DSD capabilities for ARDOUR?

Is there any possibility of DSD format for ARDOUR?

Wow.

(8 years and 34 weeks of crickets!)

I guess there is not much demand for it either :slight_smile:

It’s pretty well impossible to process DSD without converting it to PCM anyway. Plugins all need PCM, and does any DSD interface hardware even exist?

As noted, you can’t really mix or edit in DSD format. Ergo, for Ardour would only be an export (and I suppose import) format. I’m not sure of the legal status of DSD at this time - I seem to recall that it is still controlled by Sony or some other corporation, but I’m not sure.

The DSD trademark is controlled by Sony, but the concept of oversampled 1-bit conversion has been around since the 60’s, so unlikely anyone could exert control over the idea of using 1-bit PDM for audio transport.

The original poster is probably long gone, but just for pedantry, if you multiply binary numbers you get more bits than you started with, so unless you want to limit your gain change options to 1 or 0 (no gain change or silent) you will end up with more than 1 bit after any gain change (including panning) or EQ or filtering, etc., at which point you have PCM values at a ridiculously high sample rate.
In order to acknowledge that but still give marketing guys an excuse to make up new trademarks, someone came up with “DXD” which is what you get when you convert DSD to PCM for editing, but instead of converting to something reasonable like 48k or even 96k sample rate, you convert to 384k so you can market “bigger must be better.”

Ardour will handle 384k, so just consider Ardour a DXD editor like Sonoma or Pyramix and be happy you can get it for several thousand dollars less than either of those workstations.

Thank you for this priceless information. I thought the above expensive DAWs were my limiting factor. Yes there are available interfaces and yes there are more than one way to multi-track DSD.