[Ardour-Dev] Ardour on Windows

[Robin Gareus]

On 04/10/2015 09:05 PM, Felix Er Anzola M wrote:
> Hi, i'm interested in helping Ardour on Windows.
> 
> Can give support on IRC and in the forum if needed since my work is turning
> a bit more tied to the computer than before, i usually post in Ardour's
> forum as Fernesto.

There's #ardour-windows on freenode IRC.
http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=ardour-windows

While I don't expect casual windows DAW users to drop by on IRC,
Menu > Help > Chat  of the windows versions links there so some people
may show up. The Windows Forum at https://community.ardour.org/forums
will likely be the place frequented by users.

Any Thoughts? Is there something that's more suitable to help out
Windows users?



Some further brainstorm and braindump:


http://libremusicproduction.com/ has great tutorial videos for Ardour. I
suppose a simple "Getting started with Ardour on windows" video would be
nice to have. Any takers?


One invaluable task suitable for non-dev contributors is to triage
bug-reports. A lot of users start at the forum (also Linux, OSX) but
eventually we'd like a ticket on http://tracker.ardour.org/ to properly
keep track of things.



As far as I can tell, the weakest points of ardour on windows are currently:

 1) ASIO/Portaudio engine
 2) plugin support
 3) GUI polish (fonts in particular)

Everything else is pretty much identical to Linux and OSX.

(1) is being worked on (thanks to Harrison), so things will eventually
become better. The current workaround is to use JACK if there are issues
with a specific card.

(2) is quite good, actually. We tested a variety of freely available
plugins, but things are different out in the wilderness.


Before announcing Ardour4/windows widely, we should definitly do a round
of beta-testing with hardened windows users.



I don't expect a lot of window-specific crashes. Most issues (apart from
plugins) also exist on GNU/Linux and OSX as well. Still
http://ardour.org/debugging_ardour needs a windows section. It basically
goes like this:


1) get and install a debug build from http://nightly.ardour.org/
2) Start > All Programs > Ardour4 > Ardour4 GDB
[a terminal (oh, oh :) with gdb comes up]

from here on it's pretty much like
  "Option 1: Running Ardour inside GDB"
on the debugging_ardour page.

3) type     run <enter>

(Ideally use the "Dummy" backend in the Audio/Midi setup, no realtime HW
I/O. Depending on the bug in question this may not always be feasible.)

4a) when ardour crashes, type     thread apply all bt <enter>
4b) when ardour hangs, press Ctrl+c in the terminal
  then type      thread apply all bt <enter>

5) type    quit <enter>

The windows/gdb version automatically writes the debug-output to a file
called  ardour-debug.log  in the user's home (because copy/pasting text
out of a windows cmd.com terminal is hard).

6) go to to http://tracker.ardour.org/bug_report_page.php
  describe the issue and attach the log file.


That needs to be put in proper prose and eventually make it onto the
site as HTML.

so much to do, so little time,
robin