[ardour-dev] Ardour 2 Beta 9 First Impressions

[Sampo Savolainen]

Quoting Dan Tepper <dan at wintaper.com>:

> 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.

Fixed in SVN.

> 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.

I don't know what happened to this, but in my opinion it's better to use
"remove" and "cleanup unused sources".

> 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.

Fixed in SVN.

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

I've tested those options, and they have worked for me. Maybe I wasn't
thorough enough.

> 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.

Are you sure the new track actually has two inputs? I've seen cases where
running a session with a different jack driver or a sound card with less
input ports have caused 2.0 to revert stereo (2 in / 2 out) tracks to mono
(1 in / 2 out).

> 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.

Not a bad idea.

> 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.

Definitely worth some discussion. I've been wondering how to make 2.0's
"corrupt session files unreadable to earlier versions" feature more
user-friendly. Sounds good to me, especially while we're still in beta mode
and 0.99.3 is still more stable. Any objections?
 

  Sampo