Hello,
i am working quite intense on lerning ARDOUR by doing. Using its beta i
exrerience some bugs that are more or less tolerablein such great an App
for no cost (crashes when trying some adventurous routing-stuff, some
lesser gui-issues).
After all there are only 2 really serious problems:
1.)Importing .wav-files fails too often (regardless if these files are
written by Samplitude, Audacity, rezound or even Ardour itself)
How is that on your setups out there?
Many similar problems earlier. I haven't used the program since it went to
it's first release. I expect its gotten better.
2.)Many xruns, (some after 2 seconds, others after 2 mins, mostly within
40 secs or so - sometimes i had testrecordings of unbroken 10 minutes)
I use Ardour on SuSE 8.2 pro with jack0.74 as root only on runlevel 3 in
Windowmaker, all networking is off, no kdeinit is running.
I somehow doubt this is due to your hardware. More likely it's some set of
interactions between the software that is running on your machine, or
possibly the way you have your hardware configured. I would really try to
understand this before you spend another penny, or you're likely to spend
many dollars and make no forward progress.
Overall, I would suggest that most xrun problems are caused by latency
issues, and not by raw bandwidth until you get to the point where you are
running many, many audio tracks. I think you are not at that point yet.
Many things can effect this:
1) Gnome/KDE are compicated environments. For test purposes at least try
something like fluxbox which runs almost nothing by defualt. (I don't know
windowmaker - it may be pretty minimal already.)
2) Look at how you have your existing hardware installed and configured. Are
you sharing interrupts? Are you using APIC, APIC-IO or ACPI? All of these
can have major effects.
3) Test your existing hard drive/drives for bandwidth capabilities. (hdparm
or Benno's disk test programs)
4) Do your xruns correspond to other things happening on the PC?
Best of luck in finding the solution. Folks are here to help.
Cheers,
Mark