Cross Platform Audio Project File

monquixote

Are there any interchange file formats supported by a wide variety of DAWs which allow you to export information about edits etc?

Musicwolf

I'm not 100% sure but I would doubt it.  For no-destructive editing to work the basic recording remains unchanged and the data about where the edits occur is stored within the project file which is specific to the DAW.

You would have export the stems freezing the edits in place.

digitalscream

Nope. I seem to remember that @WiresDreamDisasters did some work reverse-engineering the Reaper project file format, but most of them are - I believe - binary and very difficult to muck around with.

monquixote

Musicwolf said:

I'm not 100% sure but I would doubt it.  For no-destructive editing to work the basic recording remains unchanged and the data about where the edits occur is stored within the project file which is specific to the DAW.

You would have export the stems freezing the edits in place.

I def don't want the stems. Just a text file with what clips went where

Very common in video editing as there are loads of standard edl and interchange formats.

Stuckfast

There are two that I know of: OMF and AAF (which I think is just a newer version of OMF). They are supposed to maintain the Edit Decision List (ie where everything sits on the timeline and is chopped up) but won't transfer plug-in settings or other mix parameters.

In my experience both are pretty unreliable, but that may depend on what DAWs you're using. (For instance, Logic appears not to support stereo audio in AAF, which is a pretty basic failing.)

WiresDreamDisasters

digitalscream said:

Nope. I seem to remember that @WiresDreamDisasters did some work reverse-engineering the Reaper project file format, but most of them are - I believe - binary and very difficult to muck around with.

Yeah, I've reverse engineered the Reaper project format and the Studio One project format. Needed to do it for some work related automation.

Reaper is a sort of xml style format, but really just tags and text strings. Studio One project is a zip file with a bunch of xml files in it which track files by guiid's.

Cubase supports OMF export. You can also export time‑stamped broadcast wave files. 

Whichever way you export though, you're invariably going to lose things. Plugin settings, automation, etc.

Funnily enough, working with both audio and video, video editing is still pretty archaic when it gets down to it. That's why you see more interchange formats, because different apps have different limitations so the user ends up actually needing to move stuff from app to app.

Audio is much further down the track in terms of feature sets, so people pretty much can and do just stick to one DAW these days.

Depending on what you wanna do Nick, you might find it better to script something up.

monquixote

My requirements are fairly simple.

I basically want to determine which clips were used in a project and at where they were used so I wouldn't need much of the project to be preserved although I guess I would need some basic automation to make sure things weren't muted or faded down etc. 

In most video editors I think that would be not too big an ask, but it seems the same might not be true of DAWs.

stratman3142

This probably isn't what you're looking for, but some DAWs have the option to add BWF data to WAV files. Then the WAV files can be set to move to the correct time locations in another DAW. There's some info below:

https://www.audiorecording.me/what-is-broadcast-wave-format-bwf-how-to-use-it-in-your-daw.html