how do i correctly use playlists and session save

I’m a relatively newcomer to ardour, I find the manuals don’t cover ‘practice’, in particular…

It says playlists are for ‘takes’. I assumed when one saved a session all the playlists for each track would be saved.

But, say you have three playlist items for a track, and have playlist 1 selected for that track, a session save only saves that selected playlist in the audio file. Is that correct?

[If thats incorrect let me know… I thought I had in the past saved multiple playlists on a single session save, but now on a different mac, it seems it only saves the currently selected playlist item.]

So each time you run a new playlist selection/take, the session has ideally to be saved there and then under a distinct session name, before say creating the next playlist item and switching to it ?

If that’s so, one has to be careful about using playlists …because say you had those 3 playlist items, for a track, you clicked save session thinking it would save all 3 playlist takes, but it would only save the selected playlist item. so when you next call that session after closing it, you lose the other playlist items that weren’t specifically saved.

Maybe theres an ‘in practice’ manual/docs somewhere …the docs run through the menu’s part by part functionally, which is typical of manuals, but they don’t tell you the best way to ride the bike so to speak, when actually doing recordings in the real world.

Well you should read the FLOSS manual which is a good introduction to the basics of working in Ardour. Also when you save a session it should save all playlists, when you export the session you only get the current active playlist ob each track.

Thanks seablade
I looked at floss manual but couldn’t see reference to playlists, although i found reference in other docs.

Re. the playlists not saving in a saved session, I was creating 5 playlist items for each track, so I didn’t have to do it on the fly in recording sessions. Is it possible ardour doesn’t save a playlist item if its empty, i.e hasn’t been actually recorded on / used? Certainly it is ‘losing’ the ‘spare’ ones at present, after I saved, closed and reopened a session.