[ardour-dev] Creating sound files

[Paul Davis]

On Wed, 2007-06-06 at 09:30 +0100, John Emmas wrote:
> At the moment, I'm trying to figure out the relationship between Playlists,
> Regions, Diskstreams and Sources in an Ardour XML file.
> 
> >From what I can see a Playlist corresponds to what you might call a 'track'
> on a multitrack tape.  Regions seem to correspond to 'sounds' recorded
> on the tape.  And Sources seem to be the actual files that contain the audio
> data.
> 
> What I can't figure out is where Diskstreams come into the equation....
> Diskstreams seem to be connected with Playlists but I'm not sure how or why.
> Is there always one Diskstream for each Playlist?  Or can there be more than
> one?  Or can one Diskstream be referenced by several Playlists?  Or can a
> Playlist have some other kind of stream that isn't a Diskstream?  I'm sure
> it must all make sense when you understand it...!

you can think of a playlist as a tape, and a diskstream as the tape
player. when we save state, we record what playlist the diskstream was
"loaded with" at that time. a diskstream only ever has one, and only
one, playlist. it never has more or less. playlists, however, have an
independent life - they exist whether or or not anything is using them,
and many diskstreams can all be playing the same playlist.

the playlist is simply a time-ordered series of regions or "events".
regions are just references to parts of one or more sources (right now,
in 2.0-ongoing and earlier, a region only references a single source;
that will change but in a recursive way).