[Ardour-Users] Waveforms still refusing to appear

[Ken Restivo]

On Tue, Dec 18, 2007 at 01:50:00PM -0500, Paul Davis wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-12-17 at 09:23 -0800, Ken Restivo wrote:
> > Waveforms keep disappearing, and refusing to come back. It's kind of pointless trying to edit audio in a GUI when you can't see the waveform. 
> 
> I am disturbed by this report because I strongly believed that I had
> found the bug and fixed it several revisions prior to the one you are
> using. However, like all bugs, I need a recipe to reproduce it before I
> can do anything about it.

Thanks. I'll see if I can come up with specific steps to replicate, because I'd love for this to get fixed.

> 
> > Ardour really *really* doesn't like it when embedded audio files get moved around or renamed. 
> 
> I hope for your sake that you're not the same person who was asking for
> Ardour to not use hard-links when doing embedding. Or perhaps you mean
> "embedded" in the sense of "audio files created by ardour" ? Please
> clarify.

Yep, that's me. I'd much rather have soft links than hard links. I don't like hardlinks in general, but that's not the problem. I wavpack all my files. If they are hardlinked, then when they get unpacked, they become two *separate* files. The workaround I've found is to not embed audio, but leave the "copy" box ticked, and just delete the original files instead.

Actually, maybe I should just make a feature request for Ardour to support compacting sessions with WAVPACK compression. WAVPACK supports compressing JACK native format files (32-bit IEEE float WAV's), so I'm sure that others might find that useful too. Might be a neat little improvement to the product.

> 
> > If that happens once, then Ardour will never again recover from it. However, moving files around is something I have to do, a lot, 
> 
> I confess that I do not understand this.

I confess that I didn't explain it any understandable way :-).

If I rename or move a WAV file, and then open a session, the waveform goes away.

If I try to recover from this, by closing the session without saving, moving the WAV file to where Ardour said it wanted it (via its log), and then re-opening the session, the waveform *still* does not come back.

In the somewhat blind thrashing around I was doing yesterday, I didn't find any way to force Ardour to re-draw the waveform. The hack I discovered a week ago-- normalizing the track-- didn't work.

By the end of last night, I discovered a hack that *did* seem to work: reversing the track, and then reversing it again, forced a waveform redraw. This is in 2.0-ongoing r2789. So I was able to successfully complete mixing the track.

By the way, regardless of all this complaining, I should mention that Ardour rocks. It was very easy to finish what I needed to finish. I like the new "blue" theme for the meter LED's, and the per-trac track meters are a great help. The feature to select ranges across multiple tracks confused me at first, but someone on IRC explained it and it seems very useful. Nice work.

> 
> > in order to compress my sessions to save disk space. I also have to rename and move files as I reorganize projects too.
> > 
> > It'd also be nice if there was some way to "repatriate" audio files that Ardour can't find,
> 
> Agreed, please file it in mantis, otherwise it will get lost.
> 
> 


Thanks, will do.

-ken