I work a lot with ardour but when my projects reach a length of ~5 min i have to stop at some point because it gets so slow. I feel like it has a lot to do with the GUI and how many regions ardour has to display at once. Am i right to assume that getting a better gpu would help with that, or should i look for something else to upgrade?
I have a lot of single kick and bass regions. Maybe loopable (midi)regions would make that easier processingwise?
I have seen Ardour 8.12 GUI slowing down a lot when I have lots of midi regions. Taking snapshots may double midi-files in the session folder each time making slowdowns even worse. My machine is not slow (AMD Threadripper, 16 physical cores, 4.1 Ghz base frequency, 64 GB Ram, nVidia Geforce 1660).
I have worked around this by instead of using many short midi regions I make one region as long as the song. Then I duplicate midi events inside it. It has helped a lot. Also when creating new sessions I go to Session / Properties / Midi and untick: Midi regions are independent. Now if you make copies of midi regions they all link to the same region. This helps reducing region-buildup when using snapshots. Linked midi regions are the same so editing one will edit all copies. If you need to edit a copy first make it “individual” by clicking on it with the right mouse button and selecting: Midi / Unlink all selected regions. Now you can edit the region without editing other copies.