Cleaning up a Session
placeholder text: needs editing and references to menu items
Cleanup looks for audio files that were recorded by ardour for this
session, but are no longer in use. "In use" means "present in any
playlist in any snapshot of the session". If you have unused playlists
(e.g. alternate takes) cleanup will volunteer to delete them for you.
then it will search all snapshots (including the one you are working
with), and move all unused captured audio files into the "dead_sounds"
directory within the session. At this point, you could still
potentially get material that was "cleaned up" back, though its quite
tricky to do.
It is advisable, even firmly recommended that after this cleanup
step, you save the session, exit ardour and restart. This will enable
you to confirm that the session still works as expected. If all goes
well (and it should), you can then do the 2nd phase cleanup, which will
remove the files from the dead_sounds directory (at which point,
the material is not recoverable without backups on your part).
Note that the presence of snapshots can cause user confusion, as in
"why didn’t cleanup do anything?" The answer is frequently that there
are all capture audio files are in use in this snapshot or in others.