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

Ichthyostega prg at ichthyostega.de
Thu Aug 31 16:06:50 EDT 2006


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> On Thu, 31 Aug 2006, Ichthyostega wrote:
>> 1) have you the "automatically connect new tracks/busses" switch on?
> 
Sylvain Robitaille schrieb:
> Hrmmm....  I don't see a single such switch, but rather four switches:

you are right, it was just lazy wording.
This switches could have caused the problem, if ardour tries to
automatically make connetctions wich are impossible. But, as you
wrote, this seems not to be the problem.


> Hrmmm...  perhaps the difference here is that I'm working with empty
> tracks, while in my real project I have a little over an hour's worth
> of material to mix?
I doubt this could be the problem. Normally, it doesn't make any difference
how much material you have on your tracks.

But -- I had just some wired problem last week: I had a project with about
50 tracks and many small takes (playback/overdubb), basically, I had more
then 800 takes. Ardour has the "bad habbit" of opening each and every take
forehandedly (Ardour-2 will have a much more clever file handling and won't
suffer from this problem). So, at some point I got "too many open files"-
messages on the console and shortly afterwards Ardour crashed. The resolution
of the problem was, to start ardour from a terminal window and issue the
following command prior to starting ardour at this terminal:

  ulimit -n 2048

There is another limitation: The maximum length of a track is limited by
the number range of some internal counter variable. But this limitation
kicks in only after several hours. Some weeks ago, I ran into this limitation,
as I tried to integrate all takes of a large pipe organ recording project into
one timeline, to facilate cutting. At 96kHz, I wasn't able to move the
playback cursor to any point byond about 11 hours 30 minutes. :-)

But I don't think this is your problem, I just noted it for sake of completeness..


> 
> There must be something about the settings I have for this project.
> If anyone can suggest what I should be looking for, I would greatly
> appreciate it.  I really don't want to have to start over every time I
> realize I need a new aux bus ...
Normally, this shouldn't be necessary. You can make real huge sessions
with lots of wildly interconnected busses and ardour handles everything
well, including the latency.

Just intuitively, I would suspect something at the input/output-configuration
of some of your tracks to be messed up. (e.g. if you have a stereo track, but
by accident removed one of its output connection points)


Just another aproach to try:
 - Use a *copy* of your session file (a so called "snapshot"). I.e. if
   your session has the name "mysession.ardour", then copy it to a new
   file (e.g.) "test.ardour" and open this file with ardour. This ensures
   that you don't loose your original session...
 - then start to *strip down* the copy, maybe at some point the problem
   goes away:

   - test 1: select all takes on all tracks and remove them. Select all
     regions in the regions list on the right and remove them too. Save
     your snapshot, then try to add you bus....
   - test 2: if this doesn't help, try to remove whole tracks (in the
     "visual" menu of every track there is a option "remove track"

>> 3) why are you trying to use a post fader send?
> It's analogous to the post-fader send on a hardware mixer,....
I understand, you want to set different send gains. Seems that your
approach is just right and the best way to achieve this.


hope this helps
Cheers,
Hermann Vosseler

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