Out of curiosity I launched Bitwig Studio and tested my “favourite” plugin – Decent Sampler, which crashes when I click “browse” (usually it happens “for the first time”, subsequent uses on the same day are fine). And, no surprise – it crashed as well, but it didn’t take down the whole DAW, I just got the option to restart the plugin. Would it be possible to handle something like this in Ardour?
What about overall stability and random crashes when editing “regular stuff”, like automations or jus even moving clips in the editor?
Once an rc1 release for 9.0 is out, you can file bugs at tracker.ardour.org and we will try to give them attention, or at least triage them.
We have no intention of doing what Bitwig does - running plugins in another process. We consider that a ridiculous technical solution inside the host, responding to a problem with plugins.
Regarding DecentSampler, make sure you have the most current version - those sorts of problems seem to occur with it, and then get fixed.
Historically, releases after a major release tend to see more of a focus on overall stability and random crashes, but as I said, if you let us know about those before 9.0 we can try to fix them too.
Honestly, I’d much rather put €99 into Ardour development than spend it on a Bitwig license – seriously. I want Ardour to be my main DAW. But right now Bitwig gives me very tangible advantages in terms of plugin crash handling and UI responsiveness.
I’m a big fan of Ardour and I really appreciate what it already does well. At the same time I’m also aware that there’s some technical debt (GTK2-based UI leading to poor performance on my 4K monitor with high CPU usage leading to xruns). Things like better plugin isolation feel to me like exactly the kind of long-term, architectural investment that would pay off massively in perceived stability and user trust.
Even if the plugin is “at fault”, every crash still costs the user time and sometimes work. From that perspective, “it’s the plugin’s problem” doesn’t really help – the DAW is the only part of the chain that I, as a user, can actually choose.
Drawing performance on your 4K monitor is not impacted by GTK2 - this is a myth that some people have spread, and is not true. That doesn’t mean that there are not/may be UI responsiveness issues, but they are not caused by technical debt. What platform are you on?
Plugin isolation is a way to help users who want to use broken plugins. We have limited resources, and we’d rather put them into features that do not center on the problems in software we cannot control.
Arch linux, i5-8300H, CoffeeLake-H GT2/Geforce GTX 1050M), sorry for direct comparison to bitwig, but damn, it just works as expected, and, for sure, using GPU to render UI can spare some CPU power that can be used to compute audio stuff.
To be honest, we’ve never seen a documented case where Cairo’s use of the CPU creates problems for audio performance or GUI performance. There have been severe issues on macOS, but that is caused by Apple’s changes to their own APIs that lead to excessive redrawing.
soo, what can I do with that? Same issue on intel and nvidia offload, no wayland here, no fancy DE (I was forced to use cinnamon since gnome dropped x11 support), I have RT-patched kernel, almost all green on rtcqs (it just complains about the /boot partition), I’ve disabled SMT, spectre/meltdown stuff, swithed CPU governor to performance mode…
When a plugin crashes and takes Ardour down with it, before I knew better I was blaming Ardour. If there is a crash, would it be possible to display a dialog to the user to clue them in, in plain English, as to why and what plugin was involved (if any)? Just thinking of users who don’t know about logging etc.
Oh yes, that’s understood, I’d just like a message to pop up in a crash that says “Hey, Ardour just crashed and it looks like it was caused by Jim’s Fabulous Saturator” and then I can say “Hmm, Jim’s Fabulous Saturator is causing a lot of crashes, I’d better take it out of my signal chain”
Can I spoil a new little feature I just saw in the Ardour 9 alpha that fills me with joy? It’s just a detail, but when I see it I say “hallelujah!.. finally!”
So I can say that I love the ability to finally import and export templates and track groups within an already open session. It was sorely missed. Bravo to the Ardour developers. I’m really looking forward to the beta, gamma, and espsilon versions…
