The new Ardour export format selection dialog I've been working on lately has some quite interesting features. The most interesting one is the format compatibility system. It allows the user to select compatibility items like "Audio CD" or "Pro Tools" and the dialog responds by marking the incompatible formats red. The part that makes this hard to implement is the fact that you can select many compatibility options, and selecting a red format should cause the conflicting compatibility item to be deselected.

Like the topic says, I'm using set algebra to solve my problems. Each compatibility item and actual format is of the same base class, which has set algebra operations like intersection and difference. This makes it easy to construct global compatibility restraints and compare them to actual formats.

So, this is work in progress and I haven't tested it yet, but at least I have a good plan. What I have accomplished lately is threading the export post processing. This had to be done in order to support real time exporting - since Ardour uses Jack, it has to respond to Jack's callbacks every period (determined by the soundcard buffer settings), and post processing entire files can not be done in one period...

After I get this format compatibility stuff sorted out, it will finally be time to do some GUI work, and see some of this stuff in action. At the moment I've been testing the export functionality by hard coding an export specification, which is not too slick. Hopefully I'll be able to post some GUI screen shots next week!