After recording a stereo track with a microphone; once the stop button is pressed, one channel of the recording will disappear from the timeline. It’s still there, but the only way you can see it is by increasing or decreasing the track display size. This is a very old bug and also occurs in Ardour 5 on Linux.
The Export Audio screen takes approximately four seconds to appear after clicking ‘Export to Audio File(s)’. This appears to be a new bug, as it doesn’t happen in version 5 on Linux. This one is really annoying, especially if you are making many short recordings.
I created a video of these problems, available to watch here (on my Google Drive):
Export plays initial silence before each export to flush out any reverb tails or synth sounds that may otherwise be present in case some plugins do not correctly reset.
Depending on your preference settings this dates back to Ardour 4.7. Although the defaults changed with each major version. The preference is export-preroll (duration in seconds) in Ardour’s config file.
Thank you for the reply. However, nothing I do makes any difference. I changed the pre-roll setting to 0. I completely wiped all traces of Ardour from my computer, uninstalled the Reaper plugins, deleted my session and did a clean install.
Before even setting anything up, I opened the dialog and it still took about four seconds to open. I tested this with Ardour 6.3 as well and it has the same problem. I’m using the latest version of Windows 10 (20H2) 64 bit. My PC specs are:
Fifine USB Microphone
Corsair HS60 Pro USB Headphones
My PC audio is set to 48Khz (mic and headphones), as is the Ardour session.
There are no other audio devices configured for the session.
Edited to add:
I just found something in the log (upper right corner of Ardour):
2020-12-20T00:33:06 [WARNING]: Ambiguous latency for port ‘Master/audio_out 1’ (0, 5136)
2020-12-20T00:33:06 [WARNING]: Ambiguous latency for port ‘Master/audio_out 2’ (0, 5136)
I tried everything I can think of including uninstalled my headphone drivers (etc.) to no avail.
I still have my version of Ardour 5, so I went back to that. The dialog box opens instantly on that version; so something must have changed with the newer versions. Please (developers) look into this issue, if possible.
It’s just a long shot - but did ver 5 have the same number of export formats available? (after opening the Export window, check the dropdown ‘Format’ box).
And it looks like you can remove formats so maybe try removing ones you think you won’t need and see if that speeds things up…
As for the 2nd issue, could you have a look in %localappdata%\Ardour6 (type that into a windows explorer’s location bar). This is where Ardour saves preference and settings.
There is a folder called “exports” with presets. Are there a lot of existing custom ones?
Perhaps try to delete (or move) that folder out of the way, and re-start Ardour.
Yes, I checked that folder, it’s empty. The issue (4 second export dialog opening) is a very strange one. I tried completely removing Ardour 6 as well as deleting all folders related to it on the PC (including the session folder). I also used Ccleaner to clean the registry afterwards. I’m a computer tech and I can’t think of anything I may have missed.
The interesting thing is that Ardour 5 doesn’t have the issue. The export dialog opens instantly. I set it up exactly the same way as I had Ardour 6 set up. However, starting Ardour 6 with a blank slate (no input/output settings or tracks) still results in the 4 second dialog box delay. This normally wouldn’t be an issue (say, for doing long recordings), but I’m doing very short voice-over clips (less than 20 seconds long).
In case you haven’t checked the video I posted, please do - it shows the problem exactly. Regarding the one track disappearing; I found a work around. Doing a session cleanup (‘Clean-up Unused Sources’) temporarily solves the issue; although it will come back in time.
Both issues should be fixed in Ardour since 6.5.62 (available from nightly.ardour.org).
The delay in opening the export dialog was because Ardour tested availability of external tools to encode audio for each format (now it only happens once, initially).