[Ardour-Users] Painful importing WAV files with constant crashing/segfaulting

[Ken Restivo]

On Saturday I spent (wasted) about 12 hours importing 24-bit 44.1Khz WAV files into several Ardour sessions. It was 25 takes, 12 tracks each, so 300 WAV files. I did get them all in eventually, but it was one of the most painful experiences I've ever had in my computing life, short of maybe installing Windoze 98.

Importing kept crashing at random times. I had to import the files pretty much one at a time, 300 of them. And even then Ardour kept crashing, blowing up, segfaulting.  I couldn't figure out WTF was up. Over the course of those 300 files, I tried testing various combinations of things, but after a while I realized that the "patterns" I were seeing were just superstition. The crashes seemed not to depend on how many files, what files, what order, where the mouse was, or anything else I tested. Importing would simply crash at random times, on average of every few files.

Actually, after a while it became sort of a game. Reminded me of my old days working on Macintosh SE's and SE/30's in the System 6.0.4 and 7.0.1 days, when you never knew when what you were doing would blow up the whole program and throw that "bomb" icon up on the screen. It was kind of like building a house of cards, you never knew which one would cause the whole thing to come crashing down.

I am running Ardour SVN revision 6505, on a Core 2 Duo 2.33Ghz system, kernel 2.6.26.8-rt12, GTK 2.12.12-1~lenny1, jackd version 0.116.1-4.

Anyway, it seems there is a bug out on this,
http://tracker.ardour.org/view.php?id=1930

Looks like the bug has been open since... 2007? Really? I guess that means there is not much hope of this getting fixed any time soon.

I may have to do this whole nightmare import process again in a few weeks. Is there perhaps a script or some other way to get around the GUI to import a bunch of files from the command line?

-ken