Hello all,
I just reopened a project made with an old version of Ardour in the latest one (9.8.0) and Ardour got stuck on the “Please wait while Ardour loads visual data” dialog for quite a long time before actually loading it. The delay was always more than 2 minutes, and went once as long as more than 3 minutes. I tried to reload the project in safe mode and to delete the file instant.xml in the project’s directory, but it hardly changed anything.
As it happens, the project included a MIDI drum track that was a bit of a patchwork: there were regions every few bars, often cut before the end to add a little drum fill in yet another region. And that seemed to be the issue: I made a copy of the project, combined the consecutive MIDI regions into one in this track, saved the project, reopened it, and it was almost instantaneous.
Is this expected? It is quite strange that the project was loading fine with previous versions, but caused the latest one to get stuck this way.