Playlist Selector / takes: questions

[johndev]

I’ve been experimenting with comping takes with the new Playlist Selector. It’s a very good tool. I have three questions.

1. Is it possible to do loop recording with playlists? I.e. Put the session in loop record as per normal but instead of it creating a layer per take/loop it creates a playlist per take/loop, so each take is automatically in its own playlist and you can therefore jump straight into using the Playlist Selector on the track. I know we can create a new playlist prior to each take but that requires the user to do the “new playlist” action before each take, which wouldn’t really work for loop recording.

2. Is there any way to convert layers into playlists, in one hit? I.e. Convert/move each layer into a new playlist. Or at least a faster way than how I’m doing it now, which is: if the track has X takes then duplicate that playlist X times, then remove takes from each of those playlists so that playlist 1 only has take 1, playlist 2 only has take 2, etc.

3. Can playlists be deleted? I can’t find any way to do it, only delete a playlist’s regions.

[johndev]

I wrote a Lua script to tackle question 2 above.

https://gitlab.com/jdevlin-ardour-mixbus/misc-scripts - LayersToPlaylists.lua

It creates a new playlist for each layer, copying into it the region(s) of that layer. The original playlist is left intact. It only works on one track at a time.

There’s no undo for that action because there’s no undo for creating playlists. So while the script could support undoing the region copying part, undo wouldn’t remove the new playlists, so I didn’t bother with undo support at all.