[LAU] Ardour: exporting woes

[Robin Gareus]

On 03/21/2016 10:00 PM, Fons Adriaensen wrote:
> It's a real shame that Ardour only offers peak normalisation. Peak
> level has no perceptual meaning at all, there is really no reason
> why a mix should ever be peak-normalised. 

Except for some medium related cases, most of them historical.

> All the code required for real loudness normalisation is already
> there, so it would be trivially simple to offer that as well.

Great. trivially simple cases are those which are best left as exercise
to the reader, right? :)

There are plans to adding loundness normalization to Ardour. The first
step was to add analysis (new in 3.7:
https://ardour.org/images/post-export-analysis-4.7.png - BTW, under the
hood this was implemented as re-usable VAMP plugin and is not limited to
Ardour).

Recent Ardour git versions also allows to analyze regions and ranges.

This information can be already be used to apply some gain factor
manually but currently cannot be automated. To automate it, we need a
couple of config-settings in the Export Format Dialog, save/load the
state and ensure backwards compatibility. Then do the same for
region-gain and finally test it all. That'll keep someone buy for a week
or three.

If you want it all and now,.. well you know where to find the source-code.

Cheers!
robin