[Ardour-Dev] waveform display for master track

[Paul Davis]

On Fri, 2008-11-21 at 10:24 +0700, Patrick Shirkey wrote:

> If I am required to make an up front donation in order to secure the 
> brain power needed to harness the execution of the concept then I will 
> do so.

I am not sure you've fully grasped some of the points that have been
made here.

What you're proposing is, within an order of magnitude, as complex as
Dave Robillard's original addition of MIDI tracks (not editing, just
recording+playback). You are proposing changes that involve fundamental
changes in the data structures and assumptions that ardour uses and/or
the threading design. In Ardour's existing source code, the whole idea
of peak data without a corresponding audio file just doesn't exist.
Ardour's source code doesn't see peak data as "metering" the way you do
- its merely a convenient way to speed up the display of waveform data.
If there is no audio file disk, there is no waveform data to display.
Whether this is right or wrong, it is how it is at the present, and
changing it would be a substantial and complex challenge.

This deep redesign appears to be proposed in order to avoid using up
what is in all likelihood a few tens of MB on disk by using a master
track in tape mode. 

I'm not sure who you imagine might do this sort of work. Dave was paid
$4500 by Google, and was personally highly motivated to make MIDI work.
>From all the discussion so far, I *still* don't understand what this
"feature" is supposed to enable. Or maybe I do, but I just don't see why
Jesse's suggestion isn't better in almost every way. It works right now,
with no further investment of anyone's time or money. As far as I can
tell, it does more or less everything you wanted, except that it uses up
some disk space. A few responses ago, you suggested that some "just go
buy another processsor". Disk space is massively cheaper than new
processors.

--p