I’ve been using Ardour for ages via the KxStudio repositories. But for some reason, I had Ardour 4 installed until now – package installation/selection problem of my own. So, I removed this older ardour4 package and installed the current version of Ardour 5.5 and at the same time deleted my ~/.config/ardour* and ~/.cache/ardour* folders to start fresh. Now, when I startup Ardour, it presents me with an audio setup wizard. However, I already have jack running and do my session management, audio routing, jack app connections via a tool called Claudia. This tool on its own manages a jackdbus session for me. The problem it seems is that Ardour 5.5 doesn’t detect the jackdbus session already present/running (Claudia/jackdbus are running as the same user I’m starting Ardour with) and it dives into the wizard to assist me, errantly. Is this a bug, some other misconfiguration on my end, or something else completely?
The audo/midi setup dialog should only show once when you start anew.
The dialog won’t be displayed if you’ve used Ardour with jack in the past. The next time you launch Ardour and if jack is already running, that dialog won’t show (regardless if you use jackd, or jackdbus). Did you select to use Audio-System: JACK (and not ALSA) at least once?
Therein lies the problem. I cannot move beyond the Audio/MIDI Setup screen even if I select JACK. Start, and Calibrate Audio are the only two buttons I can press other than X to close this window. Start will of course fail since Jack is already running, and when I attempt to close the Audio/MIDI Setup window, I get the message that Ardour cannot connect to the Audio/MIDI engine (the window fails to close FWIW). So, I cannot move beyond the Session Setup step.
-WORKAROUND DISCOVERED-
So, I rebooted… and before I used Claudia to start Jack, I started Ardour again (after another .config & .cache purge) and allowed Ardour to start Jack for me this once. From there, I could get into a session and save / exit. Afterwards, I started Jack with Claudia and Ardour didn’t complain at the next startup.
To me, this would be a bug in the initial Ardour installation / setup process. Ardour should be able to handle pre-existing Jack sessions at first startup because it seemingly fails miserably unless you work around the issue like this.
Are you using a pristine (not updated) version of KXStudio 14.04 perhaps (which ships and old[er] version of jack2) which could explain what you’re seeing.
Can you provide more information (jackd --version) and the OS that you’re using.
Hello! I got the similar problem. I’ve noticed this when had made “sudo apt-get upgrade” command for my KXStudio 14.04 system yesterday (2017-01-06). I got two versions of Ardour: v.5.5.0 and v.5.5.422_dbg at that time. Few times tried to start Ardour with jack-option in an audio setup wizard - I got the message that Ardour cannot connect to the Audio/MIDI engine. So I’ve made a system restore to point with the date 2016-12-04 (“Systemback” program). (The v.5.5.0 was included in that point, and I only installed v.5.5.422_dbg after restoring). The problem had gone. From that I’ve concluded that something in KXStudio upgrade after 2017-01-01 (or around).
As x42 noted, older versions of JACK can cause this. It can also be caused by giving a “server name” to the JACK instance. No ordinary user should EVER set a server name unless they are 110% clear on what they are doing and how it will affect things. New versions of QJackctl now hide this option so that users will not (as happens way too often) try it innocently and screw up their JACK environment.