[ardour-dev] Pre-1.0 crashes -vvv

[Wolfgang Woehl]

Dear Paul, Taybin, Jesse, Ron and all,

Must have been in 1995 that I met a guy who told me about linux. At the 
time I used a macintosh and PlayerPro to fiddle with sound. I asked the 
good man if you could make music with linux. He said "Ja klar" which 
means "sure you can" in german. Only now I realize how wrong and how 
spirited he was at the same time. Obviously the vision has become 
reality for some time now because of guys like you and Fons and Steve 
and Jack and Jan and many more. It's not just an application you share 
with us but inspiration and art as well. Saying "Thank you" is probably 
a bit like saying thanks to air for being there. Still I want to thank 
you for the lessons.

Just took a pc to an improvised studio, recorded with my band for two 
days, had maybe 4 different crash scenarios during all of the extensive 
sessions, jack-routing/ardour/hdspmixer gave us amazingly -- at least 
to me -- flexible headphone mixes, put 10 tracks to disk at the same 
time and lost none ever, ardour's navigation shortcuts/tools came in 
major handy ... it basically worked like a breeze being there and 
almost never in the way.

The rare crashes during the recording weekend were
(Ardour/GTK 0.529.2 libardour 0.827.3)

* Sometimes: exports of ranges. Tried it with/without rate conversion
* Sometimes: Set a loop, loop it, crash at the end of the loop. Most of 
the time looping is totally stable.
* jack crashes (root cron jobs swapping out jackstart children? Can that 
happen?)

And yes, the "Sometimes" was irritating. Have no time to delve in right 
now, I hope you can bring these together with other reports. Other 
issues were

* Freezing a region like toms.n in a track with toms.[1-] produces 1 new 
non-draggable region called toms.x where x is incrementing from gaps 
within [1-]. In practice this means you loose all splits plus you 
freeze regions you might not need (but do not want to destroy) like 
surrounding takes. Problem being that freezing is disk-intense and 
takes a while when you think of hour-length tracks.

* Freezing during playback results in frozen audio (great) + hiccups 
(not great). I think it should either work or not be allowed during 
playback. Is this for jackit-devel?

* Couldn't split ~some~ regions. They seemed to be perfectly healthy 
regions though.

* Recording two tracks with ardour:mama as source, one with "Align 
captured material with Existing material", one with "... Capture time" 
set makes both tracks 256 frames early (-p 1024 -n 2) compared to mama. 
Shouldn't there be a difference?

* You can drag-exceed the limit of 10 secs for fade-ins/outs. The GUI 
should reflect the limit and prevent you from doing so. (btw no more 
fade-handle related crashes)

None of these were major problems, there was always more than one way to 
do it. All in all I enjoyed showing-off linux audio to my band and none 
of that involved the vst support that starts to make headlines now. 
Running out of verbosity now, congratulations as you are closing in on 
1.0 and thanks again.

Wolfgang