I moved the song folder and now Ardour won't load it

Getting Stuff Done How do I .... ?
#1

Hi,

I moved the folder with all the files created by my project and now I cant load it. Any ideas? When I user finder (I’m on Mac osx) The audio files are still there, as are all the main .ardour and .bak files.

Any help is gratefully recieved!

thanks!

Al

#2

What version of Ardour? I don’t think that works with Ardour 2.x …

#3

I did move a bunch of songs/sessionfolders once with Ardour 3, and iI encountered the same problem.
Solved it by renaming the
/your new projectname/interchange/your old projectname/
… to …
/your new projectname/interchange/your new projectname/

You see, Ardour 3 can’t load the session if the name behind the “interchange” folder is not the same as the name BEFORE the “interchange” folder.

Intentional or just a bug? Furthermore, after the folder change you can’t open the session in Recent Sessions but you can through Other Sessions in the opening Session Setup Dialog. - same goes for Session Menu - Recent … doesn’t work…Session Menu- Open …works.

Anyway, this is how I “solved” it.

#4

@GerardGueuze Just confirming that the same renaming worked for me too in the past on Ardour 3.x. I did always find it a bit funny that inside the interchange folder there is another folder with the project’s name - I don’t see why it’s necessary to have this extra folder. That said, why would the devs have put it there if there’s no good reason?!

#5

Actually, we don’t have a good reason.

The original idea was that everything below interchange could be exported to/imported by another DAW. We keep all the ardour-specific “metadata” above interchange and all the standard-format audio + MIDI (+ video) data below. But we added the session name so that someone could actually just drag-n-drop the interchange/session-name folder somewhere else and have it make sense.

As it has turned out, this was not a useful thing to do, and definitely complicated (and broke) the ability to rename easily. Changing it, however, has its own set of complications.

#6

Thanks for the explanation. I understand that at this point, it would be even worse to change things around. It’s not a real problem - just need to remember to rename the folder when renaming the session folder. Maybe there is good place to put a note about this in some documentation?

#7

Excuse me if I’m jumping in without truly understanding the above (I think I do), but I’d like to add that I’ve wanted to cp -r entire session folders, but this only resulted in Ardour complaining that audio files could not be found when I opened the copy.

But then, I discovered I could Save As and then work on a remix using the same session folder. Hooray for non-destructive editing!