I am new to Ardour, so this question is based on only modest experimentation so far.
I am using Ardour 5.12 with Windows 10.
I have made some basic recordings with 4 tracks or so and was experimenting with some VST
plug ins. Twice Ardour crashed–and when I say crashed, I mean vanished without warning
in about .001 seconds. Since no record of what caused the crash occurred, I don’t know if this
was the plug-in itself (one may have been a MuBase Reverb plugin–pretty standard thing) or if
the location of the plugins in a folder within C:/Program Files was bothering Ardour. The plugins were simple reverb or compression items, except one, which was an older rotary speaker plugin.
It loaded, looked good, then crashed.
Thus the question: what are safe, stable
a) folders for pluigins (not sure this mattered–just a suspicion–as Ardour doesn’t remember
this folder and has to re-find the VST plug ins at each boot.)
b) what are the most stable kind of plugins for Ardour in Windows? Are VSTs categorically problematic?
or are just some?
I use Ardour with windows 7 with a lot of different plugins, I never got it to crash. I crashed it on linux when I didn’t know what I was doing with the os. I got some plugins to make Ardour freeze for some seconds and then I saw in the log that some plugin was disabled or something.
I tried some other music software on windows 10 that never ever crashed on windows 7, Renoise crashed like all the time on windows 10. windows 10 really isn’t a good system I promise you
I am not a windows user but I am pretty sure that the plugin bit depth needs to be the same as the OS and Ardour. I think Win 10 is a 64 bit OS and so it is best to use 64bit Ardour and 64 bit plugins. If win 10 can run 32 bit applications, then at least Ardour and the plugin should be the same either 32 or 64 bit. Of course Ardour does come with a set of plugins that should not crash and allow sharing a project with someone who runs mac or linux. If your VSTs are 32bit then the Ardour you are using should be 32 bit as well.
I think Johann_cat was talking about plugins crashing the daw, but yes 32-bit plugs for the 32-bit version.
I have tried jbridge with Ardour and it works good.
It doesn’t matter what folder you put your plugins in. some need write permissions
The old rotary speaker plugin (mentioned above) was almost certainly 32 bit and that may have caused its crash w/in Win 10/ 64 Bit Ardour. I’ll have to check the MuBase reverb plugin. How are “write permissions” given to plugins (Martin_Bangens)?