[ardour-users] ardour not fast enough

[Hector Centeno-Garcia]

Thank you Sampo for your reply. I answered in-line below.

Sampo Savolainen wrote:

>On Sun, 2006-03-26 at 18:33 -0500, Hector Centeno-Garcia wrote:
>  
>
>>I'm having this other problem with ardour: very often, when I stop 
>>recording, ardour shows this message "Jack has either been shutdown or 
>>it disconnected Ardour because Ardour was not fast enough", then I have 
>>to restart ardour in order to be able to reconnect to jack.
>>
>>My system:
>>P4HT 2.8 GHz
>>1 Gig. RAM
>>M-Audio Audiophile
>>    
>>
>
>Which audiophile? This makes a big difference as some of them are USB
>devices and other PCI (better).
>
>  
>

It is a PCI Audiophile 24/96.


>>Kernel 2.6.15 with Ingo's RT patches
>>jack command: jackd -R -t10000 -dalsa -dhw:1 -r48000 -p256 -n2
>>    
>>
>
>Your system is way fast enough for ardour. I'm pretty sure you are
>running into configuration issues. 
> 
> - Is DMA turned on in your disks? 
>   (see "man hdparm")
>  
>

DMA is on.

> - Which filesystem are you using on the partition the session is on?
>  
>

ext3

> - Are you running any plugins which might cause denormal issues?
>  
>
The session has five mono tracks and I'm using Freeverb in one Bus.


> - Is your soundcard sharing an IRQ with other devices?
>  
>

Yes it is, with the firewire port which I'm not using at all. I already 
went trough trying to make the Audiophile to have it's own IRQ but this 
is the best I could achieve with the way my motherboard is configured.

>   (cat /dev/interrupts)
> - How much other load is there on the system?
>  
>

Not much. Sometimes, when ardour gets disconnected from jack (and when 
it happens it happens only after I press stop), I'm just using ardour, 
no plugins and only recording from the Audiophile's stereo analog input.

>These are all things that distributions designed for audio use
>automatically try to solve. If you find all of this too much to take in,
>you can try a distribution like PlanetCCRMA or Ubuntu studio or demudi
>which will (at least try to) solve these issues themselves.
>  
>

In the past I've used demudi, CCRMA and now I'm using my own kernel 
under Ubuntu. I've invested lots of time learning how to compile kernels 
and how to configure a linux system for multimedia, and I think I'm 
getting a little bit tired of it. I prefer Debian over Fedora because of 
many reasons (philosophy and easy to find repositories among them), and 
I opted for Ubuntu because of it's polished work in configuring a 
Desktop environment.

>Of course, if you're the tinkering sort like i am, you might want to do
>this yourself. It all depends on the level of expertise / time / will to
>do research. Even though I do this myself on my home system, my laptop
>is running PlanetCCRMA to get good performance with minimal fuss.
>
>  
>