[Ardour-Dev] waveform display for master track

Jesse Chappell jesse at essej.net
Tue Nov 18 08:05:35 PST 2008


On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 10:56 AM, John Rigg <arddev at sound-man.co.uk> wrote:

> It seems that it would involve an insane amount of work rewriting
> major parts of Ardour just to avoid recording a mix, which after
> all takes exactly the same amount of time as listening to a track
> to check it before you export it. (And if you don't listen, how
> can you tell it's ready to export? I don't buy the idea that you
> can tell what it sounds like just by looking at waveform display.)

This brings up the good point that in order to produce these waveforms
you need to have either listened to it in realtime (or something needs
to have done an export-like offline rendering) to get them.  I think
Patrick is implying that they would be generated as you mixed/listened
naturally, and that you wouldn't have to do an extra step (unless you
wanted to get it all done at once).

This leads to a more sane/doable compromise implementation: you would
effectively have a destructive (tape) track around attached to the
outputs from the master bus.  This track would be permanently in a
state of record, capturing everything to disk in its normal fashion.
The implementation trick is somehow separating it from any global
transport record state, so it will record all the time.  Obviously
this would use disk for the audio and peaks, but it would be limited
to the length of the session.  The upside is that none of the nasty
bits would change in the backend or GUI. Just food for thought.

Also, for this purpose I'd think that you may not want peak values,
maybe RMS instead?  That's a whole 'nother feature to add to metering
too probably.  Bring on the CPU cycles.

jlc



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