[Ardour-Dev] waveform display for master track

[John Rigg]

On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 05:41:46PM +0700, Patrick Shirkey wrote:
> John Rigg wrote:
> >On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 01:14:49PM +0700, Patrick Shirkey wrote:
> >  
> >>Currently the track will be printed in 32bit and that can fill up space 
> >>on the drive. Also you have to specifically record the sections you want 
> >>to look at which takes time.
> >>    
> >
> >I think for most Ardour users the extra disk space used will have a 
> >trivial impact compared with the extra processing overhead to convert 
> >it to another format. Seriously, how much does a large hard disk cost 
> >these days? In a large multitrack session with a high plugin count, 
> >even a slight increase in CPU load can break things.
> >
> >  
> Then get a faster processor

Not so easy. I'm using two Opteron 248s, the fastest CPUs that my
motherboard will take. I have four PCI audio interface cards, so
if I get a newer motherboard (none of which have that many slots)
I need to replace the interface. I routinely use 24 channels of
analogue in and out, and can push that to 32 channels at 96kHz if I
need to. The only Linux-friendly interface that will give me that
many channels with a new motherboard is an RME MADI card. I'd also need
new outboard converters to go with that. It would all cost about 100
times as much as the $60 250GB hard disk I bought last week. Unless I
can make a valid business case for that it isn't going to happen.

>or don't enable the master track code.

That would be a good solution, as long as nothing extra is still
running in the background, and as long as the changes needed to
implement this don't introduce bugs that affect other parts of
Ardour (difficult to avoid, I suspect).

John