[LAU] FOSS DAW recommendations

[David Kastrup]

Tim <termtech-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> writes:

> On 11/19/2017 11:13 PM, Tim wrote:
>>> I recently had a demonstration where the mics were wired wrong and so
>>> the two "stereo" channels I recorded on were mixed up.  You think I
>>> managed to split the tracks into mono in order to salvage two usable
>>> tracks?  No beef.  I'd have had to do a stem export and reimport.  Or
>>> something.  Didn't really fit in the demo time frame.
>>
>> Hi, may I offer some technical perspective:
>> I'm no Ardour expert but I've studied a few areas in detail.
>>
>> Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm curious if I've actually got this right.
>>
>> With the MusE Sequencer, the 'splitting' you describe is easy.
>>
>> The two halves of a stereo track can be further routed to any
>>   other tracks, mono or stereo. In fact /any/ channels from any
>>   track can be routed to any other track's channels individually.
>>
>> How does MusE accomplish this, while Ardour seems to /enforce/
>>   track channel routing compatibility?
>
> D'oh. Not true. Ardour's router can "route anything anywhere"
>  as they say.
>
> It looks like that splitting operation should have been possible
>  with Ardour?

Oh, there are several ways in which it would have been doable.  Just
none hitting me in the face.

You could have created busses to route this over, keeping the original
tracks intact (probably using balance to compensate for wrong gain
settings) and then working on the busses.

You could have used (this region)/edit/make mono to create mono regions
which you could then have copied to new tracks.  You could have edited
the region properties to swap the files used for the regions (the
channels of a stereo track are placed in different files).

After mulling this over with the list for a few hours and cross-checking
with Ardour, there were several feasible possibilities to fix this and
go ahead.

However, I was under time pressure and performance pressure and the
problem was a new one for me.  Possible solutions were not obvious
enough to be available to me in that situation.

Which brings us back to another thread's motivation: sometimes having
pre-rolled limited functionality covering a solid bout of ground works
better for a user in a particular situation than being able to derive
anything under the sky.

-- 
David Kastrup