Can someone explain to me the difference between opening a project from the Ardour recent projects list you get when you just start Ardour.exe and opening Ardour by double clicking on an Ardour project file (*.ardour)?
My problem is that when I try to open projects by opening the .ardour project files, which I find to be the easiest way to do it, the program for some reason has recently started crashing instead of opening up. The dialog box on the screen goes through the steps up to “indexing plugins”, and then crashes to desktop. Every time, and regardless of project as far as I can see.
Opening from the recent projects list goes through the same steps, but there it doesn’t crash after “indexing plugins”, which at least gives me a way to open them, but this seems very odd to me. I have tried re-indexing/scanning the plugins to see if that would help, but it did not.
It all happened over night about a month ago. Does anyone have an idea of what the problem with opening projects from the .ardour files might be?
I’m in the latest Ardour 8.12 on Windows, by the way. AMD Ryzen 9 7900X with 64GB RAM, working off of SSDs.
I have had the exact same issue, but on macOS. But for me it’s been that way for years, not just several weeks as you mentioned. So I guess it’s an Ardour issue.
I’m glad someone else finally brought it up! As it would be very nice to right-click (or double-click) a .ardour file to reliably open it as well.
I suggest filling-out a proper bug-report over here to alert the devs, or at least catalogue this issue for them for later.
Have either of you ever installed Mixbus in the past? Mixbus sessions use the same .ardour extension so I wonder if that’s confusing something somehow? I don’t see why it should but you never know…
I installed Mixbus 32C and Ardour in my dual-boot system (Win and Linux) and, as a test, used the archive function to load a project into both Ardour and Mixbus. Aside from the plugins becoming placeholders and my RME interface being missing in Linux (because it doesn’t support Linux), no other issues arose. Which really surprised me.
Looking at my list of programs I do not see anything called “Mixbus”, and cannot recall ever using that, but I apparently do have something called “MixBox” from IK Multimedia installed, is that what you referred to? I’m positive Ardour worked properly for a good while after I installed that one, though.
No, I definitely meant Mixbus. I just tried it here (Windows 10) and if I double-click a .ardour file, it sometimes launches directly into Ardour’s Audio/MIDI Setup dialog (that only happens if the selected session happens to already exist in Ardour’s Recent Sessions list).
If there’s no entry in Recent Sessions, it opens the usual opening dialog. But very occasionally, Windows will ask if I want to launch Ardour or Mixbus or some other app. So I guess Windows itself must be maintaining a list of files that it knows as Ardour files and it displays it’s own popup dialog if the clicked file isn’t in its list??
What’s strange is that it never seems to launch Mixbus directly. Mixbus will only ever get launched if I see it in Windows’ own popup dialog.
Having said all that… when Ardour gets launched it doesn’t give me any errors although there’s definitely a difference while opening sessions and the Indexing Plugins stage does seem to take a bit longer.
[Edit…] No, I was getting mixed up here… I had 2 x copies of Ardour installed on my system and it was simply opening different copies!
