Ardour lately crashes and freezes a lot

[paul]

Hello. After the last update Ardour is very hard to use. Pressing the "record" button makes the program freeze for about 20 seconds, and sometimes it crashes as well. Other transport operations have the same effect...Am I the only one? What's going on?

[varpa]

It would be helpful to specify which version Ardour you are running (use Help->About) and what distro you are running on. I've had problems with Ardour 4.2.0 on kxstudio 14.04 where the Carla plugin host not longer works (no sound or distorted sound produced by Carla hosting VST synths) and also the DSP load is high because process Carla-bridge-wi is consuming a lot of CPU. Not sure if this is a Carla problem, may also be due to Ardour.

[ssj71]

I know ardour changed its plugin handling in a way that carla does not handle well. The developers of both projects have talked about whats best to do, but I'm not sure a solution has been reached yet.

[varpa]

Thanks for the explanation of the carla/Ardour issue. I changed to carla-vst and now things work again. Hope the lv2 issue can be resolved.

[paul]

Ardour 4.2, KXStudio 14.04.
I've looked, yeah, most of the problems traced back to Carla as vst (even if deactivated!). Now I just handle it externally (thanks patchbay!), so no problem.
I hope it will get fixed, but actually for my workflow having everything outside the DAW works even better, it's more like in a physical studio

Apart from the Carla issue, I still get some freezes, a couple of time the whole X crashed, but that looks more like a general JACK issue...I'll post more when I figure it out.
Thanks to all.

[varpa]

Also, in case you don't know, if you find a reproducible bug you should report it to the Ardour bug page: http://tracker.ardour.org/login_page.php. However, if your problem is a plugin crashing Ardour the problem may well be the plugin rather than Ardour per se.