Hello,
I’m running Ardour version 3.5.380 on ‘Tango Studio’, a Debian derivative, 64bit.
The problems I’m having are:
I have already ‘lost’ two projects, what I mean is, more than half of my plugins couldn’t get ‘found’ and so I lost my work.
I don’t want this to be happening anymore of course.
After I have some plugins loaded in my (mixing) project or some automation it gets superslow and it crashes from time to time.
Two times -when Ardour crashed- it showed me a message saying that: "The disk system on your computer was not able to keep up with Ardour.
Specifically, it failed to read data from disk quickly enough to keep up with playback."
I’m kind of baffled and don’t know what to do next.
I have an Acer ASPIRE 5750G laptop with 6GB RAM.
As far as I understand there is a problem with my harddrive?
I can get along a little with command line in Linux but I’m not a professional in any way and except for knowing the kinds hardware and the fact that an SDD drive is much faster than a ‘normal’ HDD and that there are different rotations per minute with different kinds of hard drives,
I’m still a layman
(I hope I’m using the right word, I’m not English.)
when it comes down to this stuff.
Two times -when Ardour crashed- it showed me a message saying that: "The disk system on your computer was not able to keep up with Ardour.
On almost any modern system the one thing that message doesn’t indicate is a problem with the disk system on your machine… Its far more likely there was some other (software) issue (or just a bug in ardour)
In laptops there are most of the time hard disk running at 5400rpm instead of 7200, so they have slow data transfer.
Can’t this be the problem in bigger projects?
Or there something on the background running that ‘steels’ resources.
Also belgian, but i don’t have a clue what a layman is :-).
On almost any modern system the one thing that message doesn't indicate is a problem with the disk system on your machine... Its far more likely there was some other (software) issue (or just a bug in ardour)
Depends. If you are on a laptop, as the OP is, and using the same disk for OS and Data(Which is quite common for laptops), and trying to do reasonable track counts, it certainly can indicate a problem. Sharing a mechanical disk is amazingly effective at destroying performance for reading audio off the disk, especially if the entire OS and operations are not loaded completely into memory.
Increasing the playback buffer size can help (Or capture if you are recording) with this however, and IIRC is much easier to do in A3 than it was in A2, but wasn’t particularly difficult in A2 either.
It indicates a problem, in that ardour obviously can’t keep the audio buffers filled, but what I meant was that it almost never indicates a problem with the disk on any modern system, and with 6GB ram, I would be surprised if there is sufficient (if any) swap activity happening to cause any issue with having the OS and the data on the same drive. I would try to rule out a lot more things first before suspecting the (or replacing the disk).
Specifically, it failed to read data from disk quickly enough to keep up with playback...
is correct in what it says, it failed to read data from disk quickly enough... that could be for many reasons, not necessarily anything to do with the disk itself.
I would be surprised if there is sufficient (if any) swap activity happening to cause any issue with having the OS and the data on the same drive.
You likely would be surprised I think:) My experience is far less than perfect in this regards, particularly with general purpose distributions, I have no idea how Tango Studio handles this however.
is correct in what it says, it failed to read data from disk quickly enough... that could be for many reasons, not necessarily anything to do with the disk itself.
Won’t necessarily disagree with this, just with your point that it is almost never the disk itself being the problem.
In a laptop it is difficult to address this. I will say that due to the differences in mechanical and SSDs, I get much better performance out of a GOOD SSD than I do out of mechanical for issues like this. The main reason is due to the lack of the heads having to jump around to read the data from different locations on the disk more than anything.
As I said before however, this may be alleviated greatly by simply increasing the size of the playback buffer size in A3, even on mechanical drives.
- After I have some plugins loaded in my (mixing) project or some automation it gets superslow and it crashes from time to time.
I think this is more indicative of the problem, there is clearly something wrong which is most likely not at all disk related (or if it is, then its far more serious than just an access time issue) …
and this…
- I have already 'lost' two projects, what I mean is, more than half of my plugins couldn't get 'found'...
run ‘top’ from the command line and see what the top issues are? is it possible the the OP to install a SSD ? that might solve the problem.
This model notebook is a little bit older… and if it has the original HD, it might have mechanical HD issues. run ‘fsck’ and ‘smartmontools’ to verify the HD is ok… never suffered any over heating. laptops can over heat easily and can cause HD problems.
Actually try htop instead of top, just keep an eye on your processor cores and see if one may be topping out before the rest. htop will easily show you each core individually.
Also belgian, but i don’t have a clue what a layman is :-).
By ‘layman’ I mean I am still quite new/not a professional - otherwise I probably wouldn’t need help at all - .
I will try the (h)top commands and keep an eye out,
I will aswell look into my plugins and maybe reinstall them.
What do you guys/girls recommend as buffer size?
And am I right that it is located at: Preferences - Audio - Buffering?
Or should I change it in QjackCtl (JACK) or in both?
