[linux-audio-user] Ardour: trying to add a "bus" causes a crash?

[Sylvain Robitaille]

Hello folks ...

I've just started working once again on a mix project, after a long
break over the summer, and am encountering a problem I don't recall
seeing before.

When I try to add a bus to the session ("Session -> Add Track/Bus"), it
causes Ardour to crash (many thanks to the Ardour developers for adding
intelligent crash recovery!  I haven't lost any real work thanks to that.)
I can add a "track" without any problem, but what I'm after here is a
"bus".

I _think_ I'm doing this right.  The project presently has 16 tracks,
and the master bus, and I want to add a bus to use to connect post-fader
sends from selected tracks, as an effects bus (with the effect inserted
as a pre-fader plugin on the bus).  I already have a (not connected)
post-fader send on one of my tracks, ready to connect to the bus I'm
trying to create.

The system is Slackware-10.2 (with a customized kernel, and upgrades
as released by Slackware), on an AMD Athlon64 (running in 32-bit mode)
with 2GB RAM (no swap used as yet, so I'm not expecting lack of memory to
be a problem).  I've been running Ardour-0.99.2, but when I encountered
this problem I upgraded to Ardour-0.99.3 to see if the upgrade would
resolve the problem (it didn't).  Jack is jack-0.100.0  (hrmmm...  I see
new versions of that are available, but it doesn't seem to me as though
Jack would be the culprit here;  I'll upgrade if it's believed I should,
though ...)

Anyone have any ideas?  Feel free to point me to documentation I should
have found (I've already checked the Ardour online manual and "how do
I..." forum, but it is of course possible that I missed something that
should have jumped out at me), or to tell me there's a better way to get
what I'm after (the equivalent of a post-fader "aux" send and return on
a hardware mixer).

It occurs to me that I can add a stereo track, insert (pre-fader)
the plugin I want, connect its output to the master track, and set it
to record-enable (all tracks for the project are already recorded,
so that won't interfere), and connect the other track sends I want
to it.  It feels like a work-around, but it might at least permit me to
continue ...  (comments on this would be appreciated ...)

Thanks in advance for any help ...

-- 
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Sylvain Robitaille                              syl at alcor.concordia.ca

Major in Electroacoustic Studies                  Concordia University
Faculty of Fine Arts / Music Department       Montreal, Quebec, Canada
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