I have had this problem for years and throughout many versions of Ardour.
I am now in Ardour 7.2.
I get this with midi and audio files but because the behavior is a little different I will concentrate on MIDI in this post and leave audio to another post.
When I try to cleanup unused sources Ardour hangs. The main window and the cleanup window go blank. A bash top tells me that ArdourGUI is using 125% while all Ardour is doing is cleaning up. The only way I can regain control is to “kill -9” and start again.
I ran Ardour from the command line to get some feedback and it stalls at: “Source from source list NOT found in used_by_this_snapshot (//mnt/sda1/ArdProj/2023/20210417/interchange/20210417/midifiles/hyd2-1.mid).”
If I grep the seesion file (grep hyd2-1.mid 20210417.ardour) I get nothing. I see that the file “/mnt/sda1/ArdProj/2023/20210417/interchange/20210417/midifiles/hyd2-1.mid” does exist but it has the size of 26 bytes.
I have manually erased this file but every time ardour starts the file is recreated without any reference to it in the session file - 20210417.ardour. It is therefore impossible for me to clean up unused sources.
Is the double slash “//mnt…” a typo?
I could see that Ardour looks resolves this to “/mnt…”.
As for why files are re-created, an empty file is kept around for every track to directly record into. One reason for this is to ensure that Ardour does not hit the max open files limit when you start recording.
Some additional info:
I’m using the binary included with avlinux .
I failed do mention that clean up usually works - it’s just a pain when it doesn’t.
double slash ??? No, this is not a typo and I have wondered why the extra slash is added. Nevertheless ardour has no problems accessing other files under the interchange directory when it does work so I don’t think it’s the double slash. Bash also doesn’t care about the double slash. Sorry I failed do mention that clean up usually works - it’s just a pain when it doesn’t.
Here are the last two lines following the latest cleanup attempt:
Source from source list found in used_by_this_snapshot (//mnt/sda1/ArdProj/2023/20210417/interchange/20210417/audiofiles/vin-3.wav)
Source from source list NOT found in used_by_this_snapshot (//mnt/sda1/ArdProj/2023/20210417/interchange/20210417/midifiles/hyd2-3.mid)
As can be seen, irrespective of the double slash it has found the file vin-3.wav.
Also, I manually edited out the slash from the front of "mnt: in ~/.config/ardour7/config.
grep mnt ~/.config/ardour7/config
And I still see a double slash in the response to cleanup.
I would have guessed that the session would not have even loaded... Is this info stored elsewhere?
When it stalls it reports:
Source from source list NOT found in used_by_this_snapshot …
The file in question is clearly in the path but not in the session file (20210417.ardour). Sometimes, when I get the same behavior with audio files, the file is present and there is a reference to it in the session.ardour file. Do you know the algorithm that ardour uses to cleanup?