Corrupt session files

Installation & Configuration Windows
#1

Hi, i’ve been experiencing an issue with ardour lately when the session files would get corrupted out of nowhere. My previous project corrupted after a crash which is fair i guess it wasnt that great anyway (at least thats what i tell myself). Today i created a new session, worked on it without closing it for 3-4 hours and as i was almost finished it corrupted after saving and pressing quit. This is the second project in a row that i lost.

Heres what it says:

Session “C:\Users\Suhai Ábris\Desktop\music\BOCremix (snapshot BOCremix)” did not load successfully:
Cannot initialize session/engine: Invalid or corrupt session state.

—ERROR: Could not set session state from XML
ERROR: Session: failed to load active playlists
ERROR: Session: cannot create Playlist from XML description.
ERROR: Playlist: cannot create region from XML
ERROR: Session: cannot create Region from XML description. Can not load state for region 'Pavement Special - The Key -stem - gross rise - 1.44'
ERROR: Session: cannot create Region from XML description. Can not load state for region 'Pavement Special - The Key -stem - gross rise - 1.44'
…

I went in and deleted these from the xml which helped but know it said another region is bad so i deleted that too and so on… i gave up after the like the 10th time.

So i was like this is not working, maybe actually solving the issue would work, so i changed the sources to ones that worked or changed the length to ones that were correct, i did this like 20 times gave up and started deleting again and than bam i get hit with this:

Session “C:\Users\Suhai Ábris\Desktop\music\BOCremix (snapshot BOCremix)” did not load successfully:
Cannot initialize session/engine: Audio/MIDI Engine is not running or sample-rate mismatches.

—ERROR: Unexpected exception during session setup: basic_string::substr: __pos (which is 1) > this->size() (which is 0)

Found nothing about this on the web so i have no idea whats happening, maybe i deleted something that i wasnt supposed to?

All in all my project is corrupt, the deadline is tomorrow and my sanity is leaving me.

Project files: BOCremix - Google Drive

I switched to making music on windows after one of these corruptions on linux, i thought all my problems would go away but now im here lol

As an opensource linux person I love Ardour so much, its what i started making music with many years ago but im so close to just give up on it. I understand this is an opensource project thats still very much in development and i should not expect it to be as good as software costing multiple hundred dollars, but it just causes so much pain for me. Throughout these years I definitely spent more time fixing stuff than actually making music which i actually dont mind (as i said i love ardour and opensource sketchy stuff in general), but corrupting my project after SAVING it and quitting with the quit button is pretty much where i draw the line and label it as “unusable”.
I don’t really expect my project to be fixed (if theres no easy solution please do not bother manually fixing 20+ lines), it doesnt really matter anymore im so broken right now, i guess ill start saving up for ableton.

I hope Ardour can become something amazing in the future, but for now bye.

Love you Paul :heart:

#2

I tried downloading your session from Google Drive but it’d only let me download everything, one file at a time! And unfortunately, I don’t have enough time here this morning (Christmas shopping to do…) So in the end, I just downloaded your .ardour session and on Windows 10, it gave me the same messages that you’re seeing.

They aren’t errors that I generally see here but AFAIK these are quite common messages, so it might be worthwhile for you to search the forum. Or maybe one of the other users will be able to help. Good luck with it, John

#3

you can click on the folder name top/left and in the context menu there’s an option to get the whole folder as zip

#4

Fixed, please find the session file at https://robin.linuxaudio.org/tmp/BOCremix.ardour

The actual cause are some rounding errors which are likely due to a bug when using Session > Properties > Misc: Default time domain: Musical (beats) time.

Region Pavement Special - The Key -stem - gross rise - 1.30 has length a1042116920@a18758104560 which is longer than its (first?) source's length of a1042112000
Region Pavement Special - The Key -stem - gross rise - 1.32 has length a911852305@a18627839945 which is longer than its (first?) source's length of a911846400
Region Pavement Special - The Key -stem - rave hits - 0.21 has length a4168467680@a25401599925 which is longer than its (first?) source's length of a4168467200
Region KICKHIGH 1.1 compound-1.69 has length a515197064@a65132334127 which is longer than its (first?) source's length of a515193600
Region KICKHIGH 1.1 compound-1.70 has length a515197064@a65132334127 which is longer than its (first?) source's length of a515193600
Region KICKHIGH 1.1 compound-1.74 has length a65132308@a65588233653 which is longer than its (first?) source's length of a65126400
Region KICKHIGH 1.1 compound-1.75 has length a65132308@a65523101345 which is longer than its (first?) source's length of a65126400
Region KICKHIGH 1.1 compound-1.76 has length a65132308@a65523101345 which is longer than its (first?) source's length of a65126400
Region Pavement Special - The Key -stem - rave hits - 0.30 has length a2214498455@a67607335185 which is longer than its (first?) source's length of a2214496000
Region Pavement Special - The Key -stem - MALE VOX - 29.27 has length a4168467680@a69821833640 which is longer than its (first?) source's length of a4168467200
Region Pavement Special - The Key -stem - gross rise - 1.44 has length a1042140540@a69821857260 which is longer than its (first?) source's length of a1042137600
Region Pavement Special - The Key -stem - MALE VOX - 29.18 has length a4168467680@a28658215300 which is longer than its (first?) source's length of a4168467200
Region Pavement Special - The Key -stem - MALE VOX - 29.21 has length a4168467680@a57316430600 which is longer than its (first?) source's length of a4168467200
Region Pavement Special - The Key -stem - MALE VOX - 29.25 has length a4168467680@a61484898280 which is longer than its (first?) source's length of a4168467200
Region Pavement Special - The Key -stem - MALE VOX - 29.26 has length a4168467680@a65653365960 which is longer than its (first?) source's length of a4168467200
Region Pavement Special - The Key -stem - rave hits - 0.19 has length a2605292300@a25010806080 which is longer than its (first?) source's length of a2605286400
#5

Robin - I created the zip file but it didn’t say where to find it. Then each further try just failed :frowning_face:

#6

As a side note, ANY time you upload your session to a file sharing service, ZIP the session first. Do NOT have your session sync’d to the service, especially if going between platforms, as those services sometimes have issues with filesystems you may be using, for instance case of filenames, mangling of the filenames, and can cause you no end of problems. that wouldn’t be an issue if opening each file directly, but cause issues in more complex use cases such as this.

Even uploading the session folder, and downloading as a zip file can cause issues.

These are things I run into quite often with students working with their sessions.

    Seablade
#7

FWIW I downloaded Robin’s fixed file (which does load now) but there’s a problem in the original file which shows all the audio files as having one or more % symbols in their name. And I do see the % symbols if I follow @Aviw’s original link - but to add to what @Seablade said, those symbols all got removed when downloaded via a zip file :cry:

#8

Thank you so much for being so quick, it works now, and sorry for being emotional it was 4 in the morning after an 8 hour session and i lost it.

Thanks, love you :heart:

3 Likes
#9

@Me_house - rounding errors seem to be quite common these days in Ardour but in other threads, Paul stated that no-one’s yet found a way to reproduce the problem. But about 5 posts ago, Robin gave a list of the affected clips for your session.

So can you see anything unusual about those clips? e.g. the way they were recorded? Or did they need to get sample-rate converted? Or did they all get processed by some particular plugin? Or anything else you can think of?

2 Likes