[ardour-users] Snapshots and filing best practice

[Mike Jewell]

On Wed, 2005-10-26 at 20:49 -0400, Peter Lutek wrote:
> Mike Jewell wrote:
> >
> >Here's my documentation so far:
> >
> >
> >
> >General Ardour filing usage notes:
> >----------------------------------
> >Some of the defaults in Ardour reflect questionable filing practice.
> >The most glaring example is the naming of snapshot files.  With these
> >files, it is very important to be able to see at a glance, the time
> >order of creation and/or last modification.  To do this the names should
> >contain the date and time in order of most significant portion to least.
> >For example, something like: 2005_07_08_16_03_21_Fri.ardour clearly and
> >simply represents Friday, July 8th, 2005 at 4:03:21 PM. Notice there are
> >no spaces or special characters in the name and if you do a simple
> >listing, these files will list in the correct order of their creation.
> >Until this gets fixed, using snapshots in Ardour will always be
> >problematic.  But there are some things you can do to improve the
> >situation.
> >
> >After researching for and writing a script to change Ardour project
> >names it became clear that the best way to use the current Ardour filing
> >is to simply always write snapshots and never do a "save" after
> >"open"ing one but rather just write another snapshot.  They are cheap
> >and, if you don't re-save them, the filenames (even with the bad
> >practice of containing spaces) will at least contain correct time/date
> >info, though they won't list in proper order if you use Ardour's
> >defaults.  But that too can easily be worked around by a simple, one
> >line script in your personal bin directory. I call mine dt (date/time)
> >and it contains:
> >   date +'%Y_%m_%d_%H_%M_%S_%a' .
> >You can have a small term window somewhere where you just type dt, do a
> >"Shift-Ctrl-C" and then a "Shift-Ctrl-V" in the ardour snapshot name
> >pop-up window and you now have names that make sense.
> >
> >Don't worry (unless you are low on disk space) about not being able to
> >get rid of unused source audio files after doing a cleanup (since they
> >are used in one or more snapshots) until you are all finished with your
> >project.  At that time (or any time you are sure you don't need certain
> >snapshots) you can delete all the old un-needed snapshots, do your
> >cleanup and maybe even rename the final good snapshot to
> >"projectname.ardour" .
> >
> >  
> >
> i like it, mike. unfortunately, it requires quite a few keystrokes to do 
> a save. seems to me we should have a keyboard shortcut for snapshot 
> save, plus the ability to define the date/time format for snapshot 
> names. then it would be a simple matter of hitting the shortcut and, 
> bam, it'd be done. frequent saves should be encouraged.
> 

Yes, it's just a work-around to get the job done simply and still have a
clean, workable file-naming system.  But, at least for me, the time I
spend doing these few keystrokes is paid back tenfold by the time I save
not having to do a research project on a directory listing to fine the
snapshot I want.  But it sure would be nice if it was built in to Ardour
like you suggest.  Maybe someday...

Mike

Mike Jewell
One-Up Audio