Ardour 5 only working properly without plugins

[funked up]

Hello, a couple of days ago I installed Ardour 5.0.0
When I open a session and hit play it kind of drags and can't really play back the tracks as if there is not enough "horse power" on my laptop.
It plays them very slow with stutters and glitches.

When I choose to open my session in "safe mode" with all the plug-ins disabled everything is ok. So I thought it might be a hardware limitation but it is a project that I already have been working on with Ardour 2 a couple of days ago and it was working fine. In Ardour 2 I had to do (every time) some workarounds to get a few things working and it was a bit of a hassle so I wanted to try a newer version.

The project I've been working on is a 16 track live recording. In almost every track I use the basic plug-ins like EQ, compressors, gate, reverb, saturation. So considering that all of them were working on Ardour 2 I don't think that I use many.
When I disable them all one by one it begins to play normal. As soon as I enable them on over 2 or 3 tracks it starts to slow down again.

I even uninstalled Ardour and tried to install the old version from the software center but I got the Ardour 5 again installed. Has it something to do with the dependencies and updates that were previously installed for Ardour 5 and now I can't get an older version on my laptop?

Any ideas of how I can make any version play well with my laptop?
Is there a chance that it has something to do with Jack?
Of course I would prefer the newer version but if it isn't possible I will use the old one.

Anyway, I don't know much about computers. I'm a musician who just wants a few programs to be working properly.
I don't need midi and I don't need to record anything for the time being. I just want to mix & edit some tracks.
Any help would be much appreciated!

I'm working on an old (upgraded) Lenovo ThinkPad R61i.
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
64-bit
120GB ssd
Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T9300 @ 2.50GHz x 2
Intel 965GM

Thank you in advance,
George.

[headwar]

Hi,

I've had something very similar with Ardour 5.X in Ubuntu 16.04. I tried a lot of things, nothing worked. Sometimes, I saw Compiz use a lot of CPU after closing Ardour. So, I installed Intel's own video drivers. It shouldn't make sense as they are supposed to be provided directly from Ubuntu's repos now, though I haven't had any problem since, so it may be worth a shot as you seem to have an Intel GPU.

The drivers are here : https://01.org/linuxgraphics/downloads , look for "Intel Graphics Installer for Linux 1.4.0"

Hope it'll help you solve your problem, regards,
Hw

[funked up]

Thank you for your reply headwar.
I would like to try this out but I'm afraid that my knowledge of installation procedures are limited to the software center and some "copy-paste to the Terminal" commands...
Could you please walk me through the installation progress?

[headwar]

No problem, it's very easy. Though the 1.4 version of the driver is supposed to be for ubuntu 15.10, it works on my 16.04. I don't know about your 14.04, maybe play it safe and download (on the same website) the latest version for 14.04. Here it is for the 15.10 version :

1) download the file https://download.01.org/gfx/ubuntu/15.1 ... _amd64.deb
2) open a terminal and go to the directory where you downloaded it (cd downloads or something similar)
3) sudo dpkg -i intel-linux-graphics-installer_1.4.0-0intel1_amd64.deb
(by the way, just type "sudo dpkg -i int" and type the tab key, let linux autocomplete for you )

Regards,
Hw

[funked up]

After trying out different approaches I came to the conclusion that it has something to do with importing a session from an older version.
I've imported the same session again in "safe mode" (plugins disabled), "saved as" with a new name and started to add plugins on every track. There seems to be no problem till now.

The bad thing is that I have to do all the work again almost from scratch. Even the volume automation has no effect although I can see the lines in the tracks where I've used it. When I pick a point where I have a volume change and drag it up or down it somehow comes to life and works again.

headwar thank you for all the detailed instructions. I guess I won't need to do that for the time being.

Thanx again to everyone who tried to help.
At least I know that I can use Ardour again although I have to do a lot of work on the same project from the beginning.

[Pablo]

Some plugins are very resource hungry. In your case, it is probable that the reverb plugins are to blame.
Anyway, instead of disabling all plugins, you can try to find the culprits, starting with the usual suspects,
by disabling them one by one while you take a look at the indications of CPU and DSP on top of the Editor Window.

Anyway, it makes sense to set up a bus with the reverb plugin and use sends from the tracks to said bus.
This way you not only release a lot of CPU but also the sound is more natural (if that is the word, I am not a native speaker of English).

This thread sheds light on all of this:
https://community.ardour.org/node/4269

Also, you didn't mention your jack settings but while editing and mixing it is recommended to work with a high buffer size (1024 or 2048) because you don't care about latency at this point and the CPU will work better.

[funked up]

Pablo, your reply and the link you mentioned helped a lot.
But I still had to do all the work from scratch. There was no way to make all the old plugins and their settings work in Ardour 5.

But it's ok, I've learned a lot about the new UI and used busses for the reverbs as you suggested.
I had the buffer size already set to 2048 because as you said I don't care about latency. I don't record with Ardour. I just want to mix and edit.

Said that, I have this tiny little problem now with Jamin but I've created a new topic for that since it's something entirely different.