[Ardour-Dev] waveform display for master track

[Patrick Shirkey]

torbenh at gmx.de wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 09:41:40AM -0500, plutek-infinity wrote:
>   
>>> From: "John Emmas" <johne53 at tiscali.co.uk>
>>> Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:35:57 -0000
>>>       
>>> Does anyone know of another system that already offers this?  I don't and
>>> personally, I like the idea.  I've often said that Ardour should offer more
>>> individuality and establish an identity all of its own.
>>>       
>> i know SawStudio (http://www.sawstudio.com/) has the ability to generate a list of peaks above a user-defined threshold for the master output, but i don't know of anything offering a complete waveform display without full export.
>>     
>
> So we are talking about a second audio engine, which is running in the
> background. (engine means a second butler thread also)
>
> to make this at least somwhat usable for dj mixes (which are rougly 1
> hour in length) , it might need to render only things that changed recently. 
> so we need to change all editing operations to maintain a list of
> changed positions.
>
> i consider this at least of the same complexity as adding midi to
> ardour. while being much more spread over all the code. 
> this makes merging trunk changes into that branch a lot more
> nightmarish than merging 2.0-ongoing with 3.0.
>
> i dont think there are more than 10 people in the world who could do
> this. and one of them alone would still fail, because he would be
> swamped by fixing mergoes.
>
> having said that:
> having a button which would freewheel over a range would be nice.
> so you could have a tape track of the master and just freewheel
> a range you changed onto that.
>
>   

That would be a nice short term fix and may actually be all that is needed.

I also like Kjetils idea of a master session view which displays the 
overall mix.

If the two could be combined so that it is an automated process then 
that would probably do the trick.

Maybe the view would only refresh when a refresh button is clicked and 
the peakfiles would be generated and replaced at that point?

The view could be floating and only displayed when moused over or a 
specific button is clicked.

To save space the waveform could be exported as 8bit/mono which should 
give enough info to build the peakfiles and display the complete waveform.






Cheers.




-- 
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd.