I’ve got a hard drive full of Ardour projects that I never quite finished and hope to come back to some-day. These are, for the most part, all Ardour 5.x series projects and used a bunch of plugins from various sources, including KXstudio that were installed on top of Ubuntu 18.04. For various reasons, I don’t have much time to work on them, but want to return to working on them eventually.
i would like to upgrade to a newer version of Ubuntu on this computer but am afraid that the plugins aren’t going to properly function if I do so/ that’s what happened on another computer when I tried it. I think there was a library version incompatibility so, while I could still open Ardour and load.projects, the plugins were all disabled. On that laptop, it’s not much of a problem, but on my main workstation, re-creating the mixes after losing the plugin settings or, even worse, the audio routing settings would be very time-consuming. So I would like to avoid that.
What I’m considering now is, instead of upgrading, instead doing a dual-booting install of Ubuntu 22.04 so that I can use a newer OS for everything besides Audio work and boot back into the old system when I have a chance to work on my old audio projects. I suspect that there’s likely going to be a few years before I can return to them.
Does anybody have other suggestions for preserving an archival state of your DAW setup so that you can return to old projects much later?
Alternatively, does anybody have suggestions for how to upgrade Ubuntu without breaking existing LADSPA and LV2 plugins?
@pseudonomous keeping “out-of-bulid” sofaware (such as plugins) running across updates to the host (Ardour) or OS is a wicked-hard problem. The only “bullet-proof” mechanism I can think of is to bounce any tracks containing “problematic” plugins (anything not shipped with Ardour in the older version) to audio, and then re-import the bounced audio to the project, afterward disabling the “source” tracks.
KXStudio plugins are being built on Ubuntu 18.04 and should still work on 22.04. So when on 22.04 it should be a matter of adding the KXStudio repositories and installing the plugins you need. Most LADSPA plugins should be available from the default repositories.
Another option would be to backup ~/.lv2, /usr/lib/lv2 and /usr/lib/ladspa and copy plugins over to your new install whenever you can’t find a packaged or otherwise released version of a plugin. For LV2 plugins, copy them over to your home directory (~/.lv2), for LADSPA I’m not sure if you could do the same, according to LADSPA SDK Documentation you could but then you might need to set LADSPA_PATH (unless Ardour already looks there, not sure).
Or you could create a list of all your installed packages on 20.04 and do something smart with that on the new install. There should be various examples on the net on how to do this. Last time I upgraded (from Ubuntu 20.04 to Debian 12) I just did a dpkg -l | grep "^ii" > packages.txt on the old machine and used that on the new machine to install the plugins I needed by crudely parsing that txt file with awk '/kxstudio/ {print $2}' packages.txt | tr '\n' ' ' for example to get a list of KXStudio packages I could feed to apt.