The new search media feature for ardour 3 is really a great long waited feature for me!!
I’d like to make a few suggestion to improve the feature.
Mainly, I would include this search dialog as a tool that you could use within a session. This way, it would become a kind of “replace media function”. You would be able to replace an audio file of a certain format with an audio file of another format for example, or just replace a loop created with a certain audio file with a loop created with another one.
It would also be great if you could replace media regardless of the number of channels the audio files have. This way you could replace a stereo file with a mono file if needed.
I use Ardour for movie making, so these ideas would be useful for my video editing workflow.
A couple of things. One this is not the area to discuss A3 features etc. at the moment. The proper venue for that is still Mantis and this would make a feature request there.
The second thing is that due to how Ardour handles audiofiles and it’s concept of regions, I doubt this would work like you intended unless you never ever edit regions in Ardour. Since a region literally only points to an area of the source audio file, a single audio file can be the source for hundreds of regions literally, and any time you make an edit on any of those, the source and its replacement would have to line up perfectly, not a very common occurance. It does happen sometimes(And indeed is already possible to do similar in A2 with the link functionality, something I have used on occasion), but not very often in my experience.
actually, the “replace region” functionality is planned, but for the sort of reasons that seablade pointed out, it would/will be done at the region level, not “replace media”. ardour has no problems adding regions with N channels into tracks that have something other than N.