Saving Sessions

There are a number of ways to save Sessions in Ardour, so that each Session can be use later on. The simplest way is to save the entire Session as a single Ardour file.

Save a Session

You can save your session by pressing "Control" + "S" (or "Apple" + "S" on OS X), or by using the menu Session > Save.

Ardour File & Folder Format

A typical Session's folder on your hard drive might look something like this:

2009-11-25T20:03:10.ardour      interchange
2009-11-25T20:03:10.history     looping2.ardour
analysis                        looping2.ardour.bak
dead_sounds                     looping2.history
export                          looping2.history.bak
instant.xml                     peaks

The name of this Session is "looping2". The first entries, listed here as

2009-11-25T20:03:10.ardour
2009-11-25T20:03:10.history

are a timestamped Snapshot of the Session and its history. Ardour will use this Snapshot to recover from a crash.

The folder named export is often used for Exporting files from your Session.

A Session file has the .ardour extension. The Session file is periodically backed up by Ardour with a .bak extension.

looping2.ardour
looping2.ardour.bak

The .history file keeps a record of changes you have made during your Session, and is also periodically backed up.

looping2.history
looping2.history.bak

The interchange folder contains the actual audio data of all the Regions used in your Session.

$ ls interchange/looping2/audiofiles/
Audio 1-1%L.wav
Audio 1-1%R.wav
cheesy synth-1%L.wav
cheesy synth-1%R.wav
cymbal-0-bounce-1.wav
cymbal-1.wav
guitar_drone.edit1.wav
highhat-0-bounce-1.wav
highhat-1.wav
kick-0-bounce-1.wav
kick-1.wav
slap bass 2-1.wav
slap bass-1.wav
snare-0-bounce-1.wav
snare-1.wav

And finally, the peaks folder contains the data Ardour uses to graphically display the Peaks of your soundfiles.

$ ls peaks/
cymbal-0-bounce-1%A.peak
guitar_drone.edit1%A.peak
guitar_drone.edit1%B.peak
highhat-0-bounce-1%A.peak
kick-0-bounce-1%A.peak
snare-0-bounce-1%A.peak
teeeest%A.peak
teeeest%B.peak
teeeest2%A.peak
teeeest2%B.peak

Continuing

Saving an entire Session allows you to open it again at a later time. However, if you would like to preserve a certain state that your Session is in, to be able to return to that state later on after you have made changes, then please continue to the next session called Saving Snapshots.