[Ardour-Users] So many lost midi files

[Vincenzo Ciancia]

Dear all,

I have been a very strong supporter of open source for 20 years. This
is going to be a desperate rant.

I learned to make music on the PC in the last months. I studied really
a lot. I had one piece in particular I was developing while studying,
in ardour. That piece is dead. Completely killed by the program bugs.
I had beautiful "decorations" that at some point disappeared and were
not on disk anymore. These were previous versions of ardour, and bugs
have been fixed, so I retried, removing those parts. I had improvised
solos I loved.

Now that solos are lost too; I have been using (paid) ardour 3.5.380.
After losing some more midi files of which I had backups, I had been
using 3.5.386 (compiled by me) hoping for the better. Midi files
losses have continued. Today I lost the solos. Then I desperately
tried to recompose old sessions of the solos. Then ardour became a bit
slow. I closed it, reopened, and more midi files were lost. I do not
know how to continue, after 20 years I can't use windows anymore, and
I don't own a mac and will not buy one tomorrow.

To make this rant constructive, as a computer scientist and musician I
*beg* the developers to protect midi tracks as best as they can until
bugs are *really* solved. I mean, please CHANGE your code to add
temporary extra functionality, so that some versions of a midi track,
included backup copies of midi files, are constantly saved. The code
altering and deleting (?) midi files is broken, please save us.

In case someone misunderstands me, I still think ardour is the best
daw I ever seen in terms of professional functionality, and once I'm sure I will
not lose any more files, I will return to it, if I don't get used to
another operating system in the meantime, and whatever other daw I
use, I will make backups. Silly me for procrastinating this.


Vincenzo