[ardour-dev] metaphors and metamorphs

Rick ricknance at gmail.com
Tue Feb 7 02:16:12 PST 2006


Hi,

I'd posed a couple of questions to the wrong ardour list a few months
ago and was told that the questions I had should probably be either
here or on the user list.

The one that probably belongs here;

If one wanted to start with ardour to make a "trackless" mixer, is
there anything that's basic to the programming that is inherently
track programming?


Sorry for the naivete of the question, (I'm not a programmer) but
here's some context:

I'm finishing a PhD in electroacoustic composition. I'm looking for
future research (post-doc) projects and as a composer am pretty
dissatisfied with all the audio workstations I've used (no offence
here, I haven't used Ardour yet). My experience so far is Logic,
ProTools(TDM and LE) Audacity (not really a workstation) a tiny bit of
Ableton, a bit of Nuendo, Deck, annnnd... well I think that's it.

Most (well all but maybe Ableton) sound mixing tools are basically
tape deck metaphors, which at this point seems a bit rustic. That's
not meant as a slight or anything, its just that people don't think
like that naturally, and most of the users these days haven't acutally
seen a tape deck. Also, the metaphor forces linear thinking into a
situation that is not necessarily a linear circumstance.

I'm looking for an open source project that could handle a fork in its
path so to speak. The university I'm at right now has been very
receptive to doing open source work, and universities are  sometimes
good at getting funding for long term projects. We have an engineering
department, a music technology department, I've done an undergraduate
in psych and another in music, and I'm in contact with some
researchers about visual tools, some of it hardware, some of it
ecological psychology theories.

Context ok?

The question then is:

Is the underlying code for Ardour capable of being worked without the
track metaphor? Would it be possible to send the data from individual
regions to a filter (if the tracks were abandoned)? If one were to
pursue this line of thought, could groups of regions be "bussed" and
groups of regions be "nested"?

I know that's a lot of stuff to be asking for someone who isn't a DSP
programmer, and I realize that parts of the questions are going to be
seen as pretty naive, but I have to start somewhere.

I'd appreciate your thoughts, and I know you're busy, so no rush.

Best,

Rick






--
======================
Rick Nance
De Montfort University
Leicester, UK
RickNance.org


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