Group split extremely slow in big session

I have a big session for the recording of a whole album with about 50 tracks. The individual tracks are cut from multiple takes, so there are many .wav files (32-bit float) per track and song on the SSD I’m working with. I recorded every instrument with three or four microphones. Therefore, I’m editing everything with group splitting. However, every press of ‘s’ for a group split means waiting about 10 seconds for the split to finish.

Splitting single regions is almost instant though. This means the additional time does not come from the splitting action itself.

I’m using Ardour 5.12.0.

I hope someone can help me with this issue. Let me know, if you need additional information.

Kind regards
Marius

This is a known problem. It has been partially or mostly alleviated in the development version, but there is essentially nothing you can do about it in 5.12.

Hi Paul, thanks for your fast reply. I suppose the next release is not coming in the next two weeks? :smiley:

Out of curiosity: what is the reason for this group split behaviour? From my naive standpoint I imagine cutting N regions at time point X is not a complicated operation, but I suppose there are some border cases you have to catch that are making it more complicated?

The thing I fixed in the development version was just a GUI problem. Each split caused multiple complete recomputations of the region list treeview. It had nothing to do with the split itself.

Any chance of backporting these fixes to Ardour 5.x and releasing it while we a waiting for version 6 ?

I have also seen this when copying a couple hundred clips to a new location with ctrl + left mouse click. It makes you wait before you can start the mouse drag and after it finished.

Sadly, there is absolutely zero chance of us back-porting any work from 6.0 into a new 5.x release.

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My “workaround” is now that I export the tracks where the editing is complete as wav files (stem export). Then I reimport those wav files and delete the old stuff. I make snapshots of the session to make sure I can go back and do some more edits if needed. Not very satisfying but good enough for now.