[Ardour-Dev] Export to "Master" track

[Patrick Shirkey]

Hi,

At the risk of starting off another round of wacky thread discussion I 
would like to dig a bit deeper into what would be needed to enable 
exporting a session or part of a session to a "Master" Track.

Do we really need a second engine to do this?

Is it really necessary to run a non gui "background" process? Sounds 
like a useful addition to Ardour but may be a seperate feature altogether.

I don't have a problem with disabling playback/record while export is in 
process. What I would like to see is the exported track automatically 
imported into the "Master" track once the wavefile is written. The 
resulting region would be completely seperate from the file that is 
created when manually exporting. Just compare the time it takes to 
record a two hour session to exporting a two hour session and it should 
be obvious the potential benefits from this method.

IIUC it should be possible to disable transport/export to disk, 
freewheel and export the Master track to disk, import the resulting 
wavefile as a region, create the peakfile and display the waveform in 
the "Master" Track from a single button press.  The "Master" track would 
have to be a special track that Ardour handled internally.

What I'm not sure about is if it is possible to do this in "Tape" mode. 
If it is possible that would be very good. If it is not then the current 
method of recording a complete track and rerecording the altered 
sections may be less time consuming once the initial wavefile has been 
saved.

However it now occurs to me that a combination of both methods could be 
integrated to achieve the final result of being able to quickly see the 
entire waveform for a long session. Hence, if the user chooses to export 
the session the entire session is exported. If the user chooses to play 
the session the master track is automatically put into Tape mode. That 
would really be the best of both worlds and afaict everything is in 
place to make it possible. By default the master track could be in tape 
mode and there could be an export button which exports the whole session.

An extension to this would be exporting part of the session to the 
master track while in tape mode. i.e overwriting the specific part of 
the wavefile while in freewheeling mode. I'm guessing  this will be a 
little more difficult to put in place.

Another extension would be to generate the peakfile as soon as the 
wavefile is exported. It appears that code is already inplace to do this 
too as it would effectively be the same as the record code but in 
freewheeling mode.





Cheers.





-- 
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd.