Calling menu commands in Lua (newbie)

[eighty]

Hey there,

i run into some repeating click tasks lately and wondered if/how i can automate that process.

task 1

snap selected regions to grid, then close gaps

so getting the selected regions should do with

    local sel = Editor:get_selection ()
    local sel_regions = sel.regions:regionlist()

and for processing each region i’d do

    for r in sel_regions:iter() do

but then for the actual task, i’m a little overwhelmed from the Lua Bindings Class Reference.
Is there a method that executes commands from the menu?

I guess the snap part could be done with

    r.set_snap_to_grid() = true

but for the close gaps part i’m lost.

task 1 +

As you may guess i intend to speed up my editing here. The process ist

• rhythm ferret
• snap to grid
• close gaps
  I wondered if i could do a dialog-box with a button for each part and to enter the parameter settings. The Menu itself should be less of a problem, but again i must know how to start the functions out of Lua and to forward the setting parameters.

task 2

create X numbers of audio-tracks with same i/o settings

There i suppose i have to use the AudioTrack object but my research focused more on task 1 for now to be honest.

Sidenote

Coming from a non OOP background AND being a Lua noob, my question is very basic and tends to sound like “write that script so i don’t have to.” That’s not my intention. I’m happy to be just pointed into some general direction, if possible.

[x42 (Robin Gareus)]

For the first task, you effectively want to perform two menu actions (Menu > Region > Position > Snap to grid; Region > Edit > Close Gaps (see The Ardour Manual for a list of actions):

Editor:access_action ("Region", "snap-regions-to-grid")
Editor:access_action ("Region", "close-region-gaps")

However the latter is a problem since it is interactive. To automate this, you cannot use Ardour’s built-in editor function, but instead implement the functionality in Lua directly: _close_region_gaps.lua · GitHub

@eighty

I wondered if i could do a dialog-box with a button for each part and to enter the parameter settings.

Yes, have a look at ardour/_dialog_test.lua at master · Ardour/ardour · GitHub or various example scripts in the share/scripts folder.

@eighty

create X numbers of audio-tracks with same i/o settings

Adding removing tracks is a session operation:

local n_inputs  = 1
local n_outputs = 2
local how_many  = 16
local name_template = ""

Session:new_audio_track (n_inputs,
                         n_outputs,
                         nil,
                         how_many,
                         name_template,
                         ARDOUR.PresentationInfo.max_order,
                         ARDOUR.TrackMode.Normal)

hope that helps

[eighty]

Awesome, that’s exactly what i need!

Big thanks!