[Ardour-Dev] waveform display for master track

[Patrick Shirkey]

Paul Davis wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-11-18 at 14:35 +0000, John Emmas wrote:
>
>   
>> I think this is one of those features that people would find really useful,
>> once they'd tried it and tthey'd soon miss it if they went back to some
>> other system that didn't offer it.
>>     
>
> Such a system would completely violate several of the main code-level
> assumptions about what a bus is. That doesn't make it impossible, but it
> makes very hard. 
>
>   
I'm thinking of leaving the bus system alone and adding a case where the 
master bus pipes to a master track which generates the peakfiles but not 
the waveform?

I'm not suggesting this becomes something that all busses can do but it 
would make things a lot easier for mixing a session if it was available 
for the master output.


> Several experienced mix engineers have recently commented to me that
> mixing music is all about what you hear, and very little about what you
> see. Despite the discussion so far, I still do not see a clear purpose
> for this.
>   
I definitely agree that it's about what you hear but does that mean it's 
about how loud the soundscape is or just the quality of the sound that 
is heard?

I mean the difference between -3 and 0db is not much in the studio but 
it makes a big difference on a home stereo.

I''ve been listening back to my mix and comparing it to other music and 
radio etc and the levels are all over the place but when I listened to 
it on the headphones it seemed to be relatively smooth and I didn't 
notice any particular peaks while I was mixing it over 2/3 days.

I'm sure it's not a bug in the export process because the overall 
quality is fine. It's just that the levels are not making it to the 
final stage. Now if I printed it before I exported it I could have 
caught these issues but if ardour did that for me it would save me some 
time. I have the processing power and memory to spare so that's not a 
problem.

BTW, I'm not suggesting that you implement this feature although it 
would be helpful if you could provide some guidance on what would need 
to be done.


Cheers.

-- 
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd.