mix down as a new track

[Michele]

this is a feature request, I am not very familiar with launchpad, so I hope a bug report is the correct way to go.

I have been playing around with jokosher for just a few days, and I am really impressed, as it feels really different from most audio applications I have tried,
let alone on Linux. there are however a couple of feature that I started "missing" after 5 minutes:

1) being able to apply permanently the changes made to a track:
 - if I record a sample, normalize the amplitude and clean it up from noise, there is no reason to revert these changes anymore, so why having a couple of
   effects in the effects chain forever?
 - I have trimmed the sample as I wished, and repeated it as necessary. now I don't want 16 bits of sound, but I want to have all of them mixed together in
   a single chunk (there is another similar wishlist entry for this)

2) being able to merge two different tracks into one
 - say that I have two guitar tracks, I want to be able to make a single track out of them, to apply the desired effects on both

Both these (and probably many other issues) can be addressed implementing a "mix down selected tracks" feature, that creates a new track into the project,
containing the mix-down of the selected tracks.
At the moment I am doing this by soloing the desired tracs, mixing down the whole project and then importing the resulting audio file, but I think that such
hack is not very efficient nor elegant.

If you think that this is a desirable feature, maybe I'll try to have a look if I can contribute to implement it, even if I am not exactly a python expert.
thanks!

[Laszlo Pandy (laszlok)]

Quote: "...there is no reason to revert these changes anymore, so why having a couple of effects in the effects chain forever?"

The reason for things like this is because Jokosher in entirely non-destructive. No matter how many changes you make in the program, Jokosher will never modify the original file. Also one of Jokosher's core principles is that you must be able to undo everything, and the undo operation should not take a long time. This means that even after you mixed down Jokosher would keep all the previous audio and all the undo information. However having the mixdown effectively merge all the tracks might not be a bad idea.

I have offered to mentor this is you feel like learning some python.

[Michele (mikelito)]

thank you for your mentoring offer. I am in a very busy period at work, so I think it will take me some time before I can get into this,
but I really would like to.
I see the phylosophy behind the non-destructive choice, and I like it, but in my opinion this kind of principles should never be enforced too strictly,
in particular when they risk making things more complicated for the user.
I think that having the changes applied permanently _to a new track_ should be a reasonable compromise, because in principle one could also
keep the original tracks.

[Martin Ahnelöv (gasten)]

Isn't a high number of "live" effects pretty resource-intense? We are, after all, aiming for a non-professional audio-user who maybe don't have the most suitable computer for audio-work to his disposal.

Isn't it possible to dump tracks into wav/oggs and still keep unlimited undo? What if we do a dump with the desired effects, but still keeps the original files so it's possible to revert. Of cause, the user have to be informed about the exponential increase of hard drive space usage.