Trying to pull up session that friend me but I get message that ardour can’t find audio for the session…does that mean it was saved incorrectly?
That is one possible answer.
First question, did they send you an entire folder structure, or just a .ardour file?
If they did send a folder structure is there anything in the interchance/SESSIONNAME/audiofiles folder (Think that is the folder, going off memory, and obviously replace SESSIONNAME with the name of your session)?
Just a .ardour file…how should they save it?
They may have saved it correctly from Ardour, but they should have sent you the entire folder containing the .ardour file. In particular, the interchange folder and its contents are needed - that’s where all the .wav files are, which are the audio files that Ardour is looking for.
Anahata is completely correct. Ardour does not save all the audio in a single file, part of it’s intention is that you are never locked away from your own audio or work, which is why it uses a standard directory structure that can be navigated on any machine without special tools, and XML/plain text for the session file anyways. It specifically avoids proprietary formats like what would be required to create a single file with all your audio and session data in it.
They should zip (or tar etc. depending on preferences) up the entire folder structure that starts at the folder named the same as the session they are working on. Then they should send you that, which can be many MBs to many GBs of data depending on how much audio is involved. The .ardour file itself is probably only KB of data.
Of course if they linked to files externally that is another topic but the default in Ardour doesn’t do that exactly for this reason.