Here's a feature I don't think ANY workstation software has

Community Ideas for Ardour
#1

Mastering houses and archivists face a very serious problem (and have since the days of tape): that of projects that have little or incorrect information accompanying them in the box.

Projects that go from one studio to another for different aspects (i.e. tracking, mixing, mastering, etc.) NEED to have track sheets, technical info such as sampling rate, bit depth, “Where is Zero?”, spatial layouts, names of producers, engineers, assistants, tracking studios, mixing studios, contact names/numbers etc.

There is a lot of other info that should be included with a project as well. I belive that SPARS and the MP&E wing of NARAS have already come up with conventions and a listing of neccessary info that should be included with projects.

Maybe the Ardour project could include a text editor with a print function that would have track sheets,a bunch of the stuff listed above and more. The ability to import fonts would be nice or at least to have a selection of 25 or so public domain fonts. The ability to import a studios’ logo and the bands logo as well would be nice. That way the project box holding the masters (or hard drive, CD, or whatever archive media)could have the date, studio/band logo, project name, producer name, engineer name, track tiles, whether it is tracks, rough mixes, final mixes, stereo, 5.1, mono etc. etc.

How about the ability to save and/or print the signal flow of a given track(s), along with the settings of each plug-in inserted on that track?

I don’t know of any other DAW software that has this function built into it. One of the things that will make the Ardour project really gain traction is to include features that other products don’t have.

#2

I agree with you Bill. This stuff I often overlook on my own sessions…but to my own detriment. I think your onto a winner. Hopefully one day this will make it from an idea to the implementation queue.

#3

Looks like a good idea. Overlooked because not easily integrated.

#4

This is a great idea.

This type of feature satisfies the “real” needs of professionals, as opposed to the shiny features that are purely marketing-driven.

Maybe each Ardour installation needs some metadata tags about the facility, so as a project makes its way between studios, each region is tagged with the engineer’s name, etc.

The track notes could be extended to include jpg photo attachments (I’ve seen this on another workstation somewhere).

I’m not sure how much of a reporting tool is needed. It seems to me that the Ardour session itself would serve as a good document, since anyone can open it for viewing. A simple script could be written that reformats the XML bits into a simplified printout.

-Ben Loftis

#5

Could we add small thing, hook the following to the above excellent idea:
per export:

  • all the above ones
  • cd-r visual design (lightscribe or other cd-r tech)
  • cd visual
  • booklet / back cover
  • maybe ardour logo neatly somewhere :slight_smile:

/vaapo

#6

As in the saying about teaching a man to fish versus giving a man a fish, asking for another user feature is akin to asking for yet another fish. The wishlist and developer workload is potentially infinite, and stability suffers as the app grows too.

Far better to ask for (and the developers provide) generic interfaces instead, and let people develop independent add-ons in parallel that talk to the core through validated IPC interfaces.

The call for professional project data to be held within Ardour is one such request, it seems to me. Such a facility could indeed be very valuable in studios and even in the ambitious home setup, but there is absolutely no need for it to be implemented within Ardour itself.

Instead, provide a live and bidirectional IPC communications facility in and out of Ardour (XML as the lingua franca is fine), let subsidiary applications be popped up through user-extensible menus, and hey presto, a project data facility can be put together rapidly by anyone without needing core developer time.