In my first week of using Ardour (and, generally, extremely satisfied and impressed), I don’t seem to see a ‘Save As…’ function.
My problem is that I’ve done a lot of work, and have now run short on storage on my primary disk. (I didn’t expect all the media files to be replicated; should’ve RTFM’d more carefully!)
But I’m not sure whether it’s safe to just fork-lift the entire Ardour directory to a different device. The natural thing to do in this situation is to let the application do a 'Save As… ’ to a bigger disk; but that function isn’t immediately apparent inside of Ardour.
Any suggestion? (If not, I’ll just do the fork-lift and hope that it doesn’t just mysteriously fail after another few weeks of editing.)
Well a couple of things. 1. Unless you are utilizing the software raid function of Ardour, or are linking the files during import, you are pretty safe doing a forklift move;)
The way that Ardour handles imports is that it hard links the files. It actually doesn’t duplicate the file to tell the truth, but explaining exactly how it works is a bit long. Just leave it at the lack of space isn’t just from Ardour most likely.
But yea go ahead and do a forklift COPY first, and then check your copy, it should work fine.
As far as functionality is concerned, two years ago I wrote pretty near all the functionality needed to merge two Ardour Sessions. Along the way I realised that if one of the sessions was empty, it should be usable for a ‘Save As’ feature. However, all this was for the session format that Ardour used two years ago. It may have moved on since then. Also, only the sources and timeline regions got merged - not any midi or automation which might be trickier.
There’s no GUI available but if any devs wanted to collaborate (i.e. writing the unfinished bits) I’d be happy to dig out the old code.
There is no “Save as”. Its been a feature that is asked about quite often. We haven’t implemented it mostly because of the tricky task of asking the user about all the tricky questions that they might want to control. The most critical one is essentially a variant of the one you are already facing: “when we save this session as a new session, do you want yo copy all the data files, thus doubling your disk space usage?”
We have an alternate feature called “Snapshots” that fulfill some of the goals of “Save as”, but not the one you’re looking for.
If you keep the session name unchanged, you should be able to just move the entire session folder to a new location without any ill effects.