Subject: [linux-audio-dev] File interchange with ProTools?
From: Paul Winkler (slinkp23_AT_yahoo.com)
Date: Fri Aug 04 2000 - 19:35:53 EEST
Hi,
Just wondering if anyone has had any experience transporting tracks
back & forth between your linux box and a ProTools-equipped studio.
I'm thinking about recording another CD sometime within the next
year, and I'm trying to strategize the best way to do it.
I'm probably going to go back to a studio I've worked at that has a
pretty nice ProTools setup. But I'd really like to be able to do
some work at home on my Linux box. What and how much I can do at
home depends on the various bits of software that you-all are
developing right now. :) I'm hoping at the very least that Ardour
will be in a useable state so I can do all the little overdubs that
aren't worth spending studio hourly rates to do... and that there
will be some decent tools for working with loops and samples and
then loading them into Ardour / Snd. So the sampler team had better
get cracking too. And oh yeah, Paul, you should finish Quasimodo
while you're at it. :-} I'll probably want to do some software
synthesis and processing and so forth.
Now that I've waved my magic wand and made everyone write my
software for me, let's get back to my original question.
At the *very least* I'd need to be able to export a bunch of tracks
from ProTools, rendering all the edits and automation into linear
tracks, so I
can take them home and at least play with the monitor mix while I'm
tracking. I'll need to then be able to take my tracks from Ardour
and import them into PT. This should all be possible already, if
somewhat inconvenient; PT should be able to render tracks down to
single WAV or AIFF files, and likewise can import such. So we'd just
need to take the time for that, and then make sure they're lined up
in time properly when we import our home tracks into ProTools.
What would be *really* incredible is if I could take the PT sessions
files
from the studio and actually work with them on my linux box. So I
can do non-destructive editing on the same material in both studios.
At minimum this would mean understanding the edit decision list
enough to reconstruct which clips go in which tracks at what time,
and volume automation for crossfades and such.
Next probably would come panning. After that it's all probably
non-portable sugar: automation for plugins I won't have at home,
etc.
I don't know much about the field, but some cursory research today
suggests that the best and simplest way to accomplish it would be to
support
OMFI. http://www.avid.com/3rdparty/omfi/
I don't know much about it except that
it's a cross-platform spec for transporting audio and video
editing sessions. It's supported by Avid products, ProTools,
Fairlight, I think MOTU, and probably others. As far as I can tell,
there
is no cost to developing OMF support and there's a downloadable
toolkit that builds on Unix of some flavor.
Quick start for OMFI developers:
http://www.avid.com/3rdparty/omfi/dev/developer_process.html
Obviously before *any* of this can happen, Ardour/Snd and hopefully
other linux soundapps must have support for EDLs of some kind. Once
that's in place, it's a matter of being able to translate those EDLs
to/from OMFI.
So I guess this gets down to:
* Is anyone else interested in the idea of being able to transport
audio editing sessions to/from other systems?
* does anyone (especially PBD) think they will get around to
implementing this anytime this year? or early next year?
Note: I just downloaded the ProTools manual from
http://www.digidesign.com/support/docs/PT_5.0.1_Reference_Guide.pdf
... but neither xpdf nor gv wants to read it. :(
................. paul winkler ..................
slinkP arts: music, sound, illustration, design, etc.
web page: http://www.slinkp.com
A member of ARMS: http://www.reacharms.com
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