Ardour Won't Launch!

I’ve used Ardour for years on various Linux distros. I’m currently on Debian 10 with all software working perfectly including Mixbus. Out of the blue, Ardour stopped launching. Assuming an application glitch, I uninstalled, rebooted, downloaded a fresh file of latest version and guess what, still no launch. I’m not technical enough to crack this one, any ideas anyone?

No software just stops “out of the blue” so something must’ve changed but we’ll need more info.
Try starting Ardour in a terminal and see if it produces anything.

So in terminal: cd to installation path (usually /opt/Ardour-{version}/bin) and execute ardour.

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That is good news. Welcome to the unix world.
If you install the same application again it should behave identically. Also rebooting the system should not make any difference, you just boot into the same system again.

Chances are that for some reason the configuration became invalid. Ardour stores user config in $HOME/.config/ardour6

Try to move it away and start over, in a Terminal window run:

mv ~/.config/ardour6 /tmp/

Alternatively run Ardour from a terminal: just Ardour6 and press enter that may print some information as to why it does not launch.

Thanks for your reply, I know it must be something on my system. Ardour won’t run from the terminal either. I’ve posted a copy of the messages I get under Robin’s reply. I suspect the answer will be obvious to people like yourselves, not to me alas :slight_smile:

Thanks for your reply Robin - this is the text I get running from the terminal - I would love to know what it means :slight_smile: I’ve been experimenting with LMMS Flatpack a lot lately but otherwise have done nothing unusual with my PCas far as I know. Rob

/opt/Ardour-6.5.0$ ‘/opt/Ardour-6.5.0/bin/ardour6’
Ardour6.5.0 (built using 6.5 and GCC version 6.3.0 20170516)
Ardour: [INFO]: Your system is configured to limit Ardour to 1048576 open files
Ardour: [INFO]: Loading system configuration file /opt/Ardour-6.5.0/etc/system_config
Ardour: [INFO]: Loading user configuration file /home/robcook/.config/ardour6/config
Ardour: [INFO]: CPU vendor: GenuineIntel
Ardour: [INFO]: AVX-capable processor
Ardour: [INFO]: CPU brand: Intel® Core™ i5-3470S CPU @ 2.90GHz
Ardour: [INFO]: Using AVX optimized routines
Ardour: [INFO]: Loading plugin meta data file /opt/Ardour-6.5.0/share/plugin_metadata/plugin_tags
Ardour: [INFO]: Loading plugin statistics file /home/robcook/.config/ardour6/plugin_metadata/plugin_stats
Cannot xinstall SIGPIPE error handler
Ardour: [INFO]: Loading default ui configuration file /opt/Ardour-6.5.0/etc/default_ui_config
Ardour: [INFO]: Loading user ui configuration file /home/robcook/.config/ardour6/ui_config
Ardour: [INFO]: Loading 449 MIDI patches from /opt/Ardour-6.5.0/share/patchfiles
Gtk-Message: Failed to load module “canberra-gtk-module”
Ardour: [INFO]: Loading colour file /opt/Ardour-6.5.0/share/themes/dark-ardour.colors
Ardour: [INFO]: Loading ui configuration file /opt/Ardour-6.5.0/etc/clearlooks.rc
Ardour: [INFO]: Loading bindings from /opt/Ardour-6.5.0/etc/ardour.keys
Loading ui configuration file /opt/Ardour-6.5.0/etc/clearlooks.rc
Found nothing along /home/robcook/.config/ardour6/templates:/opt/Ardour-6.5.0/share/templates
Scanning folders for bundled LV2s: /opt/Ardour-6.5.0/lib/LV2
Segmentation fault

Except that your sound cards are probably enumerated in some random order and (in my case) all my CPU sensors are jumbled around so I end up monitoring the wrong one 1 out of 10 reboots because linux :slight_smile: (perhaps the real advantage of unix-like systems is that you generally don’t have to restart them that often - fortunately)

Does this happen when creating a new session, too? Or only when loading some existing ones?

Does using “Safe Mode: Disable all Plugins” help?

Could it be that installing LMMS installed some plugins? In theory using the flatpak should not affect this, but perhaps you’ve installed some as side-effect.

There’s a known bug on debian that installing LMMS pulls in calf-ladspa, which conflicts with calf-lv2 and they crash each other. Try to uninstall the old LV1:

dpkg -P calf-ladspa 

Working now!! I’ve just updated my Mixbus to the new version - great , went to launch Ardour and it went through the set up screens and works perfectly - thanks again anyway. Rob

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