The Ardour web site says "Ardour is not a sound
file editor."
Isn't editing sound files a big part of the process of getting music
from the instrument to the CD? Before using Ardour, I spent lots of
we've discussed this a lot on #ardour.
some people think we should take some existing ardour widgets and use
them for soundfile editing.
some people point out that audacity/rezound/sweep/snd are way more
advanced than anything we could do in any reasonable time. in fact, as
you point out:
[...] Audacity which, though very limited in many of
the features
that make Ardour so powerful, is a very powerful and intuitive sound
file editor for many of the basic editing jobs you end up doing after
the musicians have gone home and you are stuck with what you recorded.
and if you tried snd, your mind might melt down as you began to
understand what it could do :)
For instance, you need to amplify a small section of a
track (more than
the 12 dB you can get with Ardour's envelope and mixer gains). Or you
you might want to check out the contex menu for regions and its
"normalize" option.
First of all, (please correct me if I'm wrong)
Ardour says it is trying
to be a Pro-Tools type application but I can't imagine that Pro-Tools
doesn't have built-in sound file editing.
it does, but compared to soundforge or bias peak or even cooledit, it
sucks eggs. and since we're not here to try to make lots of money and
lock you into our tools, it doesn't make much sense to to compete with
existing editors.
the preferred solution is to see ardour be able to fork off your
preferred editor to work on a given region. this will be implemented
post-2.0.
for now, to do something vaguely equivalent, context-click on a region
and select "export". edit the resulting file, reimport it into ardour.
not very convenient as far as workflow, hence our other plans.