[ardour-dev] Ardour 2 Beta 9 First Impressions

[Dan Tepper]

Well I finally got Ardour2 (beta 9) up and running. It looks nice but
unfortunately I see a lot of issues versus 0.99.3. Please excuse me if
these are known problems and/or inappropriate for this forum.

1. I don't see "Remove Last Capture" under the Edit menu. In fact I
don't see it anywhere in the menus. Since I make lots of mistakes, I use
this feature a lot. Curiously, there is an option to "Verify Remove Last
Capture". Under Transport there is a "Stop and Forget Transfer" which
doesn't seem to work either.  I must be missing something.

2. "Destroy" is missing from the region context menu. There is still a
"Remove" option, however this does not delete the underlying wave file
like "Destroy" used to. Again, there is no way to delete capture files.

3. If I create a new track, record something, delete all regions and
refernces and then try either "Cleanup Unused Sources" or "Flush Waste
Basket" the unused wave files are not deleted. There doesn't seem to be
any way to delete them from within Ardour.

4. The "Meter Falloff Rate" does not work - meters are always in default
mode, setting to slow or slowest has no effect.

5. When opening projects created with Ardour .99.3, external stereo wav
files play back in mono - even though they look like stereo tracks.
Creating a new track and importing the exact same audio file solves the
problem. Removing and re-embedding also works.

6. If an audio file cannot be found, the Ardour2 aborts and does not
load the session. .99.3 would open the session with whatever.
Considering I have yet to find a way to delete audio files from within
Ardour, this is a big problem. The program should prompt me for a new
location or give me some option to remove the references. "Contact the
programmers" is not particularly helpful.

7. Since session files are not backward compatible, some warning that a
file is about to be updated (or even a confirmation prompt) would be
nice. Perhaps save the new session to a different file or use "ardour2"
as the file extension.