Hi, I use the archive function in Ardour often. Usually with these settings:
The problem with this is every time when it is reopened, the settings are reset:
This is not only annoying, but can lead to accidental quality degradation and data loss (when forgetting to change settings once) (because FLAC 16-bit is the default, which can never be restored to the original wav files again).
Please consider changing the default of “Audio Compression” to “None” to at least not cause data loss of original wav files by default.
In the long run it would be nice to be able to set our own default settings for archives.
Assuming you are referring to 24 bit wav files, as 16 bit flac can absolutely be restored to 16 bit wav files exactly. I would argue a better default would be 24 bit flac is all, otherwise you may as well just zip up the entire folder anyways to archive.
But other than that your point stands about saving settings or better defaults to me.
I’m referring to the format Ardour uses by default, which is 32 bit wav.
Any flac is an unrecoverable reduction compared to that.
Not the same. Zipping the session directory has the downside that it does not include external files, making the session incomplete and not fully working on other machines. Archiving from Ardour does include external files.
While you are correct, most of those are in fact 24 bit or less recording and similar. So arguably a 24 bit flac would be fine for most people, and thus my suggestion as a default.
EDIT: By the way, as an aside, FLAC can now encode 32 bit as well: FLAC - FLAC 1.4.0 released It would require further updates to take advantage of this within Ardour, but it is something to keep in mind.
You are correct, I am so used to just copying files into the session these days that I forgot to think through that aspect.
When archiving, the audio is normalized so that all 24 bits of the 32bit float mantissa can be losslessly encoded to FLAC, and the gain-factor is saved with the session. This is more that sufficient, and in many cases nulls with a wav.
Default zip(1) does rerefence symlinks unless the -y option is given. However for tar(1) you eed the -h (--dereference) option. This is still not ideal since you usually only keep relative symlinks inside the session and only derefernce external files.
Anyway, it is a fine feature request, I expect the most recently used settings should be saved as part of the preferences – not per session.
32 bit integer, not floating point. If you wanted to archive floating point without the normalization step that Robin mentioned you would have to use WavPack or some similar format that supports 32 bit float.
