[Ardour-Users] Ardour 3 - export bugs

[Paul Davis]

On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 7:05 PM, Kim Cascone <kim at anechoicmedia.com> wrote:

>
> e.g., no more auto-crossfading of regions in a track - this was a very
>> handy feature which I realize can be replicated with more mouse-clicks and
>> maneuvering but still...
>>
>
>  The change was based on lots of feedback from many professional audio
> editors.
>
> not sure I get why pulling it out would solve anything for professionals -
> what behavior would they expect IF they are still allowed to overlap
> regions then? I would expect a mix of regions when overlapped - no? and if
> they do mix why not have them cross fade instead of doing a butt-splice
> mix?
>

No other DAW or audio editor behaves the way Ardour did. Its behaviour was
influenced by particular ideas I had about workflow that I've since revised.


  This type of xfade (as long as the overlap) is extremely unusual and
basically constitutes "mixing" for which there are other approaches.


but yes the cross-fading overlapping regions was unusual and was part of
what made Ardour2 a cut above the rest IMO

At enormous cost to the complexity of our code. When we removed that
behaviour we removed some of the most complex code in the program. Hard to
maintain, hard to reason about. Impossible to do the right thing when
people stack >2 regions above each other, also.


>
>
> but the export window in Ardour 3 gave me more trouble and helped me
> decide to stick with Ardour2 until things get fixed
>
> here's what happened:
>

 Most (not all) issues with export have been caused by Jack2. Some of them
are fixed with the version you have, but not all.

OK - is there a bug list I can look at?

Not really.




>
> - I imported a 23 minute piece of stereo audio (44/24 wav) into Ardour 3
> that I generated from Pure Data so I could trim, edit and make fade-in/outs
> - when I clicked on export I fumbled through a hella-confusing export
> panel which kept duplicating tabs as I tried to create a new one
>

 It is more confusing because it is VASTLY more powerful.

do clarity and power have to be mutually exclusive? I find that confusion
in a UI leeches any potential power

for example: IIRC there wasa  tab called Redbook but I wanted to add one
that suited how I work, so I added a tab and proceeded to edit it, I called
it 44_24, so the new tab was created but it also replaced the existing tab
that was Redbook with a duplicate of the 44_24 one just created so I wound
up with two tabs called 44_24

These are bugs. The export functionality was massively overhauled to allow
many substantive and real-life improvements in exporting. A lot of people
haven't really used it much and/or haven't reported issues, so we don't
have a lot of feedback on what is confusing/broken/could be improved..

   We would welcome suggestions on how to simplify it/ease its use.

good to know you are open to suggestions - I just want to be able to add a
new tab then modify it with the various params I typically use for audio -
it seems like it's almost there - it's just unclear exactly how to do this

The idea is that you create a new format that describes what you want so
that you can refer back to it at any time. Then you use that format. Quite
a few other applications (I'm thinking of rippers and transcoders use this
approach too). Apparently we don't make it obvious enough.



the export dialog has not been written up in the manual.

I saw that -- but there was no indication elsewhere (that I could easily
find) of how export should work

Sure, there isn't one.


- is the region crossfade coming back? - this allowed me to quickly
audition edits and was a indispensable feature for sound design when using
Ardour as an audio EDITOR and not a multitrack DAW

 if you mean "crossfades that automatically span the entire length of an
overlap" ... i have some loose plans to reinstate it as an option after an
initial overlap is created. i have no plans to reinstate tracking the
overlap length and updating the crossfade based on that.

that's a shame since it made working on quick and dirty sound design
prototyping very easy - I guess I'll just have to use the fade-in fade-out
handles and kludge my own cross fades then :\


I understand I'm walking into conversations and debates that have been
raging for some time now and probably everyone is sick of rehashing for
people just migrating to Ardour3 now but I have been a evangelist for
Ardour for years and a monthly subscriber now and would hate to see it
become a design by focus group tool that is useful to people cranking out
pop records and film soundtracks only (aren't there enough tools for those
people?) - the thing that made Ardour killer is how simple and intuitive it
was to use and how some of the features could be found nowhere else - I I
like where Ardour 3 is headed but I hope you don't throw out the baby with
the bathwater by killing all the charm of Ardour 2...which is the version
I'm rolling back to for now as Ardour 3 doesn't seem ready for prime time.
:)

I simply cannot agree that we killed the charm of Ardour 2. I realized some
time ago that it is impossible to make a DAW that makes everyone happy.
That can never be the goal. Ardour 3 keeps what I believe were the best
features of Ardour 2 and adds a lot, lot more. Inevitably there are some
specific workflows that are harmed by the changes and simplifications we
made (sometimes to allow other more complex things to become possible).  I
do not believe that it has become any less intuitve except in a few cases
where its original behaviour was so wrong when looking at what experience
and history suggests that we simply had to change it (panning is one
example).

But yeah, you are a bit late to the party. Ardour 3 development started
about 3-4 years ago and we're on the edge of releasing something that might
be called 4.0 ....
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ardour.org/pipermail/ardour-users-ardour.org/attachments/20140702/fabb1ad0/attachment.htm>