I had just written a much longer description of what’s wrong when I accidentally hit the backspace on my browser and lost it all
So here’s a quickly retyped summary:
I’m using Ardour 2.8 on a mac. I’ve googled all this, and seen some things about most of this having been fixed in the newest version of Ardour. Which I can’t get on OSX without building from source, which is a bit beyond my abilities/knowledge. Any workarounds, or alternate way of doing thing would be amazing to know about… here’s what’s happening.
unfreezing tracks and saving: crashes ardour. I’ve found out it’s really only 2 tracks that do this, and haven’t seen what’s different about those 2.
messing around with EQ settings during playback: After I play/stop/play/stop a few times, I lose my audio. The only way to restore it is to close and relaunch Ardour. Once or twice, Ardour also crashed during this.
exporting individual tracks: Doesn’t seem to work. I do the settings, correct the file name to reflect the track (no special characters), and hit export… nothing happens. The export button goes inactive, and I can’t close the export window. I get a 6kb file with the correct name.
Recording individual tracks to a new track doesn’t work. The recording stops halfway through. Apparent buffer type error/fail. Still happens on all buffer settings.
So I can’t finish this in Ardour, and I can’t export tracks to finish it in another program without losing all the edits and volume fader automation that took me the last 2 weeks to get right. Help me, please.
Thanks!
Mike S.
PS I keep losing audio in general at random times, which I think may be Jack and my interface having an argument about which sample rate to use. Not a huge deal, and I’ve figured out how to fix it when it happens.
1. unfreezing tracks and saving: crashes ardour. I've found out it's really only 2 tracks that do this, and haven't seen what's different about those 2.
Check what plugins you might have on those tracks? If you can recreate this with those 2 tracks readily but not other tracks, post a bug report in Mantis and paste the session file there as well.
2. messing around with EQ settings during playback: After I play/stop/play/stop a few times, I lose my audio. The only way to restore it is to close and relaunch Ardour. Once or twice, Ardour also crashed during this.
We need to determine if this is a problem with Ardour or Jack. To do so you would need to launch a different Jack program and route to the same audio outputs and see if you get audio.
3. exporting individual tracks: Doesn't seem to work. I do the settings, correct the file name to reflect the track (no special characters), and hit export... nothing happens. The export button goes inactive, and I can't close the export window. I get a 6kb file with the correct name.
This is a problem with Jack IIRC, what version of JackOSX did you install? I thought it was fixed some time ago.
4. Recording individual tracks to a new track doesn't work. The recording stops halfway through. Apparent buffer type error/fail. Still happens on all buffer settings.
What are your DSP percentages like when this happens?
Chances are you get a ‘disk can’t keep up’ error? In which case the buffer you need to adjust can’t be gotten to from the UI in Ardour2, you would need to edit the conf file manually, it is just a text file and is rather easy to do though. The file is ~/.ardour2/ardour.rc and the value you want to edit is track-buffer-seconds. Let me know if you need more help to edit this.
In as far as the sample rate battles, you can tell Jack to use HOG mode in Jackpilot IIRC, you would need to start Jack with the correct interface, sample rate, etc. and hog mode enabled in Jackpilot before starting Ardour. It can happen where sometimes a different program will try to force your sample rate to a different rate, causing issues, hog mode will prevent other programs from accessing your device while Jack is running IIRC.
