ardour/manual/xml/working_with_playlists.xml

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<section id="sn-working-with-playlists">
	<title>Working with Playlists</title>
	<para>
		As described earlier <link linkend="gt-playlist">playlists</link> are one of
		the central objects in a digital audio workstation. A playlist is a list of
		<link linkend="gt-region">regions</link> ordered in time. It defines which
		parts of which source files should be played and when.
	</para>

	<para>
		Each track in Ardour is really just a mechanism for taking a playlist and
		generating the audio stream that it represents. As a result, editing a track
		really means modifying its playlist in some way. Since a playlist is a list
		of regions, most of the modifications involve manipulating regions: their
		position, length and so forth. This is covered in
		<xref linkend="sn-working-with-regions"/>. Here, we cover some of the things
		you can do with playlists as objects in their own right.
	</para>

	<section id="tracks-are-not-playlists">
		<title> Tracks are not Playlists </title>
		<para>
			It is important to understand that a track is <emphasis>not</emphasis> a
			playlist. A track is a mechanism for generating the audio stream
			represented by the playlist and passing it through a signal processing
			pathway. At any point in time, a track has a single playlist associated
			with it. When the track is used to record, that playlist will have one or
			more new regions added to it. When the track is used for playback, the
			contents of the playlist will be heard. Old tape operators will feel
			comfortable thinking of the playlist as the tape, and the track as the tape
			machine.
		</para>

		<para>
			However, you can change the playlist associated with a track at (almost)
			any time, and even share playlists between tracks. There is more on this
			<link linkend="playlist-operations">below</link>.
		</para>
	</section>

	<section id="playlists-are-cheap">
		<title> Playlists are cheap </title>
		<para>
			One thing you should be clear about is that playlists are cheap. They don't
			cost anything in terms of CPU consumption, and they have very minimal
			efforts on memory use. Don't be afraid of generating new playlists whenever
			you want to. They are not equivalent to tracks, which require extra CPU
			time and significant memory space, or audio files, which use disk space, or
			to plugins that require extra CPU time. If a playlist is not in use, it
			occupies a small amount of memory, and nothing more.
		</para>
	</section>

	<section id="playlists-as-takes">
		<title> Playlists as "Takes" or "Virtual Tracks" </title>
		<para>
			If you have a background in audio engineering, then it might be easiest for
			you to think of playlists as "takes". This isn't a particularly useful
			analogy by itself, and it can be misleading. But if you are working with
			music where most tracks feature single-pass recordings of a single
			instrument, then the idea of using one playlist per "take" can make life
			very convenient. Each time you need to record another take, create a new
			playlist list first. You will then end up with a simple way of switching
			back and forth between each version, or even listening to several at the
			same time.
		</para>

		<para>
			If you have some experience of other DAWs, then you might have come across
			the term "virtual track", normally defined as a track that isn't actually
			playing or doing anything, but can be mapped/assigned to a "real track".
			This concept is functionally identical to Ardour's playlists. We just like
			to be little more clear about what is actually happening rather than mixing
			old and new terminology ("virtual" and "track") into confusing terminology.
		</para>
	</section>

	<section id="playlist-operations">
		<title> Playlist Operations </title>
		<para>
			At this point, all operations on playlists start by clicking on the
			playlist button (labelled <guibutton>p</guibutton>) in the control area of a track in the
			editor. Clicking the button will popup a menu with the following choices:
		</para>

		<variablelist>
			<title></title>
			<varlistentry>
				<term><guilabel>Current</guilabel></term>
				<listitem>
					<para>
						shows the name of the current playlist used by this track
					</para>
				</listitem>
			</varlistentry>

			<varlistentry>
				<term><guilabel>Rename</guilabel></term>
				<listitem>
					<para>
						pops up a dialog that allows the current playlist to be renamed
					</para>
				</listitem>
			</varlistentry>

			<varlistentry>
				<term><guilabel>New</guilabel></term>
				<listitem>
					<para>
						creates a new <emphasis>empty</emphasis> playlist, and switches this
						track to use it
					</para>
				</listitem>
			</varlistentry>

			<varlistentry>
				<term><guilabel>New Copy</guilabel></term>
				<listitem>
					<para>
						creates a new playlist that is a copy of the current playlist, and
						switches this track to use it
					</para>
				</listitem>
			</varlistentry>

			<varlistentry>
				<term><guilabel>Clear Current</guilabel></term>
				<listitem>
					<para>
						removes all regions from the current playlist
					</para>
				</listitem>
			</varlistentry>

			<varlistentry>
				<term><guilabel>Select</guilabel></term>
				<listitem>
					<para>
						pops up a playlist browser to manually choose which playlist this track
						should use
					</para>
				</listitem>
			</varlistentry>
		</variablelist>

		<section id="renaming-playlists">
			<title>Renaming Playlists</title>
			<para>
				Playlists are created with the name of the track of which they are
				associated, plus a version number. So, the first playlist for a track
				called "Cowbell" will be called "Cowbell.1". This name will be used to
				define the names of any regions added to the playlist by recording. You
				can change the name at any time, to anything you want. Ardour does not
				require that your playlist names are all unique, but it will make your
				life easier if they are. Suggested examples of user-assigned names for a
				playlist might include "Lead Guitar, 2nd take", "vocals (quiet)", and
				"downbeat cuica". Notice how these might be different from the associated
				track names, which for these examples might be "Lead Guitar", "Vocals" and
				"Cuica". The playlist name provides more information because it is about a
				specific version of the material that may (or may not) end up in the final
				version of the track.
			</para>

			<para>
				If you are going to rename your playlists, do so before recording new
				material to them.
			</para>
		</section>

		<section id="selecting-playlists">
			<title>Selecting Playlists</title>
			<para>
				If you click on the "Select" choice of the playlist button menu, a dialog
				will appear that displays all playlists in a tree-structure (many will be
				hidden). Playlists will be grouped by the track for which they were
				created, with all those created for the current track displayed. Other
				tracks are hidden in a collapsed tree that can be expanded as you wish to
				find other playlists.
			</para>
		</section>

		<section id="sharing-playlists">
			<title>Sharing Playlists</title>
			<para>
				It is entirely possible to share playlists between tracks. The only
				slightly unusual thing you may notice when sharing is that edits to the
				playlist made in one track will magically appear in the other. If you
				think about this for a moment, its an obvious consequence of sharing.
			</para>

			<para>
				You might not want this kind of behaviour, even though you still want two
				tracks to use the same (or substantially the same) playlist. To accomplish
				this, select the chosen playlist in the second track, and then use
				<guilabel>New Copy</guilabel> to generate an independent copy of it for
				that track. You can then edit this playlist without affecting the
				original.
			</para>
		</section>

		<section id="using-playlists-for-takes">
			<title>Using playlists for takes</title>
			<para>
				You have several choices here. You can obviously record new takes directly
				over an existing one, because of the non-destructive nature of digital
				audio editing. You can also use the <guilabel>Clear Current</guilabel>
				operation each time you want to start a new take. This is a
				non-destructive operation that removes all existing regions from the
				current playlist. Although you won't lose any information doing this, its
				probably not appropriate unless the last take was so awful that you want
				to discard it (although without the finality of <emphasis>Remove Last
				Capture</emphasis> ). Finally, and probably most useful, you can use the
				<guilabel>New</guilabel> operation in the playlist button menu to create a
				new empty playlist, ready for the next take. Later, you can
				<guilabel>Select</guilabel> your way back to previous or later takes as
				desired, either in this or some other track.
			</para>
		</section>
	</section>
</section>