[Ardour-Users] Batch export of stems for archival

[Ben Bell]

I've been using Ardour for long enough now that I have folders full of
projects, but I've been increasingly twitchy about bit rot and digital
obsolence. In the early days I used to think "Open Source means you can
always download and spin up an old version" and while that's partially
true, the work involved in tracking down and making everything work is
non-trivial. I'm also twitchy that my future audio harware may not support
44.1kHz (e.g. my Klark Teknik DN9630 already doesn't). It's not a huge
worry, but it's git me thinking.

So I've been wondering about starting a regular archival process where I
take a project and export everything -- every track and bus, with and
without effects -- as flat audio files so that I can at least load them
up into Ardour 12 -- or something else -- and have a good starting point.

Doing this manually is a pain and I'd love to be able to just write some
sort of shell script (or Lua?) which I could feed a set of Ardour projects
to and have it churn away exporting everything.

Has anyone done anything like this or got any thoughts on the easiest
approach? I vaguely remember there being a command line option to export
the current mix, but I'm not sure about finer grain stuff as above.

bjb