xrun markers

I use Ardour with cadence and pulseaudio module jack. It’s a pretty good combination since I don’t need realtime audio. I mostly use midi and synths now. Sometimes I work with ardour and take a break to browse the web, or do other things. Ardour get’s filled up with xrun markers.

How can I clear these out without manually clicking each one and pressing remove. Doing this Ardour crashed on me a few different times. Here’s a screenshot.

http://imgur.com/TyBkXcb

Go to Edit/Preferences/2nd tab and:
*check “stop record when Xrun”
*uncheck “create marker when Xrun”
That should do it, have fun!

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xruns are sometimes acceptable imho and stopping record could be inconvenient in case of under-run, when you’re recording a life-time guitar solo.
A Location Markers line filled with xruns markers is not acceptable, though.
Anyway, when you right-click the Location Markers line but not the marker itself, you can do ‘Clear all locations’ and get rid of them all at once.

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if the system is well configured, Xruns should not exist…

if the system is well configured, Xruns should not exist..
If only that were true. It is almost impossible to configure general purpose PC hardware to guarantee that this won't happen, but you can ensure that it happens rarely. For example, don't just try to configure for the shortest latency. You will have fewer problems if instead, you configure buffer sizes etc for the longest acceptable latency for a particular use case.

If you stay (that last word “Stay” is a tribute to David Bowie, sorry for the disgression) under 10 msec you can play without trouble… Most machines can do that with rtirq settings, no?

I run Jack with 5.8 ms latency and find that when playing Yoshimi, Zynsubaddfx or Fluidsynth with a midi keyboard live, I can not hear or “feel” any latency at all.

People sometimes try to get latency to a unnecessarily low number. One should consider how far the sound travels through air in a given time to get some perspective to the issue. My 5.8 ms latency is equivalent to a situation where I play my keyboard and the speaker is 1.98 meters away from me. It takes 5.8 ms for the sound to reach my ear then. Speed of sound is 343 metres per second and that equals 0.343 meters per millisecond. 5.8 * 0.343 metres = 1.98 metres.

One could argue that in the case of amplified instruments the speaker often is farther than 1.5 meters away from the player.

I guess the above is not the whole truth, there probably is some additional latency caused by my USB sound card and its DA converters, etc :slight_smile: But I guess there might not be very good reasons to go lower than 5 ms Jack latency, it only increases the possibility of xruns without giving much real advantage.

Forgot to mention that when I’m not playing keyboard live, but when I’m recording I use a Jack latency of 69.7 ms. This ensures trouble free Ardour work :slight_smile: I have a sound card that lets me route sound from the sound card mic inputs right to the headphones with zero latency and then it really doesn’t matter what latency Jack causes and I can choose a value that maximizes xrun freedom and reliability :slight_smile:

That’s the option “hardware does monitoring” in preferences or session properties I don’t remember yet…