I’m having to do a lot of vocal comping at the moment - i.e compiling a lead vocal track from about 6 or 7 full takes of a song. During the recording phase, ardour’s playlist system is absolutely fantastic. Every take you just click new playlist and you’re ready to go again. During the mix stage it’s a bit more complicated. I currently have to make 6 or 7 new tracks, load the appropriate playlist into each track, then slowly go through auditioning each bit. Then I make yet a new blank track and chop up the others and compile my vocal track on the new blank track.
In cubase, there is a feature that lets you view all the “playlists” (though they’re not quite the same as in ardour) on a single track and switch between them very easily. I think this system has advantages but also lacks some kind of flexibility.
I think it’d be great if there was a macro type feature which would make new blank tracks pre-loaded with the playlists from a current track. For example, right clicking on a track name and clicking something like “make new tracks from playlists”. Ideally a “solo groups” feature would be great as well, so you could select this group of tracks and set the soloing up so that only one can ever be audible at a time. Maybe there’s already a provision for this, I don’t know?
Anyway, I think this feature might be quite easy to implement and would save at least 5 minutes of fiddling with tracks and playlists every time you need to comp a track.
thanks for listening
