[Ardour-Dev] waveform display for master track

[Jesse Chappell]

On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 2:48 AM, Patrick Shirkey
<pshirkey at boosthardware.com> wrote:

>> Jesse's idea will work *right* now. No work. Just do it. Create a new
>> track. Call it "Master View". Connect its inputs to the master bus
>> outputs, disconnect its outputs. Put the track into tape mode.
>> Rec-enable it. Done.
>>
>> Oh, save as template. Then start new similar sessions from this
>> template.
>
> If that is decided then what is the possibility of this being automated with
> a setting in the preferences? Or should it just be a new DJ template added
> to the collection?

The "automated" aspect of the master tape track solution is the only
part that isn't implemented in code today.  By that I mean that the
track would
always be recording irrespective of the global transport rec-enable.
I believe implementing this wouldn't be too much of a hardship, but it
might take someone who has a deep understanding of ardour internals
not to f-up something subtle.

Coming from someone who does have a pretty deep understanding of the
ardour codebase, the other suggested solutions just seem like madness
to me, with a very low [usefulness/realistic_effort] ratio.

However, I do kind of like the idea of making a separate JACK
application whose sole purpose is to build up a time-line of waveform
view(s) from whatever jack ports were connected to it.  Using
Jack-transport it would know where in time the audio was for,
overwriting anything that was there previously.   You could also click
around in it to move the transport playhead, set up loops etc.  As a
bonus it would store its session state as just peakfiles, saving
space.  If ardour had good Lash support, loading it up with proper
session would be easy too.  Just more food for thought, as if this
thread needed more.

jlc