[Ardour-Users] Plugins and stability

John Rigg au at sound-man.co.uk
Fri Aug 3 10:51:48 PDT 2007


On Thu, Aug 02, 2007 at 03:23:06PM +0100, Matt Savigear wrote:
> With reference to stability issues popping up on the list, I have 
> generally found ardour2 to be pretty solid for my admittedly limited use.
> 
> My (non-technical) wife uses ardour more than I and has complained of 
> crashes which seem to be related to the use of LADSPA plugins (some 
> plate reverb, apparently). Is it possible for a plugin to bring ardour 
> down, rather than the snag being in ardour's plugin handling code? If 
> so, is there a relatively straightforward way of getting debug info for 
> the plugin? I haven't managed to report anything so far because I 
> usually only find out about crashes after the fact.
> 
> Alternatively, does it make sense to push the channels through something 
> like jack-rack and back in again, hosting the plugins outside ardour? 
> Will this protect ardour from crashes if the plugin goes down, and do I 
> lose anything (or gain any limitations or potential snags) by externally 
> hosting the plugin in this way?

FWIW, I work around this kind of problem by avoiding the unstable plugins
(and there are quite a few). Gverb works well and is stable on my
amd64 system. For multiband parametric EQ, I couldn't find anything
that worked until I tried FIL plugins (fil-plugins package on Debian),
which has a very nice (and stable) 4-band parametric EQ.

John



More information about the Ardour-Users mailing list