Subject: [linux-audio-dev] ardour & snd: the saga begins
From: Paul Barton-Davis (pbd_AT_Op.Net)
Date: Sun May 14 2000 - 02:06:22 EEST
You all might be interested to see:
http://www.op.net/~pbd/ardour-snd.png
I've spent the day hacking on Bill's fabulously powerful sound editor
snd so that it:
1) is just another notebook page in ardour, automatically
displaying the recorded channels that ardour is working with.
2) is much more multi-channel friendly in terms of the display
layout
3) begins to approximate some decent Windows/MacOS editor GUI's
that have the benefits of a history of use by many people.
4) all channels are (by default) synced together: editing
one will edit them all, etc. there is some logic to
be worked out here yet, since undo/redo is per-channel.
The screenshot you see is of a 24 channel session in ardour. Things
are still very primitive, but are rapidly coming into focus. There is
no connection between audio i/o in ardour and that in snd yet. Might
not take long, however. In case you wonder what happened to the
track controls in snd: they pop up in another window for each track
when you ctrl-click on that track. So you can still do per-track EQ,
reverb, etc.
This is code-reuse at its finest. Bill had already done his
SND_AS_WIDGET stuff, allowing snd to be built as a widget for another
program. As a result, virtually everything I've done has just been GUI
layout rearranging. *ALL* the power of snd is still present, just the
access methods will (eventually) be a little different. Also, this is
NOT going to be a fork of snd, unless Bill decides he doesn't want to
have another #ifdef in the code. Right now, I can do this:
./configure --with-ardour
make widget
to get the object file with the widget, or
./configure --<other options>
make
to get regular old snd.
Imagine how happy I was, for example, to have forgotten about snd's
marks. I'm sitting here surrounded by screenshots of Bias Peak,
SoundForge, etc, reading about Peak's pretty nice mark mechanism.
After I fixed some small bugs with the recent GTK+ port of snd, it
turns out that snd already has a *better* mark mechanism that Peak!
Just think: a soundfile editor with guile under the hood, and GTK on
the front end - how could it get any better than this ? (OK, Gtk--
under the hood would be better IMHO :)
So, rather than head off on another lengthy journey to produce another
"soundforge clone" come join me in working on getting snd's front end
to be as suitable for multichannel work as samplitude, peak, etc! The
water is warm, and there'll be daquiris for desert ...
--p
ps. Volunteers to add LADSPA hosting are being accepted now!
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Sun May 14 2000 - 02:42:24 EEST
