Memory full and Ardour crash

  • arek
Posted: Sun, 04/19/2009 - 09:17
Hello everyone A few days ago i have posted this on Ardour's forum. Maybe someone here could have helping hand, please. I am a happy user of Ardour from quite sometime but there is one very annoing problem. I use 64Studio Amd64 on my desktop and i386 on my notebook. Here is the problem. My notebook is IBM X31, 1,5GB ram, Pentium M 1.6GHz. Ardour's sessions are on external HDD WD 160GB sata, connected through FireWire. For example: i have session with 10 mono tracks (see screenshot http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/8/8/1331909/ardour.png , i split them to align them to metronome. Files are copied to session folder in file manager, not in Ardour ( see session folder http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/8/8/1331909/sesja.png, Oh ! and why after importing files to session in Ardour when "copy to session" is checked files are doubled size of original ? So, after a few, 6 or 8 cuts and saves system memory fills to full and Ardour craches. Here is screenshot of memory usage http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/8/8/1331909/memory.png . The same situation is on my desktop with Athlon 3.2GHz and 1GB ram. Oh, and the same is with only on track, after a few splits and saves. The more splits i made the longer session opens. And why system does not use swap ? If i put in 4GB ram will memory runsout too :-) That is the question. Can you help ? additional info about system: 64Studio 2.1 i386 linux 2.6.21-1-multimedia-486 jack 0.103.0-6 Ardour 2.4.1 (build from 3243) distribution default If you need some more info give me feedback please. Kind regards Arek P.S. Sorry for poor english. >Top >Fri, 2009-04-17 02:02 >#1 >paul >Joined: 2006-03-16 >User offline. Last seen 1 day 20 hours ago. > >Ardour 2.4.1 can be considered "ancient" at this point, and several major bug fixes concerning >memory use have been a part of the 4 "major" releases since then (we are now at 2.8). Unless >you can reproduce the problems with 2.8, we really have to consider this fixed already. >Top * reply Sun, 2009-04-19 11:04 (new) #2 areklfg areklfg's picture Joined: 2007-09-03 User is online Hello Paul For now I have checked Ardour 2.7.1 from 64Studio 3.0 beta3 and situation is the same. I will post this topic on 64Studio forum maybe its somehow related with this distribiution but i doubt. Do you now why files are doublesized after importing to Ardour with copy to session ? Session is growing so much. Any ideas ? kind regards arek
‹ Record audio:from streaming & audio player Packages for 3.0? ›

Hello Pablo Lots of thanks

  • arek
  • 07/02/07
  • Sat, 04/25/2009 - 21:28
  • Copy comment link
Hello Pablo Lots of thanks for your help. Now i have installed 64Studio 3.0 beta3 on my notebook with Ardour 2.8 and so far its OK. System finally uses swap :-) , Ardour didn't crash so far. It seems that lots of regons/splits are no good for Ardour but when it starts to slowing down i use "consolidate region" and Ardour reborn ;-) ! It's great ! Thank you for all you sugestions. Kind regards Arek

Consolidate range

  • Pablo
  • 07/11/07
  • Mon, 04/20/2009 - 19:03
  • Copy comment link
Hi Arek, To launch ardour in English, do in the terminal: LANG=en_us.UTF-8 ardour2 You can always collaborate with the official translator. Take a look at the credits. When you have several regions, select them with the hand ("select/move objects" tool), right-click and do a: "Selected regions->Set range selection" This way, you have set a range. Well, you can set a range manually too, with the "select/move ranges" tool, but doing as explained, the range goes exactly from the beginning of the first region to the end of the last region selected. Once you have the range selected, you can right-click again and do a "consolidate range". When you consolidate a range, a new audio file is created (this is called bouncing, if I'm not wrong). The level matters, so do it always (or not always, at your choice) with the fader at 0 dB. This is just one choice, ardour is so flexible! You can also bounce from track 1 (full of short regions) to, say, track 11. Just made the proper connections, adjust levels and record. You are going to love ardour. Just play with it and have fun! By the way, you can purge the unused sources (unused audio files, this is). Previous version were not so stable when you worked with lots of regions. But, now it is much more stable. Depending on what you want to do, you don't even need to bounce to new audio files. You can do the mixing with the lots of regions you have split and moved. Cheers! Pablo.

Re:Memory full and Ardour crash

  • Pablo
  • 07/11/07
  • Sun, 04/19/2009 - 15:24
  • Copy comment link
Hi arek, I'm not an expert ardour user but I use it a bit and read here and there. I hope this helps. I don't quite understand your workflow. You split regions to align the drums, right. Then you export each track? As a mono audio file, sample amplitude 16 bits? Then you import again to ardour? AFAIK, Ardour works with a sample amplitude of 32 bits, so the file is doubled sized when you import a 16 bit audio file to an ardour session (assuming the same sample rate). Better said, the file is half sized when you export to 16 bit. Anyway, I don't see the reason why you export the audio files to a location outside of ardour, once the drums are aligned (if you do so). If you don't want to work with lots of regions in a track you can select all the regions, use them as range selection and consolidate range. This way you are bouncing the selection to a new audio file, inside ardour. Or you just can leave the regions alone, remember, regions are not audio files. In my experience, a huge amount of regions made ardour crash in previous versions. 2.7.1 and 2.8 are much more stable. I am sure you will feel the difference. I strongly recommend you follow Paul's suggestion and update to ardour 2.8. You can follow the tutorial in this forum. Cheers! Pablo.

Hello Pablo Oh, I didn't

  • arek
  • 07/02/07
  • Mon, 04/20/2009 - 07:41
  • Copy comment link
Hello Pablo Oh, I didn't now that i can combine splitted regions i one. I don't see anythink relatet to this in menu, maybe i'm blind ;-) , how to do it ? Yes i export each track after aligning is finished. I did it because didn't want to double size files and large session folder. So far, i have installed 64Studio 3.0 beta3 again, this time on my desktop and for now it seems it work better, with one stereo file at least. Later i will test session with 10 tracks. By the way, i'm from poland and during instalation i've chosen polish language and Ardour manu is translated to polish and it is terrible ;-) , even font scalling in Ardour didn't help, program window is to large. Do you now how to change language to english in Ardour? regards Arek