[linux-audio-user] Usability vs Intuitability in Ardour

[Paul Davis]

> nothing other than its an impediment to getting started..most apps
> including mac/win DAWs and word processors let you create an untitled
> proj without first prompting for a save location..but agree copying
> 80gb would be bad..

yes, and we've wondered how they manage to do that and discussed it
several times over on #ardour. we have never come up with a solution
that felt "right" for a potentially multi-user system.

> i meant..add a file to 2 sessions, since the peak is stored inside the
> project and not next to the original file, it doesnt know about it,
> and has no chance of reuse... surely this eclipses any more subtle 

ardour was written primarily with capture, not arrangement of existing
samples in mind (mostly because that's how most good music gets made,
even today). as it evolves towards the kinds of audio manipulation that
are centered on pre-existing samples, this is an example of the kind of
issue we need to address.

i did not want to put the peak file in the same directory as the audio
file to avoid some other user from making the opposite complaint:
"ardour leaves these stupid .peak files all over the place". there is no
standard for peak file formats, so its not as if other applications
could use them. who knows, they might even overwrite them!

> drag'n'drop is not working from konqueror but hey..even 'insert file' 

well then we to fix that. it implies that konqueror doesn't supply the
same kind of URL/filelist as nautilus despite me told that it did.

> is complaining: project samplerate doesnt match! my files are a mix of
> 44.1,48,96khz and i was always able to use them together in my windows
> DAW, it would just remap the rate difference to the nondestructive
> resampling parameter...since every app has nondestructive resample
> these days, this is a historical relic of an error message...harkening
> back to the days when computers were too slow to resample, which must
> have been long ago, since samplitude had this feature on the AMIGA...

like DP4 you mean? which simply doesn't play a region if the file is at
the wrong SR, with no warning or clue of what is going on?

i don't agree that automatic resampling is a desirable goal anyway. i
agree that it should be an option for the user, but again, if you are
concerned about audio quality, then applying per-region resampling is
aburdly expensive. i don't see it harkening back to the old days - i see
it as an indication that people don't have their sample libraries set up
to match their studio configuration. switching back and forth between
SR's is an indication to me that you don't believe in whatever
configuration you have.

> half my files are FLACs, they sound the same, its a great way to store
> 24bit files in the disk space of 12 bit files. but i agree with you
> that supporting ACM or Coreaudio codec and instantly getting
> ogg/flac/lame/etc is a lot simpler than adding a bunch of dependencies
> and dealing with slightly different APIs for each..dont blame ya.

FLAC we will add ASAP. its a good standard. it would be nice if
libsndfile could handle it, for the same reasons that we are waiting on
libsndfile for ogg support.

> actually i love it, im just wondering what your approach is to 'user
> used amSynth on tracks 1 and 3, so i will spawn it and reconnect
> everything the way it was...' well, i'll search the LASH archives
> since this is the buggest usability cache-miss in my own sequencer..

yes, LASH is a big hole at the moment. i only wish there were 40 hours
in the day, or more.


> cheers, relaly do love ardour and just wanted to redundancy check the TODO list...