Ran into something tonight, not sure if it’s user error or a bug. When I activate a range from a set of range markers and try to bounce or consolidate, I get an empty source. I’m on MacOS Sonoma 14.8.3 and Ardour 8.12.
My use case is trying to combine multiple regions in a rack into a single region of fixed length. I was trying a bunch of things to get it to work and I swear it worked twice because I had moved on to a third track when I noticed the bounced regions for the previous 2 tracks were now empty. The only other thing I know I did was delete the individual regions from the track after bouncing and before dropping in the freshly bounced source.
Also, not all of the bounced/consolidated sources were displaying in the source list. I found them all in the interchange folder but they weren’t available in the import dialog when I tried to bring them back in. Files show a full 8+ gb file but after restarting Ardour the bounced sources when dragged into a track are just short empty clips (that can’t be expanded).
What does work is if I manually select a range with the range tool, or select the range from location markers, but this is not a great workflow. If I can’t get this working right, I’ll try doing stem exports but that is also less than ideal.
I think I figured it out. I’m working a very long session and my session settings for media were regular 32bit wave, which makes sense why the new 8gb files were causing problems, being a little more than twice the 4gb limitation of 32bit wave. Bounce seems to work as expected now.
I would’ve thought this would be set to a 64-bit version by default but the original session was recorded on an old Linux machine running Ardour 5, so I can imagine that it inherited the settings from that machine.
Also, it’s in a weird spot and I only found it by accident, but to make the session properties the default, you have to go to “Misc” and click “Use these settings as defaults”.
The other thing that may have been contributing some issues is this session is a duplicate session (given the size, I wanted to have a solid backup on a separate drive in case anything happened). I checked out the file locations in the session properties and I thought I saw it was pointing to the backup session instead of the current one. I don’t know if I just misunderstood what I was looking at or what, but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.
Anyways, it would be nice if Ardour could do some quick math and alert you when you’re bouncing/consolidating to a file size that is incompatible with the media container settings/specs. It’s a rare scenario but the feature would save some hair pulling.
I don’t know how Ardour handles 4+gb long sessions with 32bit wavs, if it breaks it into multiple files or just quietly writes over the beginning of the file, but this would be the more serious scenario where a warning might save someone’s extremely time-consuming recording. It’s late and I’m tired so I’m short on suggestions on what that might look like, but something to think about.
Hope this helps someone down the road. Thanks for letting me think out loud.
The default audio file container format is now (in Ardour 9.0, not quite released yet) “WAV-compatible RF64”, which will fallback to regular WAV if the length is < 4GB, and actual RF64 if it is longer, so no checks needed.
When we changed this, I believe the commit noted “not sure why we didn’t do this before”