For a little over a week now in my Ardour summercode project, I've been mainly stabilizing code, and working on tagging and error reporting. Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files can now be tagged with metadata, which is editable via the GUI I created at the very beginning of the summer.

I've also implemented BWF export. BWF (Broadcast Wave Format) is a fairly common format in pro-audio. It includes a standard set of metadata and lots of extensions, which can be used to extend the metadata when necessary. The most useful piece of metadata is positional info. Each exported file includes a reference to the position in the time line it was originally recorded. A common use case for this could be working on something with two different DAWs. If both support BWF export and import, it is easy to get the files aligned right on the time line. The standard metadata also includes the time of export and originator information.

According to a EBU recommendation the originator reference should include, among other things, a recorder serial number. Clearly no such thing exists with DAWs, so instead I decided a svn revision number would be a good alternative. So, each exported BWF file includes the revision it was exported from. This will definitely help with debugging, if problems occur. Also, since BWF can be used as the default recording format in Ardour, it may also help with non-export-related problems. Including the revision in other taggable formats could be a good idea in addition.

Other things I've been doing include an error reporting mechanism in the main dialog, normalizing that works properly when a multi-channel export is split into mono files and lots more stability compared to the situation a week ago.