Is it possible to open a session that is located on one system on another using a samba shared folder?
I know that people have done this with NFS (another networked file system) in the past. Bandwidth is reduced, so track limits may be lower. Otherwise, should be fine.
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Excellent, I will give it a go. Some sessions I have take quite a long time to render and as I’m using ALSA that puts my audio device out of use for the duration of the render. So if I can offload that to another system it will be great.
Does Samba preserve filename case?
Would this be Linux to Linux using Samba, or cross platform?
Linux to Linux VM, not sure about the case, I haven’t used samba much
Seems yes:
https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/3.4/man-html/smb.conf.5.html
“By default, Samba 3.0 has the same semantics as a Windows NT server, in that it is case insensitive but case preserving.”
Assuming you are using Linux. Don’t use Samba. Use NFS instead. Using Samba is a permissions disaster as Samba cannot be honest when converting from Linux permissions to Windows permissions. I have had tons of issues with this for various reasons over the years. Yes, you can make a really custom smb.conf file to deal with some of these (such as your Ardour projects folder), but NFS is way easier than doing that. If you do decide to go with NFS, keep in mind if you need real root access to those drives, you have to enable it in the nfs.conf file. It’s disabled by default in many distributions.
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Well I have no plans to use Windows but I have ran into some permission issues with samba already when trying to open a project in Ardour, so I’ll look into NFS.
If you’re using Linux only then NFS is the way to go. Running Samba myself though but that’s because of a household with various OS’s being in use (Android, Linux and Windows) and the fact that access to NFS can’t be secured easily.
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Well I’m more familiar with samba so I’d prefer that actually than having to learn a new system. My issue is I can see the folder in the Ardour open session dialog, but when I click to open the session I get a cifs permission error. Any suggestions? I have read/write access no problem in my file browser.
Ah NFS was really easy to setup 
Is it possible for Ardour to reference audio files using relative paths instead of absolute?
For anyone else:
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By default Ardour does reference with relative paths unless you specifically tell it not to.
Seablade
Where would I find that setting?
Well the easiest place is right in the import dialog when you import audio files, IIRC there is a checkbox that says “Copy Files to Session” or something along those lines that should remain checked. It will copy the file in to the session and link to it relatively. If you do not copy the file into the session, it will link to it with an absolute link to the location of the file in the filesystem instead, but in general this is discouraged for various reasons (Some of which you are running into:)
Seablade
I’m not copying the files to the session in this case. These are large files and are shared between different programs for different jobs so I don’t want multiple copies and I don’t want the “master” copy to be within an Ardour project folder.
Then short of editing the XML yourself, no there is no way to do that within Ardour’s GUI.
Seablade
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Relative would create a different problem: if you used “Save As” on the session (or any other method of moving it), the relative links would break.
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I’ve duplicated my folder structure on the VM with NFS so now the Ardour projects loads and exports perfectly 