Realtime plug ins in playback

[dawhead]

As lead developer of Ardour, I'd just like to note that Ardour has always run plugins in realtime and was developed for years on a 400MHz system (admittedly dual processor). Realtime plugin support doesn't imply substantial processor usage - it depends entirely on what the plugin does. There are plugins that can tax a modern CPU, and others that would be scarcely measurable even on a 300MHz system. The issue of whether to support realtime plugins should not be decided by processor capabilities, since it is fundamentally an architectural question.

[steve]

The issue of whether to support realtime plugins should not be decided by processor capabilities, since it is fundamentally an architectural question.

Conversely, that's the reason why Ardour does not have a sample editor?

[dawhead]

Absolutely correct. We are just not interested in trying to provide an architectural framework for altering the data in existing files, particularly when there are several other excellent free/libre tools that can do (most) of the required task. What we are interested in is providing a way to fork-out to such tools (user's choice, etc) when such actions are required by the workflow.

[steve]

What we are interested in is providing a way to fork-out to such tools

Is there still no good way to do that? I've not used Ardour a great deal due to not having a suitable machine, but what I've seen of it so far I think is marvellous and certainly want to use it more in the future.

What I've been doing so far when I need to fiddle creatively on a sample level scale is to Export from Ardour, Import into Audacity, then Export from Audacity and Import back into Ardour. Not very convenient, and made worse by having to shut down Jackd before opening Audacity, but fortunately I've now got Audacity to work with Jackd, so that's one stumbling block out of the way.

I bet you're sick of hearing comparisons with CoolEdit Pro, but the ability to open Audacity from Ardour, edit a bit of sound then Export it back to where it came from would be the answer to a dream.

[dawhead]

We have discussed this idea for a long time, and have a good idea of how to do it. The key problem comes whenever we want to fork out to an editor that doesn't have any concept of "just edit part of this file" (i.e. all of them). If the source file is small, then having ardour write it all out, or just part of it out, and then invoking the editor on that new file, is fine. However, if the file is very large, and the region to be edited is also large but not equivalent to the full extent of the file, then writing out the data again is pretty wasteful of disk-space. There seems to be no way of avoiding this.

In addition, there is the problem that ardour's native audio file format (regardless of the bit depth or file header format) is 1 channel per file. There are almost no editors that can handle editing "1 sound" that is made up of N different files, 1 per channel (snd can do this). Therefore, there is a compromise to be made somewhere when we "reimport" the edit result back into ardour - we can leave it multichannel (having "exported" it for the editor), or we can reconvert it back into 1 channel per file again. Once more, for small files, this is a non-issue, but there is nothing in ardour to stop this being done on multichannel files that are hours long, at which point it becomes a major performance penalty.

If anyone in the audacity community has thoughts on how to handle this 2nd issue, I'd love to hear them.

[steve]

I think it would be definitely worth speaking directly to the Audacity developers about this if you are not already doing so.
A couple of ways of contacting them:
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/lis ... city-devel
feedback [AT] audacityteam [dot] org

As I mentioned, I've not yet used Ardour a great deal so I've not spent much time studying how it does things. Could you say a bit more about how it handles data, or perhaps point me in the direction of some documentation about this.

I believe that Audacity can open multiple files on the command-line and will import all of them into the same project, so there may be some opportunity there.