[Ardour-Dev] Interactive (possibly remote) guide to processors/effects

[Jeff Turner]

hi,

the following may contain some dumb questions.  if so, i apologize.
i've been thinking about an idea for a while, but don't know enough
about all of the related components (ardour, osc, midi), and i've been
having trouble figuring out if the concept is easy/hard/impossible.

for multiple reasons, i would like to be able to read an interactive
guide to using the available compressors in ardour - what are the
strengths/limitations, and hear demonstrations of each, maybe at
multiple presets per compressor.

the first reason is that i want to learn more about compressors.  i
have found a lot of web pages describing compression, but i have not
found any that have lots of different setup-A-vs-setup-B audio examples.

but the main reason i'd like this is that i'm overwhelmed at the
choices in ardour, and it's a good bit of work to configure and
compare different compressors, and have no idea if i'm using "good"
settings for each.  i would really like a guide book that can play a
raw audio, and then let me hear the same audio through six or ten
different setups, explaining the goal of each setup, showing the
plugin gui with the settings, ..., and asking "do you hear the
difference?" after each, (and maybe also "do you see the difference?"
in a spectrum analyzer view, ...), and "do you think it sounds
better?", ...

i think the above could probably be done in a static way, once, to
generate a web page.  but what i want is to be able to then load my
own audio snippet, to play with the knobs (maybe making copies of a
certain stack to do A/B(C/D/E) testing, to learn which setups i like
the best ...)

more generally, something like that could be used to teach me about
the entire world of plugins/effects/processors, and different ways to
combine them.  (maybe like ipython notebooks for ardour)

i looked at the OSC protocol, but it seems like there's an assumption
that there is a fixed set of controllable things, and OSC is used to
control the knobs and switches.  i don't see a way to "ls" the current
stack, or ls the available library of processors, or manipulate the
current stack of processors.

did i miss some important part of OSC?  is there some other discovery
mechanism (and manipulation mechanism) available?

i also thought about writing a scripting system that would be
embedded, or layered in to, Ardour, but that sounds like a really big
project, too.

is it just a terrible idea to want to do this in Ardour (or guitarix,
or some other DAW-ish system)?

(i know that the "interactive text book" idea is really hard by
itself.  i'm mostly curious about how hard it would be to fully
implement the "remote control processor stack", starting out with some
simple hack)

thanks,
jeff