I’m writing based on the topic I posted earlier: link to the old topic
New projects are waiting in Ardour, and it would be very valuable for me to somehow advance Ardour in these areas. We often have problems when mixing several songs because we want to transfer the presets from one project to another. Several people are also working on the projects, which means that we have to exchange things with each other, so track templates are not very suitable. They don’t appear on my computer when my colleague creates them on his computer. It’s also quite cumbersome. We have mostly solved this by saving the presets from the individual plugins somewhere so that we can load them into the other instance and then delete the file. However, it takes quite a long time and requires a lot of mouse clicks, especially with so many channels and plugins. Most of the time, it’s just a matter of listening briefly to how it sounds when you take the presets from one project to another.
On Monday, we recorded three songs with 10 musicians (30 channels) using Ardour (it was amazing). Since the setup in the studio hasn’t changed, the mixes for all three songs should be similar with the same plugin settings. If there were a “copy plugin preset to clipboard” and “paste” function, that would be extremely valuable. It would save us many hours of work. Would it be possible to implement something like this? I would be happy to pay someone who can program it (provided I can afford it). Thank you very much and best regards
Well yes, those are two separate computers, no?
So how would copying and pasting a specific plugin (or group of plugins) even help in this case where you’re working across several computers anyway?
I guess you would first get your colleague’s .ardour file (or folder tree) onto your computer, then open it up on your computer, and then copy and paste plugins you want?
I am just a little confused…
In a nutshell, you just want to be able to have two (or more) Ardour sessions/projects open at a time (on the same computer) and then copy and paste plugins (with all their presets/settings preserved) between those sessions/projects? -Yeah?
If so, then yes, that’s probably achievable using a custom Lua script, but I’m not 100% sure…
It would get tricky though if a plugin you’re trying to copy and paste also included automation of any kind. -Would you not then want to include that automation in the copy and paste function as well?
Thanks for your reply! I find it difficult to describe exactly why this feature would be so valuable to us. So far, we mainly use the copy-paste function for equalizer, reverb, and compressor plugins. Our workflow will be something like this:
We have three songs in the same studio.
We look at one song, do a basic mix with the equalizers, compressors, reverbs, etc.
We copy the setup to the second song, see how it sounds there, and optimize the sound.
We do the same with the third song. Then we go back to the first song, where we now have experience from the other projects. It’s very valuable to take the settings from one project to another and hear what happens. If it’s not good, Ctrl+Z.
After that, it’s an iteration where we’ll keep jumping back and forth between projects. Sometimes from song 2 to 1, then 3, then 2 again, etc.
The whole thing is actually always done on one computer. The projects are synchronized via the cloud and we give each other feedback.
Maybe this is a bit weird, but I work on 2 different machines and I simply sync some of the common stuff with Nextcloud. I have e.g. the whole ~/.lv2 symlinked to a directory on the server, also a few things out of the ardour8 directory under ~/.config. Of course this only works if both machines use Linux. I have no clue if something similar would work with Windows.
The problem is that plugin presets are associated with the plugin, not with the session (the idea being that you can use them again in other sessions, or, as here, on other machines). Consequently, moving the session itself between computers doesn’t move the presets you’ve created on one machine to the other.
As @werner.back has noted, you need some non-Ardour solution to sync the place(s) where the presets are kept between machines.
Note that the same thing applies for other plugin formats beyond LV2. AudioUnits and VST have the same general design when it comes to presets.
Also note, that presets for LV2 plugins are not stored in your Ardour preferences folder, but in the user LV2 dir, which is usually ~/.lv2 (or a .lv2 folder in %USERDIR% (?) on Windows, I think). Each preset is an LV2 bundle folder (with an .lv2 extension) starting with the plugin name and then the preset name (in a slightly mangled form, suitable for file names).
A Lua script solution could handle this elegantly by creating clipboard functions that capture complete plugin states (parameters, automation curves, everything) and allow pasting between sessions. This would work alongside the cloud sync approach others mentioned for cross-machine collaboration.
The script could even include batch operations, imagine selecting multiple channels and copying all their plugin chains at once, then pasting to corresponding tracks in another session.
I have experience building custom Ardour automation tools and working with the plugin state management systems. Happy to discuss more on this. (It would probably be better to talk on email to avoid cluttering this thread. You can reach out to me on my email here)
I think the proposed synchronization by @werner.back is great. We definitely need to do that. It will make our work easier, but not on this issue. The thing is, the transfer has to be quick. As soon as you have to click three times to select a path, etc., it takes 20 minutes to transfer the elements and you’re likely to make a lot of mistakes. Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V would be great. You can also copy the plugins back and forth within the project itself. Why can’t you do that from one instance to another? That would also solve the problem. You would have to
copy plugin X from project A
insert plugin X into project B and place it next to the old X
deactivate the old plugin to see the change.
decide which version sounds better and delete the worse one.
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