0008285: Convert polyphonic tracks to mono-tracks and vice versa - MantisBT

ID	Project	Category	View Status	Date Submitted	Last Update

0008285	ardour	features	public	2020-07-03 22:27	2020-07-03 22:27

Reporter	jeythekey	Assigned To
Priority	normal	Severity	minor	Reproducibility	always
Status	new	Resolution	open
Platform	Arch	OS	Linux	OS Version	(any)
Product Version	6.0

Summary	0008285: Convert polyphonic tracks to mono-tracks and vice versa
Description	Currently, mono regions can be made from a selected polyphonic region. However, the created mono regions just appear in the list view of regions and are not assigned to any tracks. This effectively de-syncs them, which could be healed after drag-and-dropping them one by one to the respective tracks by aligning them via edit --> align --> ... afterwards. However, this is rather tedious. More generally, splitting polyphonic material to mono material only works on regions and not on tracks. Suggestion: Add a feature to flexibly turn polyphonic tracks to mono-tracks and vice versa. The mono-tracks should be created as needed directly under the selected polyphonic track (and optionally replace that track). Channel order should obviously be retained in the track order. For the reverse, converting selected tracks into a single polyphonic (e.g. stereo) track, the same should apply. E.g. the upper track (or the one selected first? see 0008271) should become the left track, the next the right etc. and the mono-tracks could also (optionally?) be deleted automatically after conversion. Additionally, for the current splitting-of-regions feature, the following rules could apply: - If i) enough tracks exist below the polyphonic track and ii) no content/regions is/are currently present in those tracks in the same time range, the created mono-regions should be put into these tracks. - Otherwise, create new tracks as needed (as with converting tracks above). However, I could imagine, that this is i) a totally different feature and ii) could be more tricky/error prone. Therefore, I would suggest to make track-conversion a higher priority. Reason: Converting polyphonic tracks to mono-tracks and vice versa would increase the flexibility of work flows: 1. First, it could be used during import of polyphonic files, e.g. by first importing them as a sequence into a polyphonic track and later on converting this track to single mono-tracks (as an alternative to / workaround for 0008283). Likewise, it would allow to flexibly combine single tracks to e.g. stereo-tracks after import or at any time. 2. Flexibly switching between mono-tracks e.g. for mixing and polyphonic tracks e.g. for cutting/editing could be useful, as polyphonic tracks save vertical space as compared to mono-tracks. Furthermore, while groups are the current way to go for cutting polyphonic recordings, a potential problem in this strategy is that layering is not consistent between tracks of a group (see comments in 0008149). This problem could possibly be solved by polyphonic tracks (?). However, apparently other ideas exist for handling polyphonic takes (see the above issue), so I am not sure about this.
Tags	6.0, editing, Import, polyphonic, stereo

Date Modified	Username	Field	Change
2020-07-03 22:27	jeythekey	New Issue
2020-07-03 22:27	jeythekey	Tag Attached: 6.0
2020-07-03 22:27	jeythekey	Tag Attached: editing
2020-07-03 22:27	jeythekey	Tag Attached: Import
2020-07-03 22:27	jeythekey	Tag Attached: polyphonic
2020-07-03 22:27	jeythekey	Tag Attached: stereo