migrating from cool edit pro

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

Hey all,

I have a friend who has a lot of sessions in cool edit pro. I am trying to convince him to move over to ardour. What is the easiest way for us to
migrate his cool edit session file over to ardour?

Also, he has a lot of old 4-track tapes that he would like to copy over
onto his harddrive. Is there a HOWTO or something that can walk us through
recording those 4 tracks onto the harddrive as inidivual tracks?

Thanks in advance,

Lance

#2

lhoffmeyer: cool edit pro was/is not a “proper” DAW, it was more of an editor similar to audacity as I remember. If you have multitrack sessions with lots of editing in CEP, or indeed if you have just stereo mixdowns, it’ll all need to be exported to .wav to ardour. I also can’t remember whether CEP was destructive or non-destructive editing. If the latter, ou could import the original source files and painstakingly recreate each edit in Ardour :stuck_out_tongue: There is no way at all of importing a session file from CEP to ardour, just the audio. If you could export each track as a broadcast wave, then import each into ardour, this would preserve timecode information and get them all lined up right, but that is the best you’ll get. Also bear in mind ardour won’t directly import MP3, OGG or whatever.

As to your next question, I think that if you have some DAW experience and find Ardour’s UI too “radically different” from every other DAW you’ve used (which IMO it isn’t), then Ardour isn’t for you.
If, on the other hand you don’t have experience using DAWs at all then this isn’t quite the right place to ask really. However, here’s in brief what you do (assuming all your JACK connections etc are set up properly and you have an empty session going - ardour can sort of do this for you in most cases, just use the tab when you open it)

  1. go to session> add track/buss . Put number = 4, type=mono , normal

  2. Use either the track/buss inspector (windows - track/buss inspector), qjackctl’s “connect” window or the mixer window (alt+M or windows-mixer), to connect the appropriate tracks to the appropriate hardware inputs, and optionally rename the tracks in ardour as appropriate

3.arm all the tracks (click the little red circles on each track in the editor window

  1. hit the master record arm (big red circle on the transport bar)

  2. hit play, and play your tape.

  3. stop as appropriate, add location markers, add EQ and compression and noise removal to taste, and enjoy!

#3

So no one’s ever tried reverse-engineering the .ses format or anything?