Deep editing Ardour regions

[lykwydchykyn]

I've got some recordings in Ardour that need deep sample-level editing to remove some clicks. Right now to do this I have to export the audio, open it in audacity, do the editing, re-import it into Ardour, then line the track backup.

This is pretty tedious to say the least. Is there a smoother workflow I can do or is this it?

[ufug]

I may not be understanding correctly, but you should be able to simply zoom to the sample level in any region. I just select the click with the range tool and hit delete, then combine the regions. At that level the edit is inaudible.

[lykwydchykyn]

I feel like I tried this and I couldn't get it to zoom in far enough. Maybe I'll try again.

In any case, I also need audacity's spectrogram view and "repair" effect to do what I need to do effectively, so I still would love an easier way to get regions in and out of audacity.

[milo]

I think you can skip the export step and just work on the raw wav file, found in the "interchange" subfolder of the Ardour project. (https://manual.ardour.org/working-with- ... a-session/)

Not sure if you can leave Ardour running while you do the edit in Audacity, but I doubt it. Probably you have to stop Ardour, do the edit, restart Ardour. But try it and see.

EDIT: Maybe skipping the export step also skips the re-import and realign step as well? Hopefully.

[Michael Willis]

Ardour's regions are directly stored as wav files, so you should be able to just kids the region file in audacity to edit it instead of going through all the export/import business. I think they are named the same as the region name with .wav tacked into the end

[12strings2hands]

I feel like I tried this and I couldn't get it to zoom in far enough. Maybe I'll try again.

Zoom goes VERY far in. I can edit individual wave cycles.

In any case, I also need audacity's spectrogram view and "repair" effect to do what I need to do effectively, so I still would love an easier way to get regions in and out of audacity.

You can highlight the region, right click and do spectrograms right in Ardour.
That said, you seem to want to use Audacity, and the other suggestions about where the wav files are stored should work great.

[d.healey]

Not every region is stored as a separate audio file. If you import a file to the timeline it will display as a region, if you slice that region you will have two regions, but still a single audio file. If you have sliced the original region you will need to bounce it first before opening in Audacity.

For any detailed audio restoration you should be using a program other than Ardour because it really isn't very good for detailed work - you can't freely zoom the timeline vertically and there is no in-place spectrogram. For larger (less precise) edits, tracking, mixing, etc. it's great!

[lykwydchykyn]

I feel like I tried this and I couldn't get it to zoom in far enough. Maybe I'll try again.

Zoom goes VERY far in. I can edit individual wave cycles.

In any case, I also need audacity's spectrogram view and "repair" effect to do what I need to do effectively, so I still would love an easier way to get regions in and out of audacity.

You can highlight the region, right click and do spectrograms right in Ardour.
That said, you seem to want to use Audacity, and the other suggestions about where the wav files are stored should work great.

I would love not to have to exit Ardour, but its tools don't seem to address the problem I'm having. I have all these clicks in my vocal track that are very audible but *visually* hard to locate (they aren't spikes, but more like places where the recording skips over a bunch of samples so it causes a sudden leap in the waveform). When I say "zoom in to the sample level", I mean where you can see the individual dots in Audacity. This seems a level or two more of zoom than Ardour allows, but less than that and these gaps get smoothed over by the drawing algorithm.

Ardour's spectrum analysis is a summary of the whole region, what I'm doing is using the spectrogram view in Audacity to look for anomalies; makes it very easy to find something you can hear but not easily see in the waveform.

Anyway, I'll try editing the files directly, thanks all for the tips.

[d.healey]

Wouldn't be easier/faster to re-recorder the part, without the clicks?

[lykwydchykyn]

Wouldn't be easier/faster to re-recorder the part, without the clicks?

Ideally, yeah; but for various reasons, it's more feasible for me to edit out the clicks than to re-record.