This DAW is incredibly unstable and unreliable

#1

I’m honestly just done with Ardour. I’m not some audio engineer or power user—I’m just a person trying to make music. I do simple stuff: recording real instruments, using VSTs, tracking vocals, and running basic plugins. But Ardour constantly fails on me in random ways. It freezes, crashes, and I lose hours of work. Even when I manage to recover a session, Ardour won’t let me continue working on it. The moment I try to make a new edit, it freezes again.

I’ve looked for answers in the help forums, and what do I find? That I’m supposed to download a special debug version of Ardour bundled with a separate tracking tool to figure out why the crashes happen. Long story short: that didn’t work either.

What really baffles me is how the moderators in the forums keep asking things like what graphics card I’m using, or whether my system has this or that. I get it—maybe the sample rate on my audio interface doesn’t match what Ardour expects, or some other config is off, and that could cause crashes. But seriously? The DAW can’t even handle that gracefully? So wait—my system has to adapt to the software and not the other way around? Shouldn’t professional software be able to either warn me or adjust accordingly, instead of just freezing and destroying my work?

I’ve been donating consistently for months, and I get it—those payments are donations, so there’s no refund policy. But the fact that I put in real money and get this level of instability is incredibly frustrating. They proudly talk about Ardour being open source and on par with professional DAWs. But the reality is, it’s unreliable and unstable. Even i updated Ardour and the same problems are still there.

To be fair, I really liked Ardour at first. It comes packed with great, high-quality free tools for music projects, and that’s awesome. But the instability is just absolute trash. I honestly don’t know how there hasn’t been some kind of mass exodus from this broken DAW to something better. It’s a real shame.

This post is just a rant—I know that. And yeah, my problems will probably go away once I switch to another DAW. But my time, my money, my investment? That’s gone forever. No one’s going to take responsibility for my rage and frustration.

#2

I will take responsibility for your rage and frustration. But that’s about where it ends.

There’s a DAW for eveyone out there. I hope you find yours.

14 Likes
#3

The reason there “hasn’t been some kind of mass exodus” from Ardour is that lots of people are running it without any problem, so it’s unfortunate that your particular combination of hardware and software makes it crash.

No program can cope gracefully with every kind of hardware or supporting software snafus. That’s why Windows “Blue Screens” and the MacOSX equivalence (is it still the “sad Mac”?) are still a thing.

You’ve only created one thread here previously and there you got an explanation for your problem and you were able to solve it.

What new problems are you seeing and where were you told to download a debug version in regards to that?

As for your investment, the Ardour license (GPLv2) clearly states:

SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.

4 Likes
#4

Hi. Which platform do you use? I use Ardour on linux and i really don’t have any problems with stability. One time i recorded over 6 hours and i never had a crash.
Sometimes i had a plugin crash, but that’s all. And i think that was the fault of the plugin and not of ardour.

1 Like
#5

He was using Windows 11 in November, according to the post I linked to.

Which may possibly explain some of his problems, since Windows is a bit more of an “if it works for you; excellent” platform, from what I gather.

#6

It appears you’ve only posted a couple of times and that was with reference to recording audio with a mic.

The easy answer is that a great many Ardour users (myself included) don’t face any stability issues, at the very least not to extent you are. Perhaps you could share some system info and troubleshooting steps already taken so that people here could try and assist?

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#7

I think it is also worth saying that a person’s experience of Ardour can depend a great deal on their workflow. If you do (or try to do) things the way us developers imagine, or the way that someone in the past was helpfully vocal about, chances are that things will go well. If your workflow (for whatever reason) is quite different, it will likely run into more issues. There are so many ways to use a DAW, it is hard to cover every possible approach to a task.

An example; it has been several months since I added clip editing to what will become version 9.0. I’ve been using it, refining it, crashing it, fixing it all that time. Yet somehow, in that time I had never done the “obvious thing” of just clicking on an empty slot on the cue page, and started drawing notes. That was totally broken (immediate crash; it is, of course, fixed now).

10 Likes
#8

Hey Gustavo,
Just to provide some perspective cause I was once in your shoes trying to switch DAWs and eventually Operating Systems as well.

First… Different Daws for different folks… But I can say I came from Cubase, Protools and have dabbled in other Daws. My guess is there is something you are doing that may be wrong. The question is whether you want to research it or not.

For me, Ardour is incredibly powerful and its development is really musical but as with every DAW there is a learning curve. You can either accept the learning curve or go elsewhere for another learning curve. If you are getting freezes and unable to get your work back, then you should look at finding out what you are doing wrong in the forums. Not asking is an opportunity missed on your part.

There are tons of people on these forums that run full studios, 40+ tracks, full vsts and live instrument recording without glitches. Many of these people choose to use Ardour over other Daws. I am one of them.

Diagnose, refine, then Diagnose again. because that is what most audio engineers and songwriters do again and again. Watch any successful music person and they will tell you how humbling it is. Most people here investigate by asking the forum even with basic questions and more times than not… there is a brilliant person who has a great answer and knows a lot more than the person who asks the question.

You came to Ardour for a reason and probably a good one (forced subscriptions, privacy issues, stability, forced updates)… but on the other hand you came to Windows 11 out of either force or convenience. I dont waste my time with Windows anymore and use free linux distro that is better for music and more stable. again another learning curve but once you have Linux plus Ardour it is really great and powerful.

If you have a decent computer and decent audio device, perhaps your problem is Windows. Mine was… In my opinion, Windows became more and more musician unfriendly after Windows 7. A new operating system (Ubuntu Studio) dedicated to music is my advice. Start there. It is almost plug and play with Ardour. Do a few searches and ask the forum on your plugins and workflow to see how it does in Linux and Ardour.

7 Likes
#9

Not to discourage people from posting responses, perhaps the information is useful to other users, but our boy @Gustavo_Gac was a member of this forum for 5 months. Over that time period, he spent a total of 9 minutes reading posts. I doubt he is coming back for any of the advice left for him. Our buddy was just confused and thought this forum was an airport. There is no need to announce your departure, @Gustavo_Gac, everyone here is free to leave whenever they want without saying a word.

9 Likes
#10

From a personal point of view, an application where I have reasonable access to the lead developers, can describe a specific issue, get feedback, and even help debug the issue and get a fast fix is preferable to most commercial applications where fixes will, at best, disappear into a ticketing system and usually take months to arrive, assuming they ever do.

Cheers,

Keith

8 Likes
#11

I’d like to chime in my experience. I run Ardour on 2 pc’s. They were bought in 2012 and 2013. One has an intel i5 with Linux Mint and the other, an i7 with Arch. Ardour is very reliable, but does crash or freeze occasionally on the i5. I’m not really able to set the buffer size below 512 on the i5. Recently I copied my Arch partition from the i7 to the i5. Amazingly I am able to set my buffer to 128. I really don’t know what I did differently to Arch. It was originally installed in 2013. Goes to show what a difference the software setup can make on the same hardware. Recently I bought a Windows 11 system for my son. So frustrating. I should add that the freezes and crashes that Ardour was having on Mint were because of a failing disk.

#12

Haha, ain’t that the truth! Person 1: “AV Linux is the most blazingly fast thing ever, I got my latency down to 64fpp!” Person 2: “AV Linux is the most brutally slow thing ever… I’ve never seen such horrible performance!”

Exact same OS on 2 different User machines… :crazy_face:

1 Like
#13

I adore Ardour. Looking forward to version 9!

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#14

Ardour is the software, along with the browser, that I use the most on my computer.

I have been using ardour for 6-8 years and works perfectly stable for me.

I’ve had issues with crashes in the past due to overusing Yabridge plugins. I’ve reduced the number of Yabridge plugins to a minimum, and everything works perfectly.

2 Likes
#15

Ardour 8.12 crashes unacceptably often for me when editing.
So I downgraded to 8.11. yawn
Looking forward to 9.0
Good night.

#16

What platform? Linux, Windows, Mac? Hardware?

#17

Linux, Plasma (KDE) Wayland, NUC7i5. I suspect an X-Wayland problem, but haven’t had the time to solidify that into a bug report.

#18

Here’s another post with crashes supposedly caused by X-Wayland

#19

Ardour is THE open-source solution for professional audio-makers. I am a composer and teacher of electroacoustic music in two Music Universities in Germany, have been using Ardour for the last 14 years (almost every day!) and have created various works and performed in concerts using Ardour. I can express my experience this way: I will NEVER change to any other DAW for my work!
If Ardour is not working for you (and I hear this from many people on funny Operating Systems like Windows) the solution for you would be even more frustrating, since the problem is Windows, not Ardour! First move from Windows to GNU/Linux! :smiley:

9 Likes
#20

I can confirm that Ardour does not work reliably on Wayland (latest Fedora).

1 Like