Ardour's official statement is "you should not use Calf plugins"

[unfa]

Someone has pointed me to this bug report in Ardour Mantis, where Paul Davis has commented saying this:

Our official position is that you should not use the CALF plugins.

http://tracker.ardour.org/view.php?id=7629

I'd love to know more about this - and what can be done about this.

[unfa]

Comment from Paul Davis:

We get a steady stream of reports from people (mostly on IRC) whose sessions work great as long as they do not use a CALF plugin. They add the plugin and the session starts crashing. They remove the plugin or launch in safe mode, which disables all plugins, and the session works again.

There are no other families of plugins for which this happens. There are thousands of plugins. There are dozens which cause problems for Ardour users, on some platform. We do not have the resources to dig into each case, and the situation with CALF is so predictable that we prefer to just advise people to not use them at all. That doesn't mean they will always fail (and when they work, they are actually not bad at all). But it means that if they cause problems with a session, we are not going to investigate.

[falkTX]

A big reason for that is the damn calf-ladspa package from Debian, which breaks the official calf LV2 plugins. Also the previous/older calf version had some issues that lead to crashes, they are now fixed, but people using raw Ubuntu or even UbuntuStudio will have to wait a while to get it.
Not even Debian experimental/Sid has 0.90 release yet... Since Ubuntu imports from Debian, pretty much all Debian and derivatives have an old calf version.

[trebmuh]

Debian bug re: LADSPA/LV2 version
Debian bug re: 0.90

[lpirl]

For the record, I run the wonderful Calf plugins for years from Debian-ish repos (i.e., incl. Debian Multimedia) without stability issues.
Currently, calf-ladspa version 1.1.3-7.1 for old sessions and calf-plugins version 0.0.60-5.

Thanks for the very handy set of plugins, folks!

[jebofponderworthy]

That explains a lot: I have been using Calf LV2 for several years now, have found them most excellent in many different ways, but have almost never used them in  Debian or variants unless I compiled them myself, and have never used Ardour more than a few minutes :-) J.E.B.

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On 06/28/2018 03:23 AM, Filipe Coelho wrote: A big reason for that is the damn calf-ladspa package from Debian, which breaks the official calf LV2 plugins. Also the previous/older calf version had some issues that lead to crashes, they are now fixed, but people using raw Ubuntu or even UbuntuStudio will have to wait a while to get it. Not even Debian experimental/Sid has 0.90 release yet... Since Ubuntu imports from Debian, pretty much all Debian and derivatives have an old calf version. — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#181 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AH3qjFX1x7b-j91J59ambmHz7AZ70T4Tks5uBJJ1gaJpZM4U5kSh>.

-- Jonathan E. Brickman jeb@ponderworthy.com <mailto:jeb@ponderworthy.com>    (785)233-9977 Hear us at ponderworthy.com <http://ponderworthy.com/> -- CDs and MP3 available! <http://ponderworthy.com/ad-astra/ad-astra.html> Music of compassion; fire, and life!!!

[jebofponderworthy]

Indeed, the Debian Multimedia folks do give good running Calf; haven't run Debian for 2-3 years on audio production boxes, had almost forgotten. J.E.B.

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On 06/28/2018 06:30 AM, Lukas Pirl wrote: For the record, I run the wonderful Calf plugins for years from Debian-ish repos (i.e., incl. Debian Multimedia) without stability issues. Currently, |calf-ladspa| version 1.1.3-7.1 for old sessions and |calf-plugins| version 0.0.60-5. Thanks for the very handy set of plugins, folks! — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#181 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AH3qjJYguWSVZLdHrwTfSjGDQd6rFTXNks5uBL5egaJpZM4U5kSh>.

-- Jonathan E. Brickman jeb@ponderworthy.com <mailto:jeb@ponderworthy.com>    (785)233-9977 Hear us at ponderworthy.com <http://ponderworthy.com/> -- CDs and MP3 available! <http://ponderworthy.com/ad-astra/ad-astra.html> Music of compassion; fire, and life!!!

[codecollider]

Hi all,

actually I'm the reason of this thread as I filed the bug report at the Ardour bug tracker.
I'm running Debian stable and I have the KXStudio repos installed.

As far as I can see I don't have any LADSPA CALF Plugins installed. I even don't find the Debian Calf Package in Synaptic. Only the packages from the KX repos appear. Is it possible that Debian stable doesn't include the CALF packages?

Although I don't have the LADSPA package installed I can't use CALF plugins in Ardour or Qtractor as the DAW crashes either immediately (see below) I add the plugin or later out of the blue.

This is synaptic after searching for "calf": http://i.imgur.com/jRqTgHp.png

I can for example reproducibly crash Qtractor (= SEGFAULT) with loading the Calf Analyzer Plugin into the master channel.

Would be really great if someone can shed some light on this issue.

Thanks & cheers,
Marco

[lpirl]

I don't know how KX modifies Debian repos but in Debian stable, there is calf-plugins version 0.0.60-4+b1 and calf-ladspa version 1.1.3-7, as reported when searching packages.debian.org.

[codecollider]

Strange... maybe falkTX can comment on this.

[falkTX]

this has to be a new issue then.
the kxstudio repos have the latest calf-plugins release, and its calf-plugins[-git] package conflicts on calf-ladspa. even more, the calf-ladspa is an empty package there.

[eeickmeyer]

Hi all. I'm from the Ubuntu Studio team (current council chair). Since the release of 0.90.0, I have filed bug reports to get the official package upgraded. Unfortunately, it has been marked as a "wishlist" item. Due to this new information, I will be pushing harder to get 0.90.0 packaged and pushed upstream.

For myself, I have compiled 0.90.0 from source and removed calf-ladspa. On my system, where I use Ardour and Calf consistently, I have not seen any crashing as reported. Therefore, I'm going to link to this issue and push hard to get this upgraded. It seems as though I'm the only person on the team that has noticed a new major release happened.

[codecollider]

I definitely don't have the old Debian Calf plugins installed, only the calf-git package from KXStudio repos.

[IvanDSM]

I use Gentoo's package media-plugins/calf-9999 (which compiles the latest git commit) and don't have any issues with Calf+Ardour. My sessions work just fine.

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On 28 June 2018 at 12:32, codecollider ***@***.***> wrote: I definitely don't have the old Debian Calf plugins installed, only the calf-git package from KXStudio repos. — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#181 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AHKQxkWDXxXB8ogrqswxjBhwm-LNhazYks5uBPcQgaJpZM4U5kSh> .

[codecollider]

Update: I compiled Qtractor and now the Calf Plugins are loading. Nevertheless I got Qtractor crashing while loading in the Calf Analyzer plugin. Back Trace is here: https://pastebin.com/iLcgVHYT

[falkTX]

ah, that is helpful.
There is a signal trap/exception going on the main thread. signo 8 is SIGFPE, which according to docs:

Issued if an illegal mathematical operation is attempted

Crash happens shortly after calf_plugins::analyzer::draw(int, float*, int, bool) is called.
qtractor is catching these signals, and triggers a stacktrace when that happens.
this is only in debug mode, so I guess on release/normal mode, the plugin just crashes right away.