I recently installed a plugin called Clipper2 from InitialAudio, and when I tried to add it to the master track of my project, ardour crashed without throwing an error, and when I tried to relaunch I got this:
Session "/home/ly/projects/ardour/faultline (snapshot faultline)" did not load successfully:
Cannot initialize session/engine: Audio/MIDI Engine is not running or sample-rate mismatches.
---ERROR: Unexpected exception during session setup: negative distance in timecnt constructor
Is there any way I can launch or modify the project without the audio/midi engine so I can remove the plugin that started this?
If there is an error starting the audio engine Ardour will open the audio/midi setup window to allow you to select the proper device.
This is the actual source of your problem:
Unexpected exception during session setup: negative distance in timecnt constructor
I don’t know how you track down what value is causing the negative distance error.
Which version of Ardour are you using? There were some fixes to correct negative time errors in the 9.x versions (9.2 is the current latest version).
If the plugin is actually the problem you can open the project in safe mode, which will disable all of the plugins.
Oh, well I already tried safe mode, so I guess it’s not the plugin, though that is the point at which this negative value would seem to have appeared.
I looked through the project file and couldn’t find anything that would indicate a negative value, but I’m also not exactly sure what I was looking for because it’s not like you can just search for a “-” and find it
I did some digging and sure enough if I manage to install ardour 9x this issue might resolve itself but that means building it from source because I can’t actually afford it, so that’s where my energy is focused now.
If anyone finds the negative value or what’s causing it I would still really appreciate it
I was able to open the session in 9.12 so that would likely work for you, but I don’t have the plugins you were using, so the session file was changed to have place-holders for all the plugins. I could give you the corrected project file, but it would be missing all of your plugins, which probably would not be useful to you.
I also noticed that the project had a lot of Calf plugins, which are not compatible with Ardour 9.x, so even when you get newer Ardour you will have problems because of those plugins.
I compared the fixed project file with the original, and there are over 400 changes, so not really practical to just give you the change list for you to retrofit to your existing project file. I’m willing to upload the new project file if you want to try that, but seems like an extreme amount of effort.
Opening it in 8.12 complained about “ERROR: Correcting length of region ArmelSaysDamnGurl.6 to match it's (first) source's length of a130259640” so I edited faultline.ardour and removed that line.
After that it opens in 8.4.
cp faultline.ardour faultline.ardour.err sed -i '/ArmelSaysDamnGurl.6/d' faultline.ardour
should do it for you.
You will have to recreate that region manually if it’s vital for your session.