[Ardour-Dev] hardour (headless ardour)

[Ben Bell]

On Mon, Jul 07, 2014 at 06:16:32AM -0400, David Santamauro wrote:
> On 02/24/2014 08:06 PM, Paul Davis wrote:
> >git, in the cairocanvas branch, now contains a standalone, command line
> >program that loads and runs an Ardour session. It has no GUI and is not
> >interactive via the terminal.
> 
> What is the use-case for something like this?

There are probably many examples. In the longer term an ardour which was
controlled entirely from e.g. a tablet or other MIDI or OSC remote would
be interesting. Not having to have the GUI code in there makes for a
lighter dependency load for compiling ardour headless, and potentially
could even get rid of some performance and stability issues by stripping
out big things like Gtk.

Personally I'd like to house an ardour box with interfaces somewhere out
of the way, run a cable snake to whichever room I'm working in and
just control the basics of a recording session (new take, replace last take,
delete last take) from a small controller. I used to try this from behind
a drum kit with the tranzport but it was never entirely successful. Tablets
make it a more viable prospect but I haven't had time to code anything yet
(story of every developer's life ;)

Sure, you could do it with a remote server running X which you never
actually looked at, but it's still a useful step in streamlining the
system for that sort of interaction.

bjb