[ardour-dev] Google summer of code 2006

[David Gatwood]

On Apr 26, 2006, at 11:02 AM, Ben Racher wrote:

> I too also just noticed that Ardour has been admitted into SOC 2006. I
> was thinking of submitting a proposal to get OMF and other session  
> files
> supported, my motivation being: I have a lot of old recordings from
> Digital Performer that I would love to import to Ardour.  It didn't  
> seem
> like OMF support would be enough work... so I was also going to  
> include
> getting the control surface support working reliably.
>
> What do you guys think about this? Is this an unreasonable amount of
> work for me to accomplish in this timeframe?

OMF support alone would be a royal pain, considering how much  
variation there is
in how the content is implemented.  Heck, writing OMF is tricky  
enough, even without
reading it.  :-D

I would encourage you, if you do decide to work on OMF, to take  
advantage of the
OMF tools I put together in the deck2omf project on SourceForge.   
They would
  provide much more understandable documentation of some of the  
underlying
container format than you would get by having to pour through the\  
somewhat
incomplete Bento specification.  That said, even with that code, you  
may end up
having to read parts of the OMF spec if you find yourself needing to  
understand
some of the other source file formats, etc.

One quick note: the bentodump tool in the aforementioned project is not
endianness-safe currently, and I just found out that there are little- 
endian versions
of OMF (much to my surprise).  I'm working on updating bentodump  
handle both
big- and little-endian variants.  I hope to get it working this  
weekend, time
permitting, but no promises.

Either way, whether I get it working for LE files on BE machines (and  
BE files on
LE machines) or not, though, it should provide a good starting point for
understanding the OMF format, anyway.

You might also want to look into supporting AAF-XML.  AAF is  
essentially a port
of OMF onto Microsoft's COM file format, which there is really no  
useful reason for
any sane person to support, IMHO.  However, the AAF-XML is much more
sensible; it is essentially a port of OMF on top of an XML  
structure.  That should be
relatively easy to support once you get OMF working, as there are  
plenty of ways to
read/write XML.  :-)


Later,
David