Hi all, long time Ardour user, zero time tech wizard here.
My laptop crashed during a midi recording, and it appears to be giving the same error I have seen from many others around invalid or corrupt session loading. I’m running 8.12 on Windows (though it was a previous version when the incident happened), and am not skilled enough to find the error via Command Prompt as suggested. Any help would be appreciated, so I don’t have to go back and re-record/compose.
Thanks!
Ardour complains about “Can not load state for region 'Take129_pizz strings-2'” when loading your session.
If you open that file (interchange\spider jazz\midifiles\Take129_pizz strings-2.mid) in Notepad you should see just a bunch of junk characters.
If you, OTOH, open say Take142_Opus-2.mid you’ll see that it starts with “MThd”, indicating that it’s a real MIDI file.
For some reason you have several corrupt MIDI files :
Take116_drums-2.mid
Take121_Theramin thing-3.mid
Take129_detuned piano-4.mid
Take129_pizz strings-2.mid
Take129_vib string-1.mid
Take142_sforzando-2.mid
Take143_sforzando-1.mid
Take144_sforzando-1.mid
Take144_sforzando-2.mid
Take145_sforzando-1.mid
Take145_sforzando-2.mid
Take146_bass-1.mid
Take146_Bassoon-1.mid
Take146_detuned piano-1.mid
Take146_drums-1.mid
Take146_Misc perc-1.mid
Take146_Opus-1.mid
Take146_Organ-1.mid
Take146_pizz strings-1.mid
Take146_sforzando-1.mid
Take146_Surge XT-1.mid
Take146_Theramin thing-1.mid
Take146_vib string-1.mid
Take146_xylo-1.mid
If you remove them you should be able to open the session again.
It would be nice if Ardour gave you a “Detected corrupt MIDI files. Ignore them and continue (yes/no)?” popup but it currently doesn’t. Not even in the latest 9.0 development version.
Could it be that the Window was shut down or crashed while ardour was running? Or perhaps d disk-full error?
I was able to load the session after deleting 5 files in the folder:
spider jazz\interchange\spider jazz\midifiles\
There are more files that that literally just contain NULLs; but those are not used in the session. We’ve only seen this when the system crashed or after a power-failure when files were not properly written to disk.
Thank you! Yeah, the system crashed unexpectedly, so that’s what corrupted the files for sure. Is there no way of restoring those midi files so I can avoid the rewriting work?
While Ardour has several safeguards for data to deal with the program itself crashing, if your system crashes (and thus cannot guarantee the persistence of data on disk), Ardour can’t do anything to fix that, unfortunately.
Fair enough, thank you all!