This is something I get all the time when I’m using Cubase: I will do a final mixdown to wav or aiff, then have to do the exact same thing again for the same file for an mp3 version.
I can’t offhand recall whether you can mixdown to mp3 in Ardour at this point (I’m away from that computer) but assuming you either a) can or b) will be able to at some point, it would be really, really nice to be able to mixdown to multiple formats at the same time so you can just set it and forget it while it does the mixdown.
Is it feasable? I have no idea. But it would be nice for me.
a) In the UNIX ideology, every program should do only what it was designed for and nothing else. There are a lot of competent mp3 encoders out there like lame which can be used to convert the exported wave file into an mp3
b) The licensing restrictions on mp3 are even more strict for encoding than decoding. We can’t legally include an mp3 encoder in Ardour, we can’t even do that for a decoder.
The shell script thing is a good idea - what would be ideal is if you could specify in the Ardour export window an external command to run, into which the exported wave filename would be substituted at “%s” or something, so you could automatically invoke whatever encoder you wanted (or even have the file copied somewhere or whatever you wanted to do).
I really like textchimp’s idea. It’s just like in IDE’s (integrated development environments): They don’t offer all the logic you need, but they allow you to insert your own external programs/commands which you can trigger when you need them. So this is the perfect way to have all the functionalities available straight from 1 “interface”, and still each program can do what it is supposed to do and nothing more.
Similar to that I think it would be nice if you would be able to define your external programs/commands, and then at the export window (and probably many other windows too) you could say which external programs must be run
