Does anyone else use multiple copies of Ardour simultaneously?
I do, and it seems to work without a hitch on macOS by simply duplicating the application (.app) file and renaming it. But are there any major pitfalls with doing this on GNU/Linux or Windows (-or on mac even that I’m not aware of)?
I think somewhere @x42 or @paul mentioned that Ardour was (and is) designed with the idea that only a single instance of Ardour would be open and running at a time, and I’m curious what that implies about the structure of Ardour itself (-input/output routing, certain files aren’t meant to be shared, etc.).
Ultimately, if someone wants to duplicate Ardour on their machine, what is recommended and what is not recommended to do in that process?
1 not quite right. The design idea is that a given instance of Ardour works on only a single session. Multiple instances of Ardour? no problem …
2. … on Linux. On macOS some of the operating system’s ideas about what an application may get in the way. I don’t know anything in particular about how that might break or how one might fix it when it does.
3. I’ve run multiple instances of Ardour on both macOS and Linux with no issues, sometimes deliberately and sometimes by accident.
I wonder if the file locking thing is a hangover from when Mixbus needed Jack? 'cos on Windows you can run Ardour and Mixbus simultaneously as long as neither of them uses Jack!
It’s unrelated to JACK. Keep in mind that Ardour and Mixbus are entirely separate installs and don’t access the same files on disk either.
Running multiple instances of Ardour on windows was possible in the past, and caused corrupt preferences and plugin meta-data, amongst other issues. We explicitly prevent multiple instances from running since Ardour 7.0-ish.
The underlying issues is that, as opposed to POSIX systens, one cannot move files that have an open file-handle, and r/w file-handles are exclusive per application.
using several simultaneous instances of ardour on daily basis - one or more for separate songs/compositions plus one “big-picture” (e.g. album master session, film score, radio piece etc.), no issues here on arch linux with 8.12.0.
one tricky thing is that i have to take care to keep my control surface connected to just one of the instances, otherwise it’d mess up my mix mixing one session and unintentionally moving with all the others.
That is definitely a potential pitfall to watch-out for. Good comment.
And yeah, that’s probably what you or Robin had more-or-less said at some point. (-Too time-strapped to dig-up where… -But likely in the context of Ardour offering a built-in, inter-session copy-paste functionality, and why that’s therefore unlikely/impossible.)
…
[ EDIT: Actually, I just stumbled upon Paul’s original comment:
-In response to:
So because that relatively recent post is now locked ( … …stop locking posts so soon… -___-), it’s also somewhat relevant to quickly tag @acek here and say: you might be interested in this → copy-paste Lua script I posted yesterday. ]
relatively recent post is now locked ( …
…stop locking posts so soon… -___-), it’s also somewhat relevant to quickly tag