On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 2:14 PM, Fons Adriaensen <[email protected]> wrote:
> I'm preparing a seminar that will take place tomorrow (4 May), > it will involve live mixing of surround sound using Ardour. > While setting up the PC to be used, two problems occured. > > The first one is solved, but its cause remains misterious. > A some point it appeared that the sound card (HDSP-MADI, > used every day since years) had decided to meet its creator. > Every program trying to access it - from jackd to aplay -L > not only blocked, but turned out to be impossible to kill. > Replaced the card - same result. It turned out to be a > corrupt /var/lib/alsa/asound.state. The systemd service > doing the 'alsactl restore' while booting choked on it, > blocked, and this apperently blocked all others trying > to use the card later. What I don't understand is how alsactl > exactly failed, and why these processes seemed to be immune > to a 'kill -9'. > > The second one is an Ardour2 session that worked perfectly > on another similar PC, but becomes completely unresponsive > on the one to be used. It has four mono tracks and three > 10-channel ones, and little else. DSP load is not the problem, > it's less than 15%. Things look like it's the graphics. When > Ardour's playhead reaches the right end of the editor window, > it takes something like 5 seconds for the editor display to > update - everything seems to freeze during that time but audio > is not interrupted. Same when trying to scroll or change the > zoom factor. Video card is Nvidia GeForce 7300, indeed quite > old, but the same PC does full-screen HD youtube videos without > problem. Video driver is nouveau as nv seems to be no longer > supported by Archlinux. I'm pretty sure this system didn't have > such problems when it was using nv. OTOH nouveau works very well > on other systems... I could try and install the proprietary > Nvidia driver, but with just some hours to go I'd rather not > take any risks... > > Any hints ? > > Ciao, > > > Fons, sorry if this reply didn't come in time, but FWIW, Non-Timeline can now import Ardour sessions (audio tracks and regions) and should have significantly faster graphics, esp. on older hardware.
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