CD Import Features

Good day,

a CD import features in Ardor 7.0 would be nice. A great thing.

Provided the CD is not copy-protected, I believe you can already do this. Go to the Import screen and select the files off the disc. Given the open-source nature of Ardour, I highly doubt any decryption functionality will ever be incorporated or even considered for future releases.

Thank you for your quick response.

My question was not phrased correctly. Can Ardor handle and import the cda format?

Maybe describe the work flow you are thinking about. If you mean put a CD into a CD-ROM drive and Ardour will import all of the tracks, then no. If you mean you import tracks using some other program, then of course Ardour can import 16-bit PCM audio files (the underlying audio data format for CD-DA) no problem.

No. Ardour does not directly handle any audio files. All audio file I/O happens via libsndfile. While libsndfile does support a wide variety of codecs and formats, compact-disk-audio (cda) is not one of them. see libsndfile features.

I didn’t recognize “cda,” thinking perhaps it was someone’s attempt to convey CD-DA (the formal compact disc specification), but it seems that “cda” file extension is some kind of Windows-specific way to represent a CD in Windows file explorer:
“However, CDA is actually not a file format nor it contains any information at all. CDA stands for Compact Disk Audio, it represents a shortcut of audio track from a Windows perspective. In reality, it does not have any music file in it but only track time and length.”

“The CDA file extension is a data format known as CD Audio Track Shortcut. CDA files are small (44 bytes) virtual file created by Microsoft Windows CD driver for each track on an audio CD. They contain indexing information such as track times plus a special Windows shortcut that allows users to access the specific audio tracks. They do not contain music, instead point to where the music is located on the CD.”

So with that understanding it makes sense that Ardour (or underlying sndfile library) cannot import “cda format” because it is not really a file format at all, and contains no audio data.

Good day,

Thank you for the effort you are making.

There are Schlager CDs with instrumental sounds that can be bought in stores. One would like to sing this song again. So it would be good if Ardor had an import module for the cda format. Additional software would then be superfluous.

This is so 1995… this is such a small limited use case now that it would be a waste of developer time to implement even if libsndfile would support it. Optical drives have been missing from computers for several years now and some Disk ripping and authoring applications are slipping quietly into bitrot with a few exceptions. For the rare occasions that a User would want this 3rd party applications do just fine.

I had a customer come in who wanted to do a compilation album of stuff he recorded in the 80’s and 90’s that was archived on CD’s he was astonished that I neither had a CD ROM (I purchased a USB one for the job) or any ripping software which I installed very quickly and easily… This is not a needed daily feature, not even close…

Good day,

then it’s supposed to be like that. Nobody imports hit CDs that often. It is not a MUST. You’re right. Especially since there are enough conversion programs on the market. It was just an idea as I’ve seen this feature in other DAW’s before. Not bad.