[Ardour-Users] Waveforms still refusing to appear

[Ken Restivo]

On Tue, Dec 18, 2007 at 04:12:25PM -0500, Paul Davis wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-12-18 at 12:16 -0800, Ken Restivo wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> So, I still don't entirely understand what category of files you are
> referring to. Are you talking about files stored inside the Ardour
> session folder? If so, its basically "illegal" for you to mess with
> these in any way, and I would encourage you to not develop a workflow
> that involves doing so. The arrangement, semantics and lifetime of these
> files is subject to change at any time, and is intended to be (mostly)
> transparent to the user. Of course, this is a *nix-style app, so we're
> not going to go out of our way to hide things from you. But if you're
> messing around with these files, you're on thin ice.

I don't want to mess about with Ardour internals IFF I can avoid it. But I need to be able to WAVpack compress Ardour's WAV files, and that means the ones inside the interchange/session_name/audiofiles directories.

My workflow is:
1) Save and close the Ardour session
2) Recursively WAVpack all the WAV files in the whole directory tree, mostly the interchange/session_name/audiofiles/*.WAV

When I need to work on it again, I first wvunpack the .wv files in the directory tree, then open the Ardour session.

> 
> > 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.
> 
> When libsndfile support it, so will Ardour. We are not going to write
> out own i/o code for new audio file formats - libsndfile is the
> framework we use, and its much more useful for all applications if
> support for WAVPACK is added to libsndfile than added to Ardour.

Adding wavpack to libsndfile sounds like the cleanest solution to me.

I'll ask the maintainer of libsndfile if he's interested in doing that, or if he'd accept a patch if I figure out how to do it. He seemed pretty cheerful about adding OGG Vorbis support, so maybe he'll be interested in wavpack too.

-ken