Most plugins are not just file to drag into the the right place. e.g. LV2s are bundles. Many come with an installer that also deploys presets, etc.
As for LV2 (and AudioUnits on macOS), Ardour does not even know (nor care) where plugins are installed. Ardour uses LV2’s lilblilv (or Apple’s AU SDK) which handles all this behind the scene.
Furthermore one ideally only installs or updates plugins while Ardour is not running (!). This is because updating a plugin while it is in use can cause various issues.
You could also enable “Analyze Exported Audio” checkbox in that dialog…
…and In the Post Export Report window you’ll find a similar button.
or you can use Ardour’s status bar at the top: Show “Path to Session” (if it’s not already visible), and then double click on it to open a File Browser; then navigate to the “export” subfolder there (default export path).
There’s a joke/parable we like to tell about DAWs.
For every user, there’s only about 20 really important features (e.g. for you, mixer undo/redo is among them).
The problem is that no 2 users have the same set of 20 really important features so by the time you form the union of all of them, it’s 2000 or 20000 really important features.
It is almost certainly true that for your actual or imagined workflow, mixer undo/redo is critically important. Rest assured however that there are thousands to hundreds of thousands of DAW users (Ardour or other DAWs) who function quite happily without it.
If you think about it, the overall nature of my comment is simply for more ease of use in the program.
Finding the plugins was not straightforward
Figuring out which ones I needed was the same.
And so on.
Same with global undo.
Now, as a community member, I can actually help to make dealing with plugins easier - this is reasonably straightforward. I even used to have very detailed beginner-friendly tutorials on my website for moviemakers who may want to become linux users (I’m sure it helped exactly 0 people lmao). It covered every issue I ran into setting up my machine and various different workflows.
But the other issue is more difficult.
Making things for other people is not easy, and having to go even further so users can easily interface with the program… it’s a lot of work. Believe me when I say I understand this more so than 99% of other people… with opinions.
Maybe my first comment came off as flippant. I’m sorry; wasn’t meant to be.
I’m not offering to change what we do, but let us know what you think of this prioritization/allocation of resources.
To answer your quote, I do believe a think on how to polish of the interface is due - just to make things that much easier.
“Small things” that add up and help a lot.
You can make presets in the plugin… Sometimes i do that, but for better workflow it would be great undo/redo. Some windows vst’s have a arrow left/right for undo/redo. So you can click it with the mouse manually. You can run this plugins under linux with yabridge or linvst.
On linux plugins, i never saw this arrows. As I said before, I agree that undo/redo would be important for better workflow. But probably only a small part of the ardour community thinks like we do
Hi Paul,
is region-fx removed from the nightlies (Ardour-8.6.506) or was it moved to another menu? I know it was there and could be found in region properties, some weeks ago.
I’m not sure if there’ll be another v8 release or if we’re waiting for v9 now but does anyone know roughly when it’s due? It’d be nice to see an official release with AAF import working. Last I heard, it was fixed in the nightlies - but for whatever reason, people seem reluctant to use the nightly builds (maybe due to lack of support?)
Many thanks @Daniele1971 - I just downloaded the last nightly build and tried a few AAF imports here and they’re still working. I’ll try a few more tomorrow.
. I appreciate the extra detail on this.