Copy channel strip and paste into another Ardour instance

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

Hello everyone

I’m in the process of mixing/mastering a few new songs with a colleague for (www.mimomusic.art). Since the recordings were made in the same studio, I would like to use the channel strips that we worked on in the songs for another project. We have seen that you can make templates for tracks when you create them. But copy existing strips and paste them somewhere else. Is that possible, or is there a workaround?

I’m going to have a look and see if I can find the strips in the *.ardour XML and paste them into the other project.

#2

That will be tricky.
Ardour uses unique (numeric) IDs for each element in a session. Those cannot be simply copied over.

There is however a commandline tool ardour8-copy-mixer (usually in /opt/Ardour-8.12.0/bin/ardour8-copy-mixer), that matches tracks by name and copies settings.

Note: If you have not yet done so, make a backup of the session file before copying settings

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#3

Great, I’ll give this a try, thanks. After looking at a few diffs, I can see that it will be rather difficult with the XML.

#4

Doesn’t seem to work in my case, ardour crashes when I open the overwritten project.

ardour-8.12.0: ../gtk2_ardour/audio_time_axis.cc:97: virtual void AudioTimeAxisView::set_route(std::shared_ptr<ARDOUR::Route>): Assertion `!is_track() || is_audio_track()' failed.
Aborted (core dumped)

Would copying, pasting over instances be difficult to implement for future versions? Or even better: being able to save and load channel strip templates would be great. Would it be possible to pay programmers from Ardour for such an implementation? I could also test it, but I don’t have the time to program it myself.

#5

What is missing the current track/bus template system that you would want?

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#6

Good point. It almost does what I want it to do. The only thing missing is the insertion. I can take the channel out of the template when creating a new one, but I can’t overwrite the settings of a channel. Or am I missing something?
When I right-click on the name of the channel, instead of save, a load.
And I am missing the info where the templates are. So that I can share them with my colleague. Where are they stored? I just checked this:

#7

I don’t understand. Earlier comments sounded like you want exact copy-n-paste, but now it sounds as if you want something else. I don’t know what “take the channel out of the template” means, or why you can’t override settings of a channel … what settings?

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#8

You’re absolutely right, it’s a bit different, sorry for the confusion. Basically, I want to copy the settings from one channel in a project to another. I find the easiest way to do this is with copy-paste as described at the beginning.
However, you can also solve the problem in another way, as described below with saving and loading templates. Two different approaches, but the same problem solved.

My aim is not to have to insert and set all the plugins manually. It takes hours to do this.

#9

So … one way or another you have to add new tracks or busses (you’re calling them channels). You either add them and then copy the settings from somewhere else (mousing around, remembering shortcuts or dragging etc.

Or, you specify the template when creating them, and have no further work to do before you’re ready to use them.

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#10

This would be the case if the new project were to be set up from scratch. However, we are improving and working on about 14 songs at the same time. Every time you want to make an update from one project to another, even just to hear how it is, you have to make an extra track and possibly delete the old one. At the moment I find it quite complicated. We’ve definitely been missing this function for a while.