DDP Mastering

[Andreas Ruge]

Dear all!

First of all, I have to admit that I'm fairly new to Ardour, having
never really used it.  But when reading about the improvements that
are worked on for the export dialog, I thought I should offer my
help for an DDP export feature, whenever that might be on the plate.

I think I do have pretty good knowledge of the spec and the
different flavors of DDP filesets that are around these days.  In
real life I'm a recording producer and engineer for classical music
 having to work mainly with commercial software for the classical
field (i.e. Pyramix, Sequoia, SADiE, Sonic), masters are almost
always delivered as DDP fileset, mostly on DVD-R, sometimes on
Exabyte tape.  For an archiving project I'm involved with I'm
writing a (Python) program for conversion of different CD audio
image formats, among them cue/wav, cue/bin and DDP, at the  moment
that's still work in progress.

Adding DDP export to Ardour should be pretty straight forward, as
it's not much different than a cue sheet export.  Much more work (as
always) would be the possibility to import it, or just play it - the
latter feature is missing in most commercial DAWs as well.

Troublesome is most likely the license.  Using the DDP format for
"products" is free of charge, but the license expires every year,
can be terminated any time, and doesn't allow  transfer or further
distribution of the license material in any other way than in the
creation of a product by the licensee.  Sounds difficult for an open
source project, but I'm unexperienced in licensing issues.  Has
anybody contacted DCA about that already, did you get an answer?

I'm sorry, if this has already been discussed here.  Just wantetd to
offer my help, even if my C/C++ knowledge is limited.

Best Regards,
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[Paul Davis]

On Wed, 2008-06-25 at 12:40 +0200, Andreas Ruge wrote:
> Dear all!
>
> First of all, I have to admit that I'm fairly new to Ardour, having
> never really used it.  But when reading about the improvements that
> are worked on for the export dialog, I thought I should offer my
> help for an DDP export feature, whenever that might be on the plate.
>
> I think I do have pretty good knowledge of the spec and the
> different flavors of DDP filesets that are around these days.

Nick Mainsbridge has already done some work on DDP export support. I'll
let him weigh in with whatever he's done so far.

> Adding DDP export to Ardour should be pretty straight forward, as
> it's not much different than a cue sheet export.  Much more work (as
> always) would be the possibility to import it, or just play it - the
> latter feature is missing in most commercial DAWs as well.
>
> Troublesome is most likely the license.  Using the DDP format for
> "products" is free of charge, but the license expires every year,

The first question that needs to be determined in this area is whether
we actually need to obtain a license to support DDP in the first place.
If its easily "reverse" engineered, the situation is entirely different
(there are no rules that protect file formats, unless they are
encrypted). I don't know how Nick has done whatever he has done so far.

--p


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[nick mainsbridge-2]

On Wed, 2008-06-25 at 12:40 +0200, Andreas Ruge wrote:

> Dear all!
>
> First of all, I have to admit that I'm fairly new to Ardour, having
> never really used it.  But when reading about the improvements that
> are worked on for the export dialog, I thought I should offer my
> help for an DDP export feature, whenever that might be on the plate.
>
> I think I do have pretty good knowledge of the spec and the
> different flavors of DDP filesets that are around these days.  In
> real life I'm a recording producer and engineer for classical music
>  having to work mainly with commercial software for the classical
> field (i.e. Pyramix, Sequoia, SADiE, Sonic), masters are almost
> always delivered as DDP fileset, mostly on DVD-R, sometimes on
> Exabyte tape.  For an archiving project I'm involved with I'm
> writing a (Python) program for conversion of different CD audio
> image formats, among them cue/wav, cue/bin and DDP, at the  moment
> that's still work in progress.
>
> Adding DDP export to Ardour should be pretty straight forward, as
> it's not much different than a cue sheet export.  Much more work (as
> always) would be the possibility to import it, or just play it - the
> latter feature is missing in most commercial DAWs as well.
>
> Troublesome is most likely the license.  Using the DDP format for
> "products" is free of charge, but the license expires every year,
> can be terminated any time, and doesn't allow  transfer or further
> distribution of the license material in any other way than in the
> creation of a product by the licensee.  Sounds difficult for an open
> source project, but I'm unexperienced in licensing issues.  Has
> anybody contacted DCA about that already, did you get an answer?
>
> I'm sorry, if this has already been discussed here.  Just wantetd to
> offer my help, even if my C/C++ knowledge is limited.
>
> Best Regards,

Hi, I have it more or less working.. probably less than more though.
I managed to work out the spec (I think). I used the source of the
dvdtape project along with some example folders kindly provided by the
guys at Benchmark Mastering
( http://www.benchmarkmastering.com/home.html ) .. I also used some
screenshots of a mastering app from a japanese website.

There is somewhere a public specification for DVD masters which claims
to be based on DDP-2.0, although I've lost that link.

I've dropped the ball with this one though. I can create a folder
containing the standard files (seems identical to the supplied
examples), but haven't worked on the "single file" type of image at all
(the block size changes or something).

Lack of time is my blocker, so if someone else wants to have a go, I'll
find some time to clean up the embarrassing bits and send it over.

Regarding license, I assumed that if it didn't claim to be DDP (but
happened to be identically useful) then all was ok.. maybe thats a
little naive of me.

Let me know if you think you can legally do anything,


cheers,

Nick Mainsbridge



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[Andreas Ruge]

Hi Nick and others,

I've in the recent weeks put some code together which could be used
for DDP creation (CD audio only), it only writes DDP filesets on
hard disk (as that's what I'm doing nowadays in real live).  About
the programming interface I'm a bit indecisive, so if anybody would
like to put in comments, you can see the C header file at
http:/ddp.andreasruge.de.

Now in order to see if or how this can fit into Ardour, would
someone mind, pointing me to the specific code that's at the moment
handling the cue sheet export?  I have to admit I'm still a bit lost
in Ardour's source code.

> Hi, I have it more or less working.. probably less than more though.
> I managed to work out the spec (I think). I used the source of the
> dvdtape project along with some example folders
That's interesting, I didn't know about that project, will have to
check that out.

> Lack of time is my blocker,
That I completely understand. :)

> Let me know if you think you can legally do anything,
I've called them, and it didn't seem to be so much of a problem, but
I haven't spoken to the right person yet. We'll see...

Andreas
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