Opening session or restore a snapshot from within Ardour crashes Ardour

#1

When I have Ardour open with a session, and I try to load a new session from WITHIN Ardour, via Ardour menu Session > Open / Recent, Ardour closes ( crashes ).
Same behaviour when I try to load a snapshot via the list editor > snapshots, Ardour closes.

Does someone else experience this behaviour ?

Sidenote :
After Ardour has closed and opening Debian13 system monitor > applications tab ; I notice there’s still an Ardour instance consuming some memory.

Linux Debian 13 / Ardour 9.4.1.

#2

Does this happen with all sessions?
Best guess is that it is caused by some plugin that does not close properly.

Please see if this applies to the current official released 9.2[.0].

#3

Hello Robin,

Yes, over here Ardour closes as soon as I :

  • try to load a session from harddisk, from within Ardour’s menu via session > open / recent .
  • try to restore to a snapshot from the list editor.

This crash while opening from within Ardour, applies to Debians ‘integrated’ Ardour 8.12 and also to my self compiled version’s up to 9.2.
Even with test session I did create without any plugins, same crash behaviour.
Opening sessions / snapshots in the pre ardour recent sessions dialog box works without any issues.

Just to be sure, today I downloaded the demo Ardour-9.2.0-x86_64.run, and to my surprise in the demo version all session loading from within Ardour functions 100% fine.

I don’t have any clue what could be causing this.
Only difference is the location of installation usr/bin/ardour9 compared to demo at opt/ardour-demo/bin/ardour9.

Maybe I have to do some further investigation…
Any idea is welcome.
Kind Regards, Luc.

#4

/opt/Ardour.. comes with its own handpicked library stack.

Ardour depends on a significant number of free/libre software libraries. Most GNU/Linux distros just use dependencies of whatever library they have around when compiling Ardour, some also add custom optimizations… Ubuntu packages of Ardour have historically been broken many times in subtle ways.

Though this is the first time I hear that debian’s version has issues. Notably because I do use debian’s user-land when developing Ardour.

In your self-compiled version, run ardour from the source-tree inside a debugger:

./gtk2_ardour/ardbg

run
and when ardour crashes, get a backtrace:
thread apply all bt

see also Debugging Ardour | Ardour DAW