I’d like my sessions to be self contained, meaning I can give my friend a copy and it works out of the box. For this reason I now only use cross platform plugins. However I’m having trouble with a-Fuildsynth sf2 - soundfont files. It seems Ardour only makes a link for this file and if the session is opened on another computer the soundfont cant be found. I only use a-Fluidsynth for drums and the sf2 - file is really small (69 MB) and I’d like to have it always copied to the session folder.
I’ve looked for an option to copy a-Fluidsynth sf2 to the session folder rather than making a link, but have not found any. Is this possible at the moment ?
I realize that sometimes sf2 - files can be big and in this case it might be preferred to not copy the file into the session. However linking only works as long as you always have soundfonts in the same path in the filesystem and this holds true only for a while. After buying a new computer / reinstalling Linux I find my self reorganizing things and links tend to break.
No. Also neither Ardour nor the plugin plays a part in this. The symbolic links are created transparently by the LV2 spec implementation in liblilv.
When you use Ardour > Session > Archive the symbolic link is dereferenced. Also most, if not all, unix tools have options to dereference symlinks when sessions are copied (rsync, cp, tar, …).
Ok, thanks for the reply. I’ll just keep on copying the original sf2 over the link manually then. I’m not using archiving since I might decide to re-edit a song later and prefer to keep them uncompressed.
Come to think of it I record onto a SSD and always copy sessions to a magnetic disk with rsync. Sessions on the magnetic disk will end up in my long term backup. It seems I can de-reference those links with rsync -rtvL source/ target/
