How to thoroughly clean up a Session

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

Hi,

I would like to know if there is a way to clean-up a (finalized) Ardour Session and remove all history items.

From within the program you can remove unused sources and regions (interchange folders), flush wastebasket, rebuild peak files (to reduce the number of files in the peaks folder).

But what about the plugins and externals folder.
In my experience a lot of unused stuff is kept there. To manually remove this is pretty time consuming.
A scriptfile could be made to remove, outside Ardour, all previous state folders and keep the highest in number (I don’t use snapshots).
But a lot of these plugin folders represent a plugin or soundfont that’s not in the session anymore. They are numbered, how to distinguish between the used and the not used?
Same for the externals folder, it holds soundfonts and ir-files that were once used but not anymore.

Is there a way (a lua script maybe?) to completely remove history, snapshotstuff etc and thereby produce a totally clean version of an Ardour-session (for backup-purpose)?

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was in the clean-up section two more options:

Clean-up unused externals
Clean-up unused plugins

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#2

Your best bet is likely to archive the session, then inflate the archive, and get rid of the original.

You can also pick FLAC when archiving to further reduce disk space requirements.

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#3

Thanks Robin,

That does the trick. Never tried this before, I can see it removes all unused stuff so that’s the way to go then.

NB
Makes me think: if the archive-function can clean these things up then why not add this functionality to the clean-up section. Something for the Ideas for Ardour-category.