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

[plutek-infinity]

>Date: Wed, 20 Jan 2010 12:35:55 -0800
>From: Ken Restivo <ken at restivo.org>
>
>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 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.

perfect timing, ken! i've just done the same sort of thing, in a similar scale, with similar observations. however, it seems my crashes may have been less frequent than yours -- i could often get through 30 or 40 file imports without issue. but then, like you say, ardour would crash for no apparent reason, and might do it again after only a few files.

yes, a command-line import would be nice too.

my other issue is timestamps -- are you trying to import with timestamps? seems only the first of a multi-file import gets put at its timestamp. the remainder are either put immediately after each other, or at the same time, depending on import dialog settings. there doesn't seem to be any way to say "import all the selected files into the selected track, placed at their timestamp locations." the option to place files in selected tracks disappears unless the number of selected tracks equals the number of files selected for import.

even if the current bug was fixed, importing many sessions with large track counts and multiple files on each track would still be a large job -- in the absence of multi-file timestamp functionality, we have to essentially assemble by hand.

i'm on Ardour 2.8.4 rev 6077.


-- 
.pltk.