Exporting to other DAWs?

Hi there.
I’m new to Ardour and have a question.
Basically I have put together a portable budget studio to record my band. It has a PC running Ubuntu Studio. And I plan to use this plus it’s equipment to record my band (drums, guitars et all).
However, I also have a PC at home that my girlfriend and I use for making music running Sony ACID and a wealth of useful VST Plug-Ins.

Is there a way that after recording my band in Ardour, I can export my project so that it may be read in Acid or Cubase so I can do all of my mastering on my more powerful PC?

I realise I can export the seperate recorded files and WAV. But I need something that keeps all of the time stamps etc together. I.E. I don’t have to spend ages trying to drag the WAV’s around to get the instruments in the right places manually.

Many thanks,

Snoo.

Do you mean mixing or mastering?

If you mean mastering, bouncing to stereo wav would still allow you to master it. Mixing, on the other hand, would mean individually exporting all of the tracks and reimporting them into the other software.

I remember reading somewhere that ardour would be supporting one of the universal import/export formats shortly, but until then you can always export all tracks individually from a common point and reimport them if you have to hobble along until then.

Are you trying to do the mixdown and/or mastering on your PC simply because it’s a more powerful machine, or because you have a better rig attached to it? Most of the mastering process is colored by the monitors you’re using, which is probably way more important than the machine you’re using.

I’ve been using ardour + jamin for mixdown and mastering with no trouble, but I also have a decent set of near-field monitor speakers to do it with.

Exporting individual wavs isn’t a problem, and everything will be time-aligned as the new individual files will all start at the start of the project. Use the export command, deselect the masters and select the individual tracks you need one by one (I normally find I use mostly mono exports for this). Each bounce will just create one file, so you’ll need to go back to the export dialogue, de-select the tracks you’ve just used and select the next ones (this is going to be streamlined in v3 IIRC). Once done you can import into anything else with no timing issues.

a perhaps better way is to make sure you have the header type in ardour set to Broadcast wave file (.BWF), and if you export any regions, export them as .BWF.
These files contain timestamp information, and will pop into the timeline correctly aligned in many sequencer packages (I’m familiar with cubase, nuendo and pro tools… not ACID, but I would imagine it’s the same).

If the ardour recording is simple without much editing, you can try just directly opening the .bwf files from the project directory into another DAW. I would warn you that this hardly ever works, and even less often satisfactorily. Mind you, exporting between any two DAWs is a complete pain in the arse. Pro Tools -> cubase is difficult enough (there’s that OMF thingy but I’ve never done that and had it work properly!)

Good Luck

John,

yes, I’m on about a (very) long time ago. Also, quite apart from the issues I had with it, I found the name a little strange… OMF… Open… doesn’t it need some sort of licensing to use it?

AAF is a much better prospect, I think :-), though I’ve never used that myself I know people who swear by it.

From Dan Weatherill:
(there’s that OMF thingy but I’ve never done that and had it work properly!)

Really…? OMF is one of the most stable interchange technologies around. In my particular field (film & television) it’s used daily by thousands of users all over the world. Admittedly, its stability stems from the fact that OMF’s inventors (Avid) no longer develop it - thereby giving us all an interchange format which nobody tinkers around with any more!! Things weren’t always so smooth with OMF, so maybe it’s a long time since you last tried it.

I would dearly love to incorporate OMF into Ardour but it would be a lengthy task. Two years ago I started work on AAF, hoping that somebody might sponsor me along the way. Nobody did, so I had to give up after completing the import stage. I repackaged the import code as a plugin, in the hope that users might be willing to pay for it but the only glimmer of interest came from a company called Trinity Audio who bundled it with their (Ardour-based) Indamixx product:-

http://www.indamixx.com/

It’s still early days but if they sell enough units, maybe it might pay enough to kickstart development again.

John.

I have been struggling with SoundFlower to do the same at once for 16 chanels of a GB song transferred into Digital performer.
I know it is possible…However, due to he cplexity, loneliness and frustration, I think I will do with the method you indicated…
Thanks!


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