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

[Ken Restivo]

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 04:15:03PM -0500, plutek-infinity wrote:
> >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.
> 

Alas, using sndfile-convert -float32 on the files did NOT prevent them from crashing Ardour. So that's not the problem, I guess.

I posted a backtrace, as requested. And, crickets.

Was the backtrace helpful? Is any progress being made on fixing it?

I noticed that someone submitted a backtrace in 2007 and it didn't fix the problem, and at this point I still doubt if the problem will ever get fixed, given so many other priorities around. And I'm wondering if there's some way I could write a script to generate a *.ardour file that has all the clips already in it, to avoid that GUI entirely.

I have yet another ProTools session coming up which I have to import into Ardour, and likely another 300 WAV files to import. I'm not looking forward to it.

-ken