I’m in intensive use of many tracks and regions in a session.
I deleted part of my project with a hundred of regions in ~20 tracks, and I thought the region will still appear in regions list. Then I discovered sources list. I concluded:
Sources are the files recorded / imported (in …/session/interchange/session/audiofiles/)
Regions are the regions that are existing and that used to exist within the session
But after deleting these regions, they don’t appear neither in sources nor in regions, but obviously remain in …/audionfiles.
You’ve got the basic idea right. But things changed a lot in the development of 6.0. The source list shows regions corresponding to what we internally call “whole file regions”: regions that describe an entire audio (or MIDI) file. These will not vanish if you delete the same regions (or even all regions that refer to the same source) from tracks.
The region list contains regions that actually appear in tracks, somewhere. If you were to delete all regions from all tracks (technically, from all playlists), the region list will be empty.
In older versions of Ardour, the region list contained all regions that had ever been created for that session, including ones not in use on any track anywhere.
Ok, I’m beginning to understand.
But the sound I’m looking for isn’t in sources list, even in an older snapshot where I didn’t deleted regions yet. It is present in regions list however.
It is an imported soundfile, and I can find it in …/audiofiles/sound%L and sound%R