etc.)

AAF uses a proprietary Microsoft library for reading and writing its
files.  OMF is a similar binary EDL, almost identical to AAF except
that it uses the old Apple Bento container format (from OpenDoc).
While there are no (complete) non-proprietary libraries for Bento,
the spec is published, so it is at least possible to write one if 
someone
were so inclined....

AAF XML is a variant of AAF that uses XML instead of a proprietary
binary format to store the edit decision list.  Thus, one could fairly
easily write a tool to interpret that file format.

Pro Tools should be able to export OMF.  Some versions might
be able to export AAF as well, but I'm not sure.



> Probably in the short term I need to figure out if there's anything I
> should do other than save my Pro Tools sessions files. Comments?

That's definitely a must.  Do an OMF export as well, and AAF if
your version happens to support it.  That will at least give you a
non-Pro-Tools-specific file format to work with in the future.


> *.pts files look binary to me. I haven't done any Googling to see if
> someone's broken the code.

Doubt it.  Since PT can export OMF, which is fairly well-understood,
I don't see much point in trying to figure out the structure of
a .pts file....  :-)


> I was thinking I could do a bunch of track by track bounces so that at
> least I could get song structure back later, but even that would take
> a week or two to really get done.

Pain in the backside, but not a bad idea.


David
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