Troubleshooting

Ardour tips

Since Ardour support can be… annoying, I thought I’d start posting tips and workarounds here, in no particular order. Feel free to submit any of your own via Discord.

  • If you’ve disabled then re-enabled follow range, and follow range is no longer working, restart Ardour. If that doesn’t work, back up your ~/.config/ardour8 dir and let Ardour create a new one.
  • If you’ve duplicated a MIDI track and the notes aren’t playing in the new track, but the output assignment is correct and notes sound from the virtual keyboard, delete the duplicated track, create a new track, and copy/paste regions from the old track to the new one.

media-sound/alsa-tools-1.1.6 fails with pcxhr error

If you do not have a Digigram PCXHR, you can resolve this by changing

ALSA_CARDS="*"

to

ALSA_CARDS="emu10k1 emu10k1x hdsp hdspm ice1712 mixart rme32 rme96 sb16 sbawe sscape usb-usx2y vx222"

in /etc/portage/make.conf.

ERROR: Failed to compile the “firmware_install” target…

genkernel needs to be keyworded ~amd64 in /etc/portage/package.keywords/sys-kernel:

sys-kernel/genkernel ~amd64

Once you have updated genkernel, this problem should be resolved.

For more info, see this post: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-8161550.html

Booting

If, after installing, you kernel hangs on boot but doesn’t actually panic, you might need to perform the following:

  1. Edit /etc/default/grub by adding this line: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="acpi=off nomodeset xforcevesa"
  2. Make sure boot partition is mounted: mount /dev/sda2 /boot in chroot or mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/gentoo/boot outside of chroot.
  3. grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
  4. Reboot.

Updating

Running eix-sync, you get:

fatal: destination path '.' already exists and is not an empty directory.

Solution:

rm -rvf /usr/local/portage

eix-sync

X-Runs: Known Causes

The following are known causes of x-runs. There is nothing you can do about this except avoid/ignore them.

  • Firefox with JACK support. Don’t use Firefox while recording.
  • jack_keyboard causes an x-run when exiting.
  • Ardour may cause an x-run or two when starting/exiting. This can be ignored.
  • Audacity may cause an x-run when starting/exiting.

If x-runs occur while using a JACK program normally, you need to tweak your settings until you have zero x-runs under normal use. Generally, start as low as you can with your buffer size and work your way up. Start as high as you can with your sample rate and work your way down. The number of periods should be 2 or 3 – you will have to experiment to see which works better on your system. If you establish a zero-x-run config and you are not happy with the latency, you will need hardware that can handle a lower latency without x-runs, or decide that occasional x-runs do not interfere with your creative process. (For audio recording, this may not be possible, but for non-recording uses, it may be.)

Software Installation Issues

Sooperlooper: The wxwidgets use flag is required in order for the slgui component to be compiled.