I’ve been working in a session for a couple weeks now, recording multiple songs one after the other. I’m using all the same instrumentation so I thought it would be simpler this way having each track already configured the way I want it.
I’m getting to the 25 minute mark now and I’ve been having Ardour disconnect from Jack fairly regularly when starting to play or record. It’s not that big a deal to quit Ardour and restart but I wonder if this is just pushing the system too hard and I need to break things up.
I’ve got about 6 tracks playing at once, and 5 of them are generally full of chopped up audio clips. I feel like the quantity of individual clips must be the culprit. Even saving takes about a second or two to process, where I’m used to instant saving.
I’m basically just wondering if anyone else has ever created a session this big and suffered similarly with performance. I really like having all the songs in the same session but I realize that maybe it’s not efficient. Any suggestions for alternative workflows are also very welcome. I don’t believe there’s any way to hide or lock chunks of the timeline, but something like that is what would be ideal.
Short version, if you only have 6 tracks something is wrong with your setup. Are you by chance using the same drive that the OS loads off of for recording/playback?
Long version, if you mean a lot of splits and overlapping regions by “chopped up audio clips”, you very well may have run into the same issue that I’m having: http://tracker.ardour.org/view.php?id=2982
Could you check if that is the same problem? I’m currently having it with 8 tracks and 40 Minutes of audio. If you consolidate the regions into one long, performance would be smooth again then. I think the track count does not matter, but the number of overlapping regions does.
I don’t think I’ve had the GUI slow down on me yet. Everything is still running decently, other than the bit of extra time it takes to save or start playback, and the Jack disconnects.
I am running my OS from the same drive as recording/playback. Would running my OS from a separate drive significantly improve all around performance? I should probably do that anyways. I’m not getting any disk error messages but would this still be a cause of my issue?
Also, what is a reasonable latency to use with Jack? I’m currently running at 1024.
Unless you were also getting the error about disk not being able to keep up, it is not the same(It may be with the performance, but not the error). If you were, you should put that in that bug report as it isn’t currently how I am reading it.
yeah sorry, I ignored the disconnection from jack, I’m not having that. It still could be the same problem. But he didn’t say anything about the disk not being able to keeping up either
My response was based off misreading your original post, I thought I read you were getting that message, which would indicate a problem with keeping up with reading the audio from disk and in that case yes it would make a difference.
However your problem is a bit different than what I thought, so it is unlikely to make as much difference.
Seablade
PS I take it that the Jack>Reconnect option in Ardour doesn’t work for you when it disconnects?
No, the reconnect option gives me a [ERROR]: could not reconnect ardour:master/out 2 and system:playback_2 (err = -1) message for every track and isn’t able to reconnect.
