I use snapshots along the way in the mixing process. I use the “Save & continue working on current version” scheme so that the snapshots are “frozen” backups I can come back to.
Say my sessions is called “MySession” and I name my snapshots r1, r2, … rn
I end-up with the following construct (visible in the open dialog)
MySession (that's the name of the project / folder)
MySession (that's sort of the "main" snapshot, can't be renamed/deleted)
r1
r2
r3
...
So I go on making snaptsots and working on the main “MySession” version.
If at some point I’m not satisfied with where my project is going, I switch back to a previous snapshot, say r3
Now I’m editing r3 and if I hit the save button, it’s overwriting my r3 backup !..
I have to immediately create a r4 snapshot and move this way.
It’s not the way I want to work !
How can I switch to the r3 snapshot and make that the “main” MySession version again and continue working as I had started ?
Right now you can’t. Really a snapshot is a session in itself, so when you open a snapshot you are literally opening a session. It would be interesting to see about making snapshots read-only when closing them from creation, not sure what that might look like, but could introduce it’s own set of issues as well.
But for right now the best option is to open the snapshot and immediately save it as a new name, or make a duplicate of the snapshot and open that.
Thanks for the confirmation.
It’s too bad because that really defeats the purpose of proposing both “snapshot & keep working on current version” and “snapshot & switch to new version”
You start working one way and then are forced to change your way …
If at least the “main” snapshot (that has the same name as the session" could be deleted or renamed, you could get your way around …
I wonder what’s so special about this one
You can rename (or delete) snapshots from the Editor List
But, as you’ll see in the screenshot below, the “main” snapshot can neither be renamed nor deleted (context menu items grayed-out)
For the record there is absolutely nothing special about the ‘main’ session file vs a snapshot IIRC. You can delete the ‘main’ session and rename a snapshot to that file name, and it will now be the ‘main’ session as they are literally both XML files. It doesn’t really help with your original question, but just putting that out there since you asked above what the difference was.
Thanks
I removed my “main” snapshot file from the session directory (along with its .bak .history . history.back files) and duplicated the desired snapshot’s files (along with its .bak .history . history.back files) as the session’s name and I can confirm I’m now back to the desired state.
Would be nice if Ardour did let you remove/rename that snapshot just like any other from the Editor List window …
