I’m wondering why ardour exports to wav and not to flac. Flac is open source, Wav isn’t right?
I’m glad to hear this! A lot of time when working out a song I do a quick render and encoded it to Vorbis so I can hear it in my car stereo or at my friends house.
Ok, thanks. Not a big issue for me, but if wav hasn’t any advantage above flac, I should choose flac…
Flac and Ogg/Vorbis exports will be supported by v3.0 (its implemented but 3.0 is not released).
Flac etc. are compressed formats which are not the most obvious way to store audio data for editing & playback in a multitrack editor (though certainly possible). RIFF/WAVE does not require an encoded or decoder, so calling it open or closed source makes no sense, and is supported by about 99% of all audio software, unlike Flac, which though a great standard, is still relatively new and spreading.
as mentioned, wav has a huge advantage over flac in that it doesn’t require any encoder or decoder. in addition, the codebase for flac has been a little unstable over the last couple of years, which was actually the primary reason we haven’t supported it in any way till recently. libsndfile, which we use for all our audio file I/O on linux, did support FLAC a few years ago, but then the FLAC guys changed the programming interface and broke that support. Hopefully things are now stable - we may even backport FLAC support to 2.X at some point. Currently, it requires a version of libsndfile that has not yet been released.