[Ardour-Dev] Non-freewheeling export mode in Ardour 3?

[Fons Adriaensen]

On Tue, Nov 01, 2011 at 07:23:35AM -0400, Paul Davis wrote:
 
> the problem (as i realized overnight) is that the computational cost
> of export is essentially unbounded and so its impossible to do this
> with JACK in normal mode. sure, one could say something like "well, it
> works on most machines if you use only a single uncompressed export
> format". that's not very satisfactory, and isn't likely to ever be
> reliably true enough to justify the claim in the first place.

Two things are being mixed up here:

1. Non-RT processing to allow arbitrary complexity.
2. The results becomes an external file.

AFAICS, these are orthogonal, and make sense separately.

Regarding 1), if the issue is the overhead of data compression,
dithering, etc., this could simply become a separated process
(controlled and monitored from with Ardour, the user won't 
notice) using a previously exported standard WAV file as input.
So 'export' would become an automated two-step process, and if
things are CPU bound anyway it won't take more time than trying
to do the two steps at the same time.

Apart from that any processing that is slower than RT would
produce a result that you can't even check before, so that
doesn't make much sense.

Ciao,

-- 
FA