Hello! Thanks very much for helping me when I’d had trouble installing 3.5.357 a couple weeks ago.
I am having another issue, though. When I started Ardour, it gave me a ‘Missing File!’ notice, and when I loaded up the session, it had indeed lost 4 WAV files. I looked in the Interchange folder for them, and they weren’t there. Could it be that they actually are there, and I searched for them wrong? That is, when the session loaded, I right-clicked on the empty regions to see the name that popped up.
This is what was in Ardour’s message box:
[ERROR]: Filesource: cannot find required file (Vox 1-31.wav): while searching /media/tami/audio/howl/interchange/howl/audiofiles:/home/tami:/media/tami/audio
[WARNING]: A sound file is missing. It will be replaced by silence.
[ERROR]: Filesource: cannot find required file (Vox 3-12.wav): while searching /media/tami/audio/howl/interchange/howl/audiofiles:/home/tami:/media/tami/audio
[WARNING]: A sound file is missing. It will be replaced by silence.
[ERROR]: Filesource: cannot find required file (Vox 4-7.wav): while searching /media/tami/audio/howl/interchange/howl/audiofiles:/home/tami:/media/tami/audio
[WARNING]: A sound file is missing. It will be replaced by silence.
[ERROR]: Filesource: cannot find required file (Vox 3-13.wav): while searching /media/tami/audio/howl/interchange/howl/audiofiles:/home/tami:/media/tami/audio
[WARNING]: A sound file is missing. It will be replaced by silence.
[ERROR]: Filesource: cannot find required file (Vox 4-8.wav): while searching /media/tami/audio/howl/interchange/howl/audiofiles:/home/tami:/media/tami/audio
[WARNING]: A sound file is missing. It will be replaced by silence.
[ERROR]: Filesource: cannot find required file (Vox 6-24.wav): while searching /media/tami/audio/howl/interchange/howl/audiofiles:/home/tami:/media/tami/audio
[WARNING]: A sound file is missing. It will be replaced by silence.
[ERROR]: Filesource: cannot find required file (Vox 2-27.wav): while searching /media/tami/audio/howl/interchange/howl/audiofiles:/home/tami:/media/tami/audio
[WARNING]: A sound file is missing. It will be replaced by silence.
So, how do I find those WAV files? Or do I need to re-record them? Thanks!
At present we do not believe that Ardour is responsible for such file losses. When we have looked into cases where this has happened, there is always some other explanation.
As usual, I personally am not willing to try to debug such cases via a web forum. If you want my help, find me as “las” on the #ardour IRC channel, US Eastern (GMT-5) timezone.
It happened again… Also, while re-recording some of the lost files, something peculiar happened: the beginning of the newly recorded region was an existing region, while the new material I’d recorded appeared a bit later – so I had to shrink and move the region accordingly. That hasn’t happend before, why would it do that?
I’ll look for you on IRC. My name will be the same as it is here.
I had some missing regions (MIDI and audio files) here too. I programmed many beats (with many crashes and “ignored beats”) and after reopening the session some files were missing. Last time I’ve exported all audio channels and after re-opening pretty much one whole import (16 drum tracks) was missing.
I think the problem started at 3.5.308 or 3.5.143 . I am using the Arch linux ardour3 package. These files weren’t in the interchange folder. It seems they were deleted when I’ve closed the session.
It is hard to reproduce (because I’ve copied the MIDI files) and ignored the audio files and had to get going.
But after this week I should have some more time and try to get some bug reports for the MIDI crashes.
I’m having a hard time reproducing it too (mainly because I just want to hurry up and get along with music-making), but I did get some strange behavior that might explain some of it: sometimes when I recorded, part of an already-existing region would show up, followed by some silence and THEN the wave-formation of whatever it was I was currently recording. It made me think that if I changed the name of the playlist before recording, this would not happen? Sometimes the name of a newly-recorded region would resemble the name of an already-existing WAV file.
I’ve had the same experience. So far, the lost files have been only those associated with the most recent capture, and only for a single stereo track in a multi-track capture. In every case, both the left and right files from the same track have been lost. This seems a bit too specific to point to anything but Ardour as the cause. I wonder, does Ardour perform a filesystem sync after completing a capture? Target filesystem is EXT4, if that gives any clue.
I don’t think anyone was yelling at you, it was more excitement as you may be the first person to find a reproducible recipe for this major issue. As long as others can reproduce it, it is at least a step forward.
I’m using 3.5.357 on Arch Linux, today was the first time I have used Ardour. I made a MIDI track, but most of it went missing when I closed the program. I can recreate this behaviour at will.
Create a new project and add a MIDI region. Copy and paste it, then right-click on the copy and choose MIDI > Unlink from other copies. As expected, a new MIDI file appears in ProjectName/interchange/ProjectName/midifiles. Keep an eye on these two files.
Save the project, close the program and the copy is gone.
Hmm, the MIDI-file which got lost here wasn’t an unlinkend copy. Don’t remember whether it was recorded or created manually but definitively not copied and unlinked…
There is really no such thing as a filesystem “sync” (despite the command of that name), at least not when it comes to missing files.
During our investigation of this issue, which led to some changes that are in 3.5.357, we discovered that there are only a handful (I think two) places where Ardour actually removes a file from the filesystem. It was hard to see how either of them could explain the behaviour that some people are seeing. I therefore think that this issue is not caused by Ardour actively removing files, but more likely by some combination of issues (particularly track/playlist naming) and recording passes that somehow overwrites an existing file.
Hi, yesterday I’ve had the same experience. I was working in a big session (around 50 tracks) with a lot of regions and when I was loading the session the error arises: Ardour (3.5.357) can not find a region named “ferran-2.5.wav”. I was lucky because this audio file is not actually used in the session (just an outtake). I’ve checked it on the region list and file system and regions “ferran-2.6.wav” and “ferran-2.4.wav” exists but “ferran-2.5.wav” doesn’t.
Maybe Ardour deleted a file on the hard drive or there is a mistake in session xml file and actually file “ferran-2.5.wav” never has existed and Ardour just jumped to 2.6… I don’t know just some ideas…
I think that problems like this are critical, event more than random crashes because losing recorded material is very annoying and very hard to explain to a musician who just played it a few days ago. If you need more info, our you can point me in the right direction, I will be very happy helping to workaround this issue.
Regardless, Ardour3 behaves very good in a heavy production environment, I’ve been working on a big project for weeks and this is the only issue that I have experienced. Congratulations! Ardour3 Rocks!