At my practice space, I’m running Ardour on Ubuntu Studio with a Lexicon Omega and at home I’m running Ardour on Fedora 10 w/ an M-Audio Delta-44 soundcard. I would like to take the projects I’d recorded at my space home to do some editing there.
I’ve copied the folders containing the Ardour files to a USB stick but when I open them at home, Ardour opens it and you can see where all the tracks are supposed to be but it can’t seem to find the actual audio files (everything in the little regions bar on the right is written in red). I navigated to the folder itself and the files are in there, Ardour is just not finding them.
So what am I doing wrong? Is it just because I’m working in two separate distros?
You probably copied the files to a USB key which uses the FAT filesystem, and you used a session name that is not supported on FAT. I think underlines in the session name can cause this problem.
look inside the .ardour file in the session folder. look for the path names to the Sources. You may be able to figure it out from there.
Given the limitations of FAT, it is probably safest to transfer the files between the computers as a tar archive.
tar cvf /media/your_usb_drive/filename.tar the_ardour_directory # create the archive
tar xvf /media/your_usb_drive/filename.tar # extract the archive in the current directory
Compression helps (cvzf and xvzf) somewhat, but is slower.
There isn’t a lot of point using compression an Ardour session because the overwhelming volume of the data involved is audio. Neither gzip (-z) or bzip2 (-j) compression will do very much to audio data, so you burn a lot of CPU time for not much data volume reduction. If you have the space, just skip the compression.