[PlanetCCRMA] Planet CCRMA x86_64 and Adour/Ardour2 XRuns

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On Fri, 2007-03-09 at 23:22 +0200, Beepo / Vanguard wrote:
> Then I started experimenting with the Ardour2. There was some hickups to
> get the jack starting. For some mystical reason the integrated sound
> card of my motherboard was enabled. I remember that I had this kind of
> issues with FC3 or 4 even if the card is completelly disabled in BIOS.
> FC5 32bit version worked fine without any trouble.
> 
> When the Jack was up and running I played around with Ardour2. Ardour
> 0.99 projects could not open with Ardour2 that just crashed. So I tried
> with new project. For some reason it was not able to record anything at
> first. The signal showed up in the mixer when the track was armed but
> nothing was actually recorded.
> 
> For some mystical reason the recording started to work after Ardour
> restart so I was able to continue testing. After one audio track I set
> the Jack sync on and started Hydrogen. After that started the flow of
> xruns whenever I stopped the playback in Ardour2.
> 
> Problem is that the same thing happens with the Ardour 0.99 (+ it has
> some UI problems. The markers bar above the tracks is shifted to the
> right some bars)
> 
> I noticed that even the processor was completelly idling the load of the
> system was between 1.2 - 1.6. I suspected the nvidia drivers (I use the
> beta version from NVidias site) and I had copied the old FC5 xorg.conf
> directly to the FC6 installation. So I configured the X again using
> nvidia-xconfig. That solved the problem and the loads went down to 0.2
> when idling (don't know exactly why).
> 
> After that I still have the xrun problem whenever Ardour/Ardour2
> playback is stopped. The recording / pplaying back works perfectly but
> as soon as I stop the transport the XRuns get the world. XRuns stop when
> I exit the ardour.

Strange. 

Are you using reverbs in Ardour? Which one? It almost sounds like you
are hitting denormal problems. The symptom of denormal problems in your
situation is that you stop Ardour and the xruns take a little bit to
appear (and when they do the cpu load goes to 100%...) What is the cpu
load when you get xruns?

Are you getting xruns when you run any other jack programs?

It could be a 64 bit related Ardour problem but most probably something
obvious like this would have already been caught. 

[probably redundant, but just in case: make sure you are using the hw:
device in the jack configuration, that you are using realtime priority -
you'll need to edit /etc/security/limits.conf if you are using the stock
fedora pam]

Don't know what else could be the problem. How are your interrupts
configured? (to find out "cat /proc/interrupts")

> The questions in breaf:
> -----------------------
> Is there a way to tell the Alsa that it should not know anything about
> the integrated audio card and the only sound card in the system should
> be the SB Audigy EX? (I have allready commented out the modules in the
> modprobe.conf and unloaded the modules manually. For some reason the
> modules are loaded always)

Yes, the startup process loads all drivers for existing hardware...

You could configure your mobo soundcard so that it is the second card so
that it will not bother you. You should be able to do that with the
soundcard configuration program in the "System Settings" menu. 

> Could the XRun problem go away by fixing the above one?

Probably not...

> Regarding the bristol Fernando mantioned in earlier messages I get a
> flash of the UI and then the following:
> initialising one arp2600
> parent exiting
> done create interface: 764100, 76c6f0
> Client ID = 131
> Queue ID = 1
> Registering 0 1
> Registered 131 0
> opened GUI midi handle: 1, fd 46
> Read Configuration: arp2600
> return - no data in buffer
> exit algo: 1, 7d6910, 0
> removing one arp2600
> /usr/share/bristol/bin/startBristol: line 302: 10990 Segmentation fault
> $BRISTOL/bin/brighton $* -engine
> 
> My system is:
> FC6 x86_64 with Planet CCRMA (kernel 2.6.20-0119.rt8.fc6.ccrmart)
> Asus K8V SE Deluxe
> AMD Athlon64 3000+
> Memory: 1024MB
> Sound Blaster Audigy EX
> 25Gb IDE boot disk
> 2xSATA150 120GB disk as a software RAID for projects
> 
> Best Regards:
>   Aapo Romu
> 
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