[ardour-users] Some questions about fades

[Wolfgang Woehl]

John Emmas:
> I have a couple of questions about timeline fades:-
>
> 1)  If I grab and drag the top left-hand corner of a timeline clip it seems
> to apply a fade-in which is represented by a diagonal line.  Sometimes the

Or curves. Right-click the fade to change. Btw the fade is not "applied", you 
draw it and it will be accounted for in the gain stage on playback and 
exports when it is ...

> area above the diagonal line is shaded and sometimes it isn't.  Is there
> any significance to the shading?  i.e. why do some clips get the shading
> when others don't?

... activated / shaded. Do this with a right-click in the fade. Default 
is "deactivated".
Maybe sometimes you had the fades activated by right-clicking a fade handle?

> 2)  How (or rather, where) is the actual length of the fade-in represented
> in a session-state file?  I assumed that there might be an entry in the
> appropriate clip's region but I can't see anything obvious.

The fades are represented as a list of 
"Location in audio frames -- absolute gain" pairs in
Playlist -> Region -> FadeIn / FadeOut -> AutomationList -> events.
The "location in audio frames" is relative to the start (FadeIn) or end 
(FadeOut) of the region.

> 3)  How is the length of the clip calculated?  Is it just simply the number
> of samples between the start of the fade-in and the end of the fade-out?

Length is the number of audio frames ("Samples") between the start and the 
end. Duh, plus 2 :)

Wolfgang