Cannot initialize session/engine: Invalid or corrupt session state

Hello, my name is Daniele, i use by many years ardour on Gentoo, recently i have some files, saved with an old version, that look corrupted, and i can not open them with ardour. I need those files for export some wave tracks inside. I try with plugin disabled. The message obtained is:
Session “/path/to/session” did not load successfully:
Cannot initialize session/engine: Invalid or corrupt session state.
I tried to buy an installer for windows to test those sessions on it but with the same result. Searching, i found an old post in this forum dated 2014 with a similar problem, looks old, so i open a new one, maybe someone here can help me. Those are the corrupted files:
http://www.deleteria.it/tmp/ardourError/giza.ardour
http://www.deleteria.it/tmp/ardourError/lagoDeiCigni.ardour
http://www.deleteria.it/tmp/ardourError/sfinge.ardour
http://www.deleteria.it/tmp/ardourError/zenith.ardour
I opened that with emacs but i am not able to understand the code inside. Is there a manner for adjust it? At least for export the waves.
Thanks and sorry for my bad english.

This is a known issue when loading some Ardour2 sessions in recent Ardour5. If you were to load by starting ardour from a commandline, you’ll see the actual error:

Multiple tempo definitions found at 0

There was a bug in Ardour2 that allowed this.

The solution is relatively simple, edit the .ardour session file, search for <TempoMap> and remove the duplicates.

In case of the giza.ardour, near the end I’ve removed the movable="yes" entries, keeping the initial fixed tempo.

  <TempoMap>
    <Tempo start="1|1|0" beats-per-minute="120.000000" note-type="4.000000" movable="no"/>
    <Meter start="1|1|0" note-type="4.000000" beats-per-bar="4.000000" movable="no"/>
  </TempoMap>

The resulting files looks like http://robin.linuxaudio.org/tmp/giza.ardour and loads now. Tested with ardour 5.12.

I trust you can edit the other session files accordingly in emacs yourself.

PS. For reference: the original file, before modification was

  <TempoMap>
    <Tempo start="1|1|0" beats-per-minute="130.000000" note-type="4.000000" movable="yes"/>
    <Tempo start="1|1|0" beats-per-minute="130.000000" note-type="4.000000" movable="yes"/>
    <Tempo start="1|1|0" beats-per-minute="120.000000" note-type="4.000000" movable="no"/>
    <Meter start="1|1|0" note-type="4.000000" beats-per-bar="4.000000" movable="no"/>
    <Tempo start="1|1|0" beats-per-minute="130.000000" note-type="4.000000" movable="yes"/>
  </TempoMap>
1 Like

Yesssss!!! I can open it!!! :smiley: Many thanks!!! :slight_smile: