Lack of destructive editing

Hello. I’m not a professional, but i’m ready to recommend Linux+Ardour to familiar sound producer…
I’ve used Ardour this summer together with Audacity, because such things as noise reduction, editing on the level of individual samples, fast stereo-mono-stereo conversions are needed. And it would be better if such things were in proximity of 1-2 clicks, not import/export operations.
So the idea: Audacity is a Free software and a JACK client, so it is possible to use it’s code in Ardour (?).
There is a menu item in Ardour called “open region editor” (not certain about translation) - the first item in region right-click menu. So let’s change it’s designation, you click it and open region in a built-in Audacity-like destructive editor, where you can apply any plugin directly to the wave, edit samples, resample tracks, split stereo to mono, and (!) merge mono to stereo in two clicks (I like this feature in Audacity), bounce the result to one track and exit to main Ardour workspace with newly created region. Its more fast and simple, than export region as a file, open with Audacity, edit, export, import in Ardour…

Oh, and Audacity has a nice export capabilities… :wink:

Rather than adding code from Audacity to Ardour, it seems to me the nicest thing would be if it worked the same way as the old-school mail clients that let you use your favorite text editor: create a temp copy, open with designated editor, watch file for it being re-saved, then automatically re-import. Of course, handling things like potential changes in file size, etc might be a little tricky…

For efficient wave editing, btw, mhwaveedit is nice and fast once you learn the keys. :slight_smile:

We have long intended to provide this capability, but we will do it as suggested by yawfle - invoking the external editor of your choice. Audio file editors vary significantly in their user interfaces, capabilities, and basic philosophy, and we’d rather continue to offer users the choice than pick one and build it into ardour.

I cannot comment on when this capability will be implemented.

another comment: please expand on what you mean by changing “the level of individual samples”. do you mean individual regions or individual (single value) samples? if the former, ardour can do that very easily already.

and what’s the need for “fast stereo->mono->stereo” conversions?

I mean manual redrawing of soundwave.
And about stereo: for example, I have stereo track and I need to make changes in it’s right channel, or timeshift it. I split the track, do what I need and link them back together without bouncing, grouping or routing audio.
In Ardour I can only split to mono.
But if I add mono region on a stereo track, it streches on both sides of the track, so I can’t put mono regions separately on channels of the track. Why?
Maybe I’ve just missed this features in Ardour?

All ive needed is a “open exernal editor” feature so i could use Audacity while ardour is open, edit a .wav file, save it, and then have it reinserted into ardour. I used to use this same feature with Acid Pro and Sound Forge, that way i could record a guitar part, add a fade in/out, save it and it automatically updated in Acid Pro. The JAmin thing calls for you to finalize the whole project just to edit, thats not as easy to do when all you want to do is edit one part of a song.

In this case it must start Audacity with certain temporary options: configured for use with Jack, correct frequency, etc. And when Audacity is closed - restore it’s options like it was before start. - to avoid manual reconfiguring Audacity every time for use with something, or as stand-alone.

I think the simplest is the philosophy that mythtv uses with it’s selection of default video player… (this is not limited to mythtv but it’s an example that comes to my head quickly)

it has an input where you input the string you would use to open your favourite player from the command line followed by something like %f (denoting file name)… e.g. mplayer -f %f (open the file with mplayer with option -f)

A similar implementation for ardour would be excellent and hopefully be easy to implement…

so if audacity has command line configurable options it would be simple…