How about a file manager, where you can organise your sessions files in folder and subfolder, rename them, add/remove tag informations, listen them in preview, select the part you want to use creating a new region to drag in the editor.
I mean, something Cubase-like insted of ProTools-like.
Pro Tools has a āFile Managerā for auditioning and adding files to your session in realtime called āWorkspaceā
Take note that you can always use whatever your favorite file manager / browser is and drag-and-drop external files into qtractor or Ardour or ā¦ (eg. from your āsamplesā directory) provided it supports a dnd protocol of course. this is the most obvious reason why thereās no file browser in qtractor (and ardour): you can use your own, which iām certainly will be the fittest to purpose.
Agree with rozea. You can use the import dialog to look and listen to your files. Also, if you use your standard file browser in Linux you can preview audio using VLC if Ardour is running. VLC will hook into Jack.
File manager for browsing whole filesystem is very good idea. Dragging audio form file manager will be faster than importing all audio to region list.
regardless of how you bring the external audio file into your ardour session, ardour will go through the conversion to internal floating point because thatās what it is using internally. So the speed gain by dānād ing a file into ardour is not much, it saves you the click or keyboard shortcut to activate the file import dialog.