[ardour-users] Automation problems

John Emmas johne53 at tiscali.co.uk
Sun May 20 00:12:23 PDT 2007


During the past few days I've been experimenting with automation in Ardour's
mixer.  Admittedly, my PC isn't very high powered by today's standards (it's
a 1.2GHz Athlon) but I've been surprised by how quickly Ardour's playback
starts to falter - even when I'm just doing simple automation on a very
simple session.

For example, let's say that I have a 3 minute stereo clip on the top track
in the editor.  The next track contains a sequence of (say) 10 shorter clips
of about 15 seconds duration (each).  Normally I can play these out happily
without any problems.  However, if I write some fader automation to one of
the mixer channels, the long clip will start to stutter & falter - usually
at the ends (out-points) of each of the shorter clips.  Once the
automation's been applied, the sequence will replay normally again (even
with automation) but any attempt to write automation causes the audio
playback to skip & stutter quite noticeably.  Is there a setting somewhere
that I could change to improve this?

Perhaps another indicator is my buffer settings. On my system they're always
quite high but I don't know if this is normal.  Here are the kinds of value
that I typically see:-

Buffers:- p = 88%  c = 99%  DSP = 40%



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