Hoping that someone has run into this before, but first the usual info…
Running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on AMD Athlon 2 X4 4Gb memory and M-Audio 24/96 card.
Everything has been working fine for the last two years. I believe that I’m using 2.8.xx (not sure I’m currently at my work PC). It’s the current build in the Ubuntu Studio dist.
Heres what I did.
New Session - Imported 24/48 Wave files recorded on the Alesis HD24 (8 Drum/Two Guitar/One Bass/Two Keys/One Vocal tracks). These are just short of two hours long.
Split the tracks for just the last song and removed the rest. Moved all 15 tracks to 0:0:0.
Then ran the Rhythm Ferret across the Kick, Snare Tom tracks. This split them into around 2000 regions each.
Then I started to edit out the regions that contained nothing useful.
Usually the first save is fine. It takes maybe 30-45 seconds and I’m back to work.
I try to save again after some more work and Ardour crashes. Just disappears from the desktop. When I restarted Ardour it recognizes the crash and is able to rebuild the session but takes 10-20 minutes. Then the cycle repeats itself.
Is it possible that so many regions are straining Ardours ability??
Am I doing something wrong. I hope not because this technique is making these drum tracks sound amazing and would like to complete this project this way.
You are probably running into problems with the undo history and/or a limit on the amount of locked memory. In the preferences dialog (windows -> preferences -> misc ) what settings do you have for the “Undo history depth” and “Saved history depth”. What is the output of ulimit -l ? In general, Ardour2 does not scale well to thousands of regions. Ardour3 will be much, much better behaved in this respect.
I did want to summarize this thread by saying there seems to be a “magic number” for region counts. After fighting it for a while the crashes stopped and I was able to finish the song. The result was fantastic, I’m still working on it but will post a link to the finished product.
It seems the solution is workflow related rather than configuration. Keeping the total region count as low as possible worked very well for me. In retrospect it was probably foolish of me to have split five tracks into 1700-2300 regions each, rather than doing one at a time and cleaning up the dreck before splitting the next.
I did try experimenting with the undo history by changing the values to 10 and then to 5. It didn’t seem to make any difference. As for the limits.conf (warning when I start Jackd) my system (Ubuntu) doesn’t seem to have one so I didn’t have the chance to experiment with that.
I am pretty certain that you have a file called /etc/security/limits.conf
I have this in mine to allow jack to runn in realtime mode, and being able to decrease the nicelevel of processes, but i never do that.