Ardour session not loading

Installation & Configuration Linux
#1

Hi,

Today I encountered a pretty big problem, my session just won’t load. Here’s the error message:

—ERROR: Could not set session state from XML
ERROR: Session: cannot create Playlist from XML description.
ERROR: Playlist: cannot create region from XML
ERROR: Session: XMLNode describing a MidiRegion references an unknown source id =38201
ERROR: Session: cannot create Region from XML description. Can not load state for region ‘Take1_Vital-37.1’
ERROR: Session: XMLNode describing a MidiRegion references an unknown source id =517122
…

This changes every time I delete the parts from the xml with the unknown source id.

For example this is what I get after modifying the xml:

> —ERROR: Could not set session state from XML
> ERROR: Session: cannot create Playlist from XML description.
> ERROR: Playlist: cannot create region from XML
> ERROR: Session: XMLNode describing a MidiRegion references an unknown source id =38243
> ERROR: Session: cannot create Region from XML description. Can not load state for region ‘Take1_Vital 4-26.1’
> ERROR: Session: XMLNode describing a MidiRegion references an unknown source id =516941

This goes on seemingly forever, until I delete my whole project.
I have no idea what’s going on.

**The problem started when I pressed the arrow keys to move the playhead, but in a strange way it also moved the whole ruler thing on the top making my project unsaveble. I “Just quit”, as the popup said to do so, and now I’m here.

Here"s my project file: Dropbox - Leave.ardour - Simplify your life

Please, someone help, this is one of my better projects, I don’t want to lose it.

Thanks,

Ábris

#2

What version of Ardour are you using?

#3

Thanks for the reply, here’s the version I’m currently using:

Ardour6.9.0~ds0 (built using 6.9.0~ds0-1build1 and GCC version 11.2.0)

#4

This is a known bug with ardour 6.x, caused by a very specific workflow that it took us a long time to track down.

If you upload an archive of the entire session, I can build you a fixed version (almost certainly).

Meanwhile, please upgrade to Ardour 7.3 so that you do not encounter this again (since you apparently use the “deadly” workflow).

#5

Thank’s,

I did not know about this “deadly” workflow.

Here’s my whole project.

Thank’s again,

Ábris

#6

Hey, it looks like I am facing the same issue suddenly. I was able to load the session many times, but all of a sudden I get the same kind of errors and cannot get out of this.

@paul is it something I can fix if you just describe how to or do I have to upload the whole session (including MIDI and audio files) so you can do it ?

Note that I stuck with version 6.9 because 7.1 (back when I tried it) was not loading my VST plugins at all. I will try 7.3 when I have the time. But right now, I really would like to recover my 6.9 session!

#7

Any feedback would be appreciated. Let me know if you need just the session file or the whole session including the interchange content. Thanks!

#8

Haha, got a similar issue today for an audio region after Ardour hang and I had to kill it.
I opened the Ardour session with an XML editor and removed the related region.
I was lucky because I could restart the session successfully and added that Audio file from the sources.
Saved 3 hours of work

1 Like
#9

I got to the bottom of my issue. It turns out, 2 of my MIDI takes in the interchange are empty, file size is 0. I copied a non empty MIDI file into those and now the session loads fine. How did they end up like this ?? They were perfectly fine for weeks. Something must have happened at some low level (the session files are read from a mounted disk, FS is xfs - I suspect some mishap when it got unmounted at shutdown). But the end result is that I have to redo these tracks … what a b…tch!

Ah yeah, don’t lecture me about backup :smiley: my backup disk died a few days ago …

#10

As mentioned, 6.9 has a “killer workflow” with MIDI regions. Right now I can’t remember the precuse details but it is somehow related to the “midi region copies are unlinked”. For some people (it seems) it is a common thing to do; for others, they never do this (and so the bug was elusive for quite a long time).

#11

@paul yeah, that must be part of it since I had copied some MIDI regions and unlinked them for sure, as I wanted to tweak each of them individually. But the root-cause for me is definitely the disappearance of the file content outside ardour. I can’t see how ardour would empty the disk file all of a sudden, people would have shouted long ago if there had been such a bug …

#12

Hi
Ive just installed Ardour 7.3 onto MX AVL 21.3.
It seems to hang on Scanning VST3 Plugins at session setup
Earlier today I ran 7.2 without any problems
Do you know what may be causing this? I havent installed any extra plugins.
Heres a screenshot:
Screenshot_2023-03-09_17-19-52

#13

Yeah, so I somehow managed to built Ardour from source. (It wasn’t easy but I learned a lot along the way). There’s only one problem. None of the plugins UI’s would show up. The plugins technicly function but no UI. I have no idea why. If anyone can help me please do.

Thanks

#14

You probably don’t have the development package for suil
When you run ./waf configure you should be seeing this, among lots of other things

Checking for 'serd-0' >= 0.14.0                      : yes 
Checking for 'sord-0' >= 0.8.0                       : yes 
Checking for 'sratom-0' >= 0.2.0                     : yes 
Checking for 'lilv-0' >= 0.24.2                      : yes 
Checking for 'suil-0' >= 0.6.0                       : yes
#16

Thanks, I somehow solved it. I don’t know how but hurray.

#17

Nevermind. Not all of them load, but I found this error:

WARNING: GCC4/5 libstdc++ ABI Mismatch

Ardour was compiled with gcc4, your system uses a newer version of the
standard c++ library. Plugins on your system may not load or plugin-UIs
may cause crashes.

Can this be the issue?

#18

That was with your self-compiled version? What toolchain do you have installed?

#19

Try moving the plugins out of there and test.
/usr/lib/vst3

#20

What linux distro are you using that’s got such an old compiler as gcc4?
Debian old-old stable?

Does gcc -v report that it is version 4?

#21

My os:

Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS

gcc -v:

gcc version 11.3.0 (Ubuntu 11.3.0-1ubuntu1~22.04)