[LAD] Dealing with time

Hi all, This meditation isn't about gray hair, sagging flesh or receding libido. :-) In debugging Nama's new audio editing functions, I'm noticing that I have more and more code dealing with time. I am concerned seeing a multiplicity of method names like adjusted_region_start_time or unadjusted_mark_time. I'm wondering if perhaps I can centralize or at least systematize this functionality. Nama deals with several kinds of time: Ecasound time. Positions in seconds or samples from the perspective of the Ecasound audio engine WAV time. Displacements in audio files. Track / Region time. Positions in a track or region Mark time. Nama currently has only one type of mark: marks anchored to an absolute project timeline. I think it also needs marks for positions in a tracks WAV files, which the user may trim or offset. Edit / offset-run time. This is what started the entire issue. To record a fix for a note at time T in a WAV file W, I use Ecasound's select object to offset all the WAV files in a project to start at time T. The fix, W', then gets placed at T using playat. MIDI time. There are plenty of references on this, and it's a subject of its own. Nama needs at least to know enough to work across the various systems for bridging between ALSA, JACK and MIDI. So do I need some Big Abstraction(tm), or shall I just continue to work incrementally? How do you think about time? I don't expect a simple answer or an answer at all, but it can help to formulate the question. Regards, Joel -- Joel Roth