I talked about this before but not sure how I described it but I would like to see ardour with the ability to load entire session into ram, I know ardour can do this but only by a 1 minute I believe.
If you have enough RAM that already happens automatically on Linux and macOS, thanks to their kernels.
So regardless of the playback buffer inside ardour, that can happen? Cause I always see disk usage: plus I sometimes get a error that my drive is too slow or whatever everyone and then
I don’t think many programs if any, write things that go to disk storage to RAM. Ardour will save Wave files and then some to your disk for safe keeping, as RAM is not a safe place for certain things, and Ram will lose data irretrievably on error.
You must be using an old fashion disk drive. If you can afford it, I highly suggest you get some SSD’s, they will make everything a lot faster! (<: You can always use the disk drive for backups.
I was asking when using like a raspberry Pi with a micro sd for the OS which ardour may be on etc
You didn’t say that, and contrary to some peoples beliefs, people cannot read minds.
Please give thorough information when asking questions, so that people have the information needed to give you more specific answers.
Audio production is very resource intensive, and although it works in principle on Raspberries and other small computing devices, you cannot expect it to work well, or without significant problems.
You need to read up on the subject some more, as you would easily find out what all is necessary, and why what you are trying to do is destined to be problematic to begin with. It’s hard enough to get good results on full blown PC’s with 4 core 3800+MHz processors and over 8GiB of RAM… Even if you use an SSD with a Raspberry, you will be greatly limited in how far you can take it, with multiple tracks, plugins and what not.
It’s like trying to demolish a house with a hammer.
Hey I understand, I apologize for any frustration, I was asking in general as well as people have many different setups and configurations, and just buying stuff isn’t always ideal when some things can be resolved via software. I remember trying out pro tools that had this RAM disk feature. It was cool. Based on your ram, the entire project can be loaded into ram. In general I would like to have this but I know it’s not a important feature.
Well it depends, because I mix with higher buffer settings anyway and you can still get good results I believe. I don’t have a Pi yet but I’ve seen others share there results and it’s good enough.
I feel like the thing about making a ram disk vs having a full RAM disk type feature in ardour is. One will let you loose all your progress and the other will fill ram but save the files from the original file location.
Every time i made a RAM disk I have to manually copy over the session and Copy it back over when I’m done.
You can use vmtouch to preload your files into RAM
Or cat /path/to/your/files* > /dev/null
Thanks, I’ll look into this, it would be nice if there was a RAM disk that linked to a folder but they constantly saves any changes made to your storage device in case of any power cuts
Audio is very low bandwidth. At 48kHz, 4 bytes/sample: 187 kByte / channel.
a 15+ year old USB2 disk can do 40 MB/sec (here 214 channels) and most modern spinning HDDs using SATA or USB3 are in the 100-200 MB/sec range.
The current record (established 2015) for using a HDD is recording 1020 tracks in Ardour (using 16 bit samples). Seeking is the bottleneck there.
(well really, having access to a MADI interface with that many channels is the bottleneck 
)
Not really needed, but yes with a SSD, not even the sky’s the limit!
Now that’s a different issue, the RPI’s Micro SD is notoriously slow.
Long time ago I ran a Sinclair Z81 off a cassette tape: That was blazing fast for the time!!! (<: to load a 480x260 image took a meal and a walk in the park, complete with a squirrel feeding session! I have also recorded and mixed more than 24 tracks on a 486 with like 32MiB of ram with great results, but that doesn’t say anything about getting Xruns on an i5 4 core processor system with 32GiB of RAM in 2021 given the OS and software available now.
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The current record (established 2015) for using a HDD is recording 1020 tracks in Ardour (using 16 bit samples).
Well, sure there are ways to do that sort of thing, but really, there’s way more to it than just firing up a DAW, tweaking a few settings and recording.
Most of the pitfalls are not in drive or other hardware performance, but since “Slow drive” is the warning he got, an SSD should get rid of that error.
They didn’t even say what exactly they wer recording (live audio, MIDI, altering prerecorded stuff…), how many tracks, nor if it will involve plugins… but as stated, given the many areas it can go south, I cannot see that being the only problem they will have.
When I read “It should be good enough”, it’s most often based on lowering ones expectations due to circumstances, and not really the whole truth. Lets be honest: Who wants good enough when great is also an option? I would rather see people get great results, and the joy that comes with it.
xruns are a function of latency (scheduling performance) which is not particularly related to processor speed, RAM size of any other obvious feature of a computer.
Actually, that’s pretty much all that was involved. The one detail that Robin did not mention is that this was done on an NTFS filesystem, somewhat against most of our expectations.
I understand what your saying. I know different people have different needs and expectations when it comes to audio. The Pi 4 meets mine for what I want to do with it.
Hi all, I’m afraid that I’ll have to echo Mrskytown11 on this comment. I have in the past, I believe, asked about getting the “failed to read data from disk quickly enough” (Tuning advice for "disk.. not able to keep up") message, and I’m running on a Linux laptop with 16G ram and an SSD. I am not doing anything which, I believe, anyone would consider outrageous. Maybe moving a loop range point during playback is considered excessive. I would think that if you need to write to disk that marker move, it could be a deferred write, but I am definitely not the smartest person in the room, and try to take "the group of 4"s (if I have to tell you who they are… ) word as gospel 
Ya and I have a lot of ram for my computer. I have 16GB of ram and for the Pi 4 I would have the 8GB ram model. I am concerned about this especially if I mix larger sessions like an short film or something. It would be nice to be able to. I’m sure my ram would fill up depending on how large the session but it will be better I think
If you want to use a Pi 4, but are worried about storage speed what seems to be to be the most straight forward solution is connect a USB SSD enclosure. You could put the audio interface on a USB 2 port and the SSD on a USB3 port.
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The message means precisely what it says. Ardour did not get the data it needs to keep playing. This can be caused by drive issues or by filesystem issues (once termed “fragmentation”), or by general OS I/O scheduling problems.
Ardour does not write to disk when you move a loop range, and writing to disk is mostly unrelated to this message.