All pans got centred

Two of my sessions have just opened with all the pan controls centred. It doesn’t happen all the time, because I reset the pans, saved and reloaded and they were still as I set them.
Alternatilvely, I hit some key combination (or carelessly clicked on a button) that resets all the pans in a session and didn’t notice. Is there such a thing?
This is with Ardour 4.7 64 bit on latest AV Linux.

Possibly relevant:
I have been mixing lots of tracks and I’m sure most have reloaded fine. This happened after I started exporting them. It’s an album in which each track is a different snapshot in the same ardour folder; I assume any action on one snapshot (like exporting) will not affect the settings of another snapshot. Is that a bad way to work? Ardour’s file open dialog seems to encourage it.

I noticed that if you put a stereo plugin into a mono track it splits it to left and right so the panner gets reset as the panners for mono and stereo are different. Maybe this is not your issue though.

No, I do have one or two stereo plugins on mono tracks and I’ve seen that happen - it looks quite different.
This, however, was all channels (most or all without stereo plugins) being reset to dead centre, apparently somewhere between saving the project and reloading it later. It’s happened several times, and later I save the same project and reload it and the pan positions are retained, so it’s apparently an intermittent fault.

I encountered something like that after soloing or muting some tracks. But I don’t know when it happened the last time. Have you filed a bug report?

I haven’t filed a bug report, because I have very little information to help with reproducing it.
I think it happened between saving and reloading a session, i.e. the pan settings just weren’t being stored and recalled, but I can’t be sure. The first time it happened I only noticed when an export sounded monophonic and when I reloaded the Ardour session it was obvious why. Later that day a couple of other sessions loaded up with pans centred and I noticed immediately, but I can’t be sure what state they were in when those sessions was last saved.

I’ll experiment with the soloing/muting idea.

Is there any chance Ardour had crashed sometime between the last save and the time you reloaded the sessions?
I know that can cause pans to reset

Is there any chance Ardour had crashed sometime between the last save and the time you reloaded the sessions?
The implication from that is that if ardour crashes it can corrupt an open session (on disk). How (or perhaps Why) is that even possible? - if I'm editing a document and the application crashes I would expect to lose the unsaved edits, but I would not expect the file on disk to be corrupted. I had experienced something similar with ardour myself but could not replicate it, and unfortunately if that is the case, then ardour is unusable for me for anything other than basic software compatibility testing if what I think happened actually did.

@mike@overtonedsp

I’ve only experienced this a few times, but my belief (STRONG emphasis on belief, i haven’t actually tested this in any way and shouldn’t have said “know” in my last post) is that if Ardour is in the process of “backing up” a session at the same instant it crashes and you choose to recover with crash data, values could be reset. I think this because the few times I’ve noticed reset pans, I had recently had a crash, and assumed I just hadn’t noticed the pans back at default yet. That’s totally speculation though and could be entirely coincidental. This is really something to ask Paul about.

It is always amusing to watch people unfamiliar with a given codebase (or any codebase) try to speculate on why crashes happen (or what their consequences are). It is very rare that the guesses people make based on “observed behaviour” are correct, at least in a program as complex as Ardour.

@paul

which is exactly why I said speculation and could be complete coincidence hahaha.
I’m a computer engineering student, so I have a growing programming (key word: growing haha) and understand that crashes rarely look like the actual why/how that caused them.

@braxtons12
as a sidenote:
I think Paul was subversively commenting on mike@overtonedsp. They are having a mild feud since a couple of years that erupted over licensing, development and payment philosophies of audio software. Though there lies potential in the improvement of Ardour as a Workstation, if a collaboration were (ever) established, it will sadly remain a passive-agressive sandbox fight between grown men (i assume).
So don’t take it too personally. You just experienced the ,Ardour Community".

Actually, I wasn’t :slight_smile:

Paul, I take it that, as someone who does know the software, you don’t know what the cause of the problem is either, or you’d have offered a more helpful comment.
As a software developer myself, I know full well that even when it’s your own code, guesswork about why it went wrong may be wildly inaccurate.
I’m going into the studio now because I have some work to do there; while I’m at it I may try some of the suggestions made above. Not that I want Ardour to crash really - and I’m glad it doesn’t do that nearly as much as it used to.

Correct. More than one person has had the “pans all re-centered” problem come up. There’s no recipe for it at present. It is unrelated to crashes.

Just had this problem happen to me today. Hopefully in 5.0 this will be resolved. Just filed a report on it.

I had this happen to me today (ardour 4.7), I added my info to dsreyes bug report here:

http://tracker.ardour.org/view.php?id=6893

Short summary: it seems to me that there is correct pan information in the session file but Ardour fails to load it correctly. I may be mistaken since I don’t understand ardour session format thoroughly. The same session with seemingly correct pan info also results pans centered when loaded in Ardour 5.4.