I have a session that I’ve been working on for a long time.I’ve manually made a backup of the session folder every few days.And now after opening ardour suddenly it crashes and I’m no longer able to open that session file.I even tried the .bak file located in the projects root directory.No luck.Here’s what I get:
ERROR: Session: cannot create Source from XML description.
ERROR: Session: XMLNode describing a MidiRegion references an unknown source id =232
ERROR: Session: cannot create Region from XML description. Can not load state for region 'MIDI-2.2'
ERROR: Session: XMLNode describing a MidiRegion references an unknown source id =232
ERROR: Session: cannot create Region from XML description. Can not load state for region 'MIDI-2.4'
ERROR: Session: XMLNode describing a MidiRegion references an unknown source id =232
ERROR: Session: cannot create Region from XML description. Can not load state for region 'MIDI-2.6'
ERROR: Session: XMLNode describing a MidiRegion references an unknown source id =232
ERROR: Session: cannot create Region from XML description. Can not load state for region 'MIDI-2.7'
ERROR: Session: XMLNode describing a MidiRegion references an unknown source id =232
ERROR: Session: cannot create Region from XML description. Can not load state for region 'MIDI-2.8'
ERROR: Session: XMLNode describing a MidiRegion references an unknown source id =232
ERROR: Session: cannot create Region from XML description. Can not load state for region 'MIDI-2.9'
ERROR: Session: XMLNode describing a MidiRegion references an unknown source id =232
ERROR: Playlist: cannot create region from XML
ERROR: Session: cannot create Playlist from XML description.
ERROR: Could not set session state from XML
And here’s the full contents of my session file.
It’s very important to me to recover that session because the manual backup is too old and there has been a lot of progress since then.
Finally I managed to solved it myself.
In the file session file there was a line describing the MIDI region 232 that was pointing to the file MIDI-2.mid:
I checked that file(interchange/PROJECT_NAME/midifiles/MIDI-2.mid) and that was(had been gotten) empty after the crash(Many regions were dependent on that,so I couldn’t just comment that out).
Fortunately that region was intact since my last manual backup, so I just copy-pasted the old one into the project folder and Voila !
TIP FOR FUTURE READERS that might face this problem:
There’s no self-recovering functionality here.Always version-control your serious ardour projects with something like Git otherwise this piece of sh*t can easily wipe them out and waste your precious time.You have to desperately grind the internet to find a solution and no luck.Then you have to e-mail the file to a developer to correct that for you in 2020! Ridiculous.
Cuz there’s no way you could even email the developer of most other major DAWs… and if you could I’m guessing you’d never get an answer let alone any help at all unless you were ready to pull out your wallet…
And I’m guessing no other major DAW would wipe out a MIDI file and leave you in an inferno where you don’t know what to do to recover the session you’ve been working on for a long time.They just work.
Not all of the people who want to use a DAW are technical to get a backtrace or other debugging information or search through 4000 lines of XML markup to find out what’s wrong and sometimes you’re in a hurry and got no time,so you cannot wait for a dev to reply.I mean those kinds of problems shouldn’t happen at all.Even the .bak file was unusable for me.
The less time tools take up from you,the more productive you can be.
You obviously haven’t used DAWs enough then. I have had similar happen on just about all of them. It happens. I can’t say for certain it happens more or less on Ardour, but it certainly happens on all DAWs on occasion.
The difference the Glen hinted at is that in Ardour you CAN go through that XML and find the issue. In other DAWs with proprietary and/or encrypted file formats that isn’t an option whether you are technically inclined or not.
Not going to argue whether it should or shouldn’t as it obviously shouldn’t. But unrealistic expectations help noone either.
Well done! And in fixing it you inadvertently proved to yourself and others that Ardour has a way to recover things via its transparent and open file structures even when manual backups fail. As @seablade mentioned, all DAWs have problems now and again (not sure whether in your case if it is a bug or user error). I’ve been seriously burned by some of the major Windows DAWs precisely because their file formats are proprietary. The worst was a fully edited classical album (using source-destination) and on re-opening all the 100+ precisely aligned edits had been screwed up with some of the source materials behind the regions using the wrong files. It was a complete and utter mess. Strangely or not, I’ve never had such issues with Ardour but I promise not to be upset if I do as I know I have a fabulously responsive group of folks to ask for help
If the implication is that this is somehow better, then perhaps less bad might be a better description… (it feels a little like saying if your open source car falls to bits while you’re driving it, then at least you can climb out of the wreckage more easily… )
I should clarify. As @seablade mentioned, all DAWs can suffer from issues that can result in project loss without proper isolated backup strategies. Having open file formats means that there is another option (or last resort) for recovering all that hard work in the studio. Plus, I simply offered a real-world example of a heavily-edited classical album in one of the big “classical” DAWs that was unrecoverable in its current state because the file format is/was proprietary. So, yes, Ardour, in that regard at least, is better
)