Ardour 3.5.308 Can't create new session any more

Hello all;

So, I was able to record 4 multitrack sessions in Ardour and then one day, it decided that It won’t create a new session.
Click on new, type in a name, the audio config windows comes up, I click ok, wait and then the error: Could not reconnect to the Audio/MIDI engine. Then I get:

Could not create session in “/home/myusername/3”

which is where the other 4 sessions are.

This is without starting Jack as Ardour would do the magic for me…so I thought I would reboot, start Jack and then repeat the above process. Oddly enough, the Audio/MIDI setup window pops up again and I get the exact same messages. If try to re-calibrate it tells me that:

Your selected audio configuration is playback- or capture-only.
Latency calibration requires playback and capture

I’ve done this already with results.

So…what am I missing? I am pretty new to this after using Adobe Audition under Windoze for years.

I have added my username to the audio group for real time (previous issue I found a fix for) and my audio.conf is not disabled.

I’m on Ubuntu 12.04LTS running on an ASUS G74SX and I’m running straight into the mic jack from my Pocket Pod.

Thanks in advance!

D

Did you install Ardour from ardour.org or your Linux distribution?

No. I had used the previous version but had problems getting sound into the machine. So, I purchased Ardour 3 (removed the old version first) and used the download link and followed the instructions from the site for my install. It worked Flawlessly for 4 sessions with no changes to my system and then the error’s started per my previous post.

Acutally, its YES to ardour.org.

Open a Terminal window and run the following command there (substituting for Ardour-VERSION appropriately):

   strace -f -e trace=open /opt/Ardour-VERSION/bin/ardour3 2>&1 | tee /tmp/ardour.out

Do whatever you do to get the cannot-open-session error. Then quit.

Then email the file /tmp/ardour.org to me at paul@linuxaudiosystems.com. After that, please find me as “las” on IRC so that we can avoid the stupidity of problem solving on a web forum. See the Support link above if you don’t know how to get onto IRC.

For future reference, we resolved this on IRC. The problems were caused by specifying a server name to JACK. This is a very specialized JACK parameter and almost no users should ever do this - it will totally break all JACK clients unless you really know what you are doing.

I was caught by a similar issue once, because I accidentally placed the ‘-n’ parameter in the wrong place. Because (just a little infuriatingly) it is valid, either before or after the -d switch, but has completely different meanings depending upon the context, in one instance it specifies the number of buffers (as I intended) but in another it starts jack with a spurious name - without any error therefore, but provokes odd messages and / or a mysterious fail-over to the the JACK config page when starting ardour. Which was, to put it politely, an “interesting” waste of an hour. As I remember thinking at the time :slight_smile:

beware the -p switch for similar reasons…

except perhaps for those who enjoy, maybe, trying to figure why a simple jack auto-start script appears to:

  1. Work correctly, but JACK appears to stop for no reason
  2. Work correctly but JACK appears to stop only when ardour connects
  3. Seems not to work at all (sometimes)
  4. Seems to work, but only with JACK1
  5. Seems to work, but ardour mysteriously limits track numbers / routing options
  6. Seems to work - but only as root
  7. Seems to work, but only when starting JACK from qjackctl
  8. Seems not to work when starting JACK from qjackctl
  9. Seems to only work when not using qjackctl at all
  10. Only works for one user
  11. Seems to require booting into Windows then reboot to linux… (That turned out to be a completely different issue…)
  12. Seems to only work on a Tuesday… (That turned out to be a completely different issue too…)
  13. All or none of the above - depending upon time of day, phase of moon etc :slight_smile:

I just installed Ardour 3.5.308 and it worked the first time, but then subsequent times I got the same error as dritter1979. The old version of Ardour in combo with jack would give me problems sometimes too, so I came up with an elaborate set of steps that allows me to recover the use of Ardour (partly based on some steps I saw on the Jack website that were insufficient for me).
I’m using Ubuntu Studio with qjackctl…

  1. First, kill any Jack or pulse processes
  2. Delete the following files
    ~/.jackdrc ~/.config/jack/conf.xml ~/.conf.xml ~/.config/rncbc.org/QjackCtl.conf ~/.config/ardour3/ardour.rc
  3. Run ardour and select your built in computer sound card
  4. Shutdown ardour
  5. Open qjackctl, stop jack, change back to your USB audio interface and start jack
  6. quit qjackctl
  7. shutdown and restart your computer
  8. open Ardour and select your usb soundcard in the options
  9. Throw some salt over your shoulder :slight_smile:

I can probably cut out some of these steps, but it’s not worth trying to figure out which ones at this point…