[Ardour-Dev] DDP Mastering

[Andreas Ruge]

Dear all!

First of all, I have to admit that I'm fairly new to Ardour, having
never really used it.  But when reading about the improvements that
are worked on for the export dialog, I thought I should offer my
help for an DDP export feature, whenever that might be on the plate.

I think I do have pretty good knowledge of the spec and the
different flavors of DDP filesets that are around these days.  In
real life I'm a recording producer and engineer for classical music
 having to work mainly with commercial software for the classical
field (i.e. Pyramix, Sequoia, SADiE, Sonic), masters are almost
always delivered as DDP fileset, mostly on DVD-R, sometimes on
Exabyte tape.  For an archiving project I'm involved with I'm
writing a (Python) program for conversion of different CD audio
image formats, among them cue/wav, cue/bin and DDP, at the  moment
that's still work in progress.

Adding DDP export to Ardour should be pretty straight forward, as
it's not much different than a cue sheet export.  Much more work (as
always) would be the possibility to import it, or just play it - the
latter feature is missing in most commercial DAWs as well.

Troublesome is most likely the license.  Using the DDP format for
"products" is free of charge, but the license expires every year,
can be terminated any time, and doesn't allow  transfer or further
distribution of the license material in any other way than in the
creation of a product by the licensee.  Sounds difficult for an open
source project, but I'm unexperienced in licensing issues.  Has
anybody contacted DCA about that already, did you get an answer?

I'm sorry, if this has already been discussed here.  Just wantetd to
offer my help, even if my C/C++ knowledge is limited.

Best Regards,