[ardour-users] auditioning groups of tracks at once & disk too slow

[Paul Davis]

On Sat, 2006-01-14 at 22:18 -0800, Kevin Cosgrove wrote:
> On 14 January 2006 at 9:11, Mark Knecht <markknecht at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > > I've been doing just fine up until now with 10-20 tracks.  Is ardour
> > > reading all of my tracks, even though most of them are muted?
> > 
> > Mute all tracks and check for disk activity. That would tell you the
> > correct answer.
> 
> I'm not sure how to check for disk activity.  Normally I'd see a
> disk light on, but it's not now.  If the disk were louder, then
> I could hear it chatter, but I can't.  I explored some system
> monitor programs, but none that I found had anything disk related
> other than swapping.  Any ideas?   I'll also look at the [in]active
> disk activity, once I know where/how to look.

as somebody already guessed, muting tracks doesn't stop disk activity.
if it did, when you unmute there would be a nasty delay before we could
start playing back.

tracks be made "inactive", either from the context menu of the track
controls in the editor, or the context menu of the track name button in
the mixer. that will (he says, praying), stop all disk activity for that
track (as well as everything else related to that track).

70 tracks is definitely close to or over the limit for most generic
modern h/w with ardour's current 32 bit float format files.

--p