[Ardour-Users] Opening of plugins while playback is delayed

[Axel 'the C.L.A.' Müller]

On Tue, 26 Jan 2016 14:28:57 -0600
"Chris Caudle" <chris at chriscaudle.org> wrote:

> On Tue, January 26, 2016 2:04 pm, Tim wrote:
> 
> > Radeon  HD 2600.
> 
> That is a really old card, I don't know if the current radeon driver even
> supports it, and if it does it might be in non-DRM mode only.  It could be
> useful to update to an HD5450, which seems to be the least expensive card
> fully supported by the current radeon driver.

I have a HD6570 and suffer from the same problem.

> > I realized when adding a lv2 plugin and opening it while the transport
> > rolls, the plugin opens a few seconds delayed. Mostly a xrun occurs.
> 
> I don't know if there is a way to avoid a xrun when adding a plugin while
> the transport is rolling.  Is the plugin being added to a track which is
> playing, or to a new empty track, or a muted track?
> If audio is playing and you add a plugin then the processing chain has to
> be interrupted, the processing graph recalculated, then the audio started
> up again with the new plugin filled with presumably silent frames.
> 
> Is your complaint just that there is a glitch in the audio when adding a
> plugin when the transport is rolling?  I would have to wait for one of the
> developers to comment, but that is the behavior I would expect, it is like
> pulling out patch cables and changing connections in an analog setup, it
> seems natural you are going to get some dropouts if you do that while the
> audio is running.

It's not when adding a plugin but when opening the plugin GUI. I also
tend to have crashes in the open graphics driver when closing multiple
GL based plugins in a row.

I think at least the crashes are related to some bug in the open radeon
driver (haven't tested with the proprietary one, yet). Not sure if the
stutter in audio (wich sometimes results in xruns, but sometimes I also
get stutters without any xruns being displayed) also stems from a bug
in that driver.

Maybe it's time to do some deeper investigations again...