Would the ability to load sessions in ram be possible for ardour. Would be nice for ardour to allow this for sessions to be loaded into memory. for example large sessions would benefit from being able to run in ram rather then a hard drive, sd card or a slow ssd. Pro tools has this as a feature called disk drive or something like that.
Oh ok cool
Well it is an audio buffer setting, but is not the buffer for your audio interface if that is what you are asking. There are seperate playback and record buffers in Ardour, they size of which can be set from the global preferences dialog, audio tab:
http://manual.ardour.org/preferences-and-session-properties/preferences-dialog/audio/
If I am live tracking shows, which can range from 24 channels to 64+, I usually max out the recording buffer for instance to ensure I don’t have issues with the disk not keeping up, especially on spinning platter disks instead of SSDs. Longer playback buffer can have some other side effects, for instance if you are on a spinning disk it can take a bit when you cause the playhead to jump to a new position as it rebuffers the entire session for playback from that point. But if you have a fast enough machine this may not be an issue. Slightly larger likely won’t be much of an issue, say 10 seconds instead of the default 5, but going to 30+ seconds can be noticeable on slower disks especially, but if you are tracking with already existing material(Which is where I have used it) it may be worth the trade off(It was in my case, on a laptop with a single mechanical disk IIRC).
SeabladeInteresting I didn’t know ardour does this, are your reffering to the audio buffer or is there another buffer setting
Ardour already does this, though it is based off the playhead position and what you have the above mentioned buffer settings set to. And yes for the rest I would point you to Paul’s response for ramdisk usage as well.
SeabladeI understand, and @seablsde I meant the audio tracks as well from the session
Ardour already loads a session into RAM up to the limits set by the buffer (Changeable via Ardour preferences) and available memory. What exactly else are you looking for to be loaded into RAM?
SeabladeArdour will cache as much as it thinks it needs in RAM, and on Linux (and macOS), the kernel will cache a bunch more. You’re not going to gain a lot by putting the whole thing in RAM.
If you really want to do this sort of thing, you can do outside of ardour by creating a ram disk using OS facilities and telling ardour to put the session there. I can see no reason to clutter up a DAW with the tools you need to effectively create and manage RAM disks.