Ardour 8.12 stalls when pressing q multiple times

When I press q multiple times quickly while a session is playing then Ardour stalls when the playhead is at the beginning of the session. Ardour can then only be force closed. I’ve first encountered this with a very simple session with a few tracks with no plugins and one track with only an impulse response plugin. As a side effect either my USB mouse or my touchpad stop working too.

Anybody recognize this behaviour? And what would be a good way to troubleshoot this? I don’t see any logging coming from Ardour when Ardour stalls.

Ardour 8.12
Debian 12
Lenovo Ideapad Pro 5: https://psref.lenovo.com/Detail/IdeaPad/IdeaPad_Pro_5_16APH8?M=83AR0045MH

Jeremy

I also see this behavior with the onboard audio. After having pressed q a few times Ardour stalls and my touchpad stops working. If I then close Ardour with Alt + F4 touchpad starts to work again.

And just checked with the stock Debian kernel, same issue. And I’ve had some issues with the GPU so I’ve ran Debian with hardware acceleration disabled in X for quite a while. If I disable hardware acceleration now the issue remains…

Does this happen with a specific session only?

I’ve seen cases where, due to a bug in some early 8.x version, some marker could end up just before 00:00:00:00 (negative timecode), and jumping there could perhaps cause this.

I cannot reproduce this. I tried: a new session, add track, record 5 sec, press q to jump to “start”.

In any case, if you find a recipe how to reproduce it, filing a bug report at tracker.ardour.org would be helpful. Thanks in advance.

Hello Robin, I can easily reproduce it by creating a new session, import an audio file, playing it and pressing q a few times quickly one after another. I’ll file a bug report!

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This is probably related to my machine. Weird though that I only run into this behavior with Ardour. Will investigate further.

I can reproduce this too.

xubuntu 25.04, Ardour 8.12

Empty session, audio import, play, press q

Freezing does only occur if pressing q twice quickly.
This is on my laptop with internal audio, will test this on my real DAW later.

Same behaviour on my main DAW
Totally different machine/hardware.
Xubuntu 24.04
Ardour 8.12

No imported audio but I recorded a little bit of empty audio on a new audiotrack.
Only Ardour stalls, usb mouse and keyboard still work.
Pressing q twice pretty quickly has the effect. Not if you press q more slowly.

Thanks for testing! What are the specs of those machines, especially GPU? As I think it might be GPU related.

Tried to reproduce it on a Dell Latitude 7420 (all Intel) but couldn’t reproduce it on that machine.

Laptop has Intel core i7 used gpu: nvidia quadro k3100m with nouveau-driver
DAW-PC has intel core i5: no additional videocontroller just gpu onboard video (intel)(xeon e3-1200)

I do have an old laptop laying in the corner with xubuntu 22.04/Ardour 7.5.0 and ATI graphics controller.
This configuration works well what I can see. I could update Ardour later this day and see if it still does.

Did some more tests, also on Windows on the Lenovo machine and I couldn’t reproduce the errors there. Just installed a debug 9.0 build and behold, no issues. But since a default Windows install and a default Linux install seem to work without issues maybe it’s something in my configuration. What strikes me is that with the default installs pressing q fast seems to be done with some kind of delay. On the affected Ardour installation pressing q fast shows no delay, the playhead immediately goes back to the previous marker.

Now also tried a debug Ardour 9 build and imported the configuration from the affected Ardour 8.12 installation but no issues.

Renamed ~/.config/ardour8 and now Ardour 8.12 just works fine. So it must be something in my configuration.

Thanks @x42 for pinpointing the issue! It seems to be related to audio (wall) time vs musical (beat) time. I always use the latter and that is causing issues. If I switch to audio time in a session that is causing stalls then the issue is gone.

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Me too (I think this is the “default” default), changing to “Audio (Wallclock) time” indeed solves the problem.

Correction: default time in a new install of Ardour is Audiotime (as Robin states in mantisBT). But if you’re coming from an earlier version (inheriting the config) it could well be Beattime.

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