because of some crashes of some sessions i downloaded the Ardour9 GDB to get some more info.
I started the GDB and loaded the session. It started loading but now it’s stuck for several hours in the “loaded track/bus XYZ” state [ New Thread 6900.0x3268]. Ardour CPU says 99% but taskmanager says between 0.6 to 2.5% CPU.
The varying measures in the Taskmanager point to Ardour kind of working but i doubt that “several hours” is healthy. But since Ardour didn’t crash yet, i can’t get the backtrace, can i?
When i read it right the backtrace info on Debugging Ardour | Ardour DAW is meant for Ardour crashing but what to do when it freezes in a state like mentioned?
you press Ctrl+C in the gdb console to interrupt program execution and return you to the gdb prompt. Then you can get a backtrace of the current state.
No, GDB CMD doesn’t react to the “thread apply all bt” input. In fact it doesn’t even show the typing.
The session issues i wanted to investigate are on my 8.12 version and i firstly wanted to gather information. “Session crashes but i don’t know why” won’t really help. That’s why i thought gathering the debugging info. So this is not really Ardour9 testing. This Topic was just to know if the GDB behaviour i described is expected so “That is odd” is a good answer for me.
I want to put my issue into a topic but atm it’s too unspecific i fear. I only know “safe mode” works. I assume something with the VSTs is the cause but i can’t hunt it down to a specific VST atm.
I guess when the GDB won’t work there’s not much more that can be done?!
No sorry, all good. That’s why i’m asking. I just start the GDB and load the session. If there is user error i want to know what i’m doing wrong!
Only in the way that it might be SOME VST conflict. deleting some VSTs usually helps, BUT:
it’s not always the same plugin deleted that lets the session load
getting the session loaded after some random plugs deleted, then saving, then trying to load again leads to crash again.
making a “safe as” of the session to get a “fresh” session layout doesn’t help either
rescanning all VSTs sometimes helps sometimes not (more not)
What also and foremost has to be said when talking about the issue i wanted to investigate: I have two machines. One my workstation at the studio - one my laptop. Both have Ardour 8.12, both have (almost) same VSTs installed. If i missed one VST then i figured i get notified from Ardour with the placeholder plugin.
Only difference is:
Workstation has Windows 10
Laptop has Windows 11
I rsync the sessions to an external harddrive and from there to either the laptop or the workstation depending on where i worked last.
So the main symptom of the issue is that i run in trouble if i try to open a session that i started on the other system. That is most propably a system misconfiguration on my laptop. But to get that fixed i hoped to get Ardour tell me what caused the crashes.
With my (limited) system admin skills i’m getting stucked here. So every advise is deeply appreciated. If that includes “Boy, you did EVERYTHING wrong!!” then i’m totally fine with that.
Is the external drive NTFS? Ardour needs to preserve case of the filenames. There have been reports of problems copying projects through USB drives which were formatted as FAT32. I didn’t remember how well exFAT is known to work, but NTFS does not have problems.
