Bug Updates

Periodically I like to review the existing bug reports for Ubuntu Studio and related applications and see if any can be addressed.  Maintaining the quality of Ubuntu Studio is an important consideration for me and addressing issues that degrade usability is a large constitute of this.

This should be the first of many 'Bug Updates' posts in which I describe the bug and how they were fixed, with a smile on my face and parsing 'yes' as affirmative in your ardour.rc file.

qjackctl
Two bugs will be discussed about qjackctl, one significant and the other annoying.  The annoying one will be discussed first.

This annoying bug manifests as a missing close button on all child windows in qjackctl.  All the additional windows that can be opened in qjackctl, e.g. connections, messages, patchbay, can only be closed by clicking on the button in qjackctl that opened them.  You can read more about it at Bug #447793.

The second, and more significant in my opinion, is a bug that prevent qjackctl from recognizing renamed tracks in Ardour.

Typically, I like to rename my Ardour tracks using pertinent names (e.g. rhythm1, solo1, bass, drums), however qjackctl would not recognize them.  Even if the Refresh button was clicked.  The only way for qjackctl to recognize them was to restart qjackctl, which is arguably not a very elegant solution.  You can read more about it at Bug #490436.

Both of these bugs have been addressed by upstream and within Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Studio 10.10 Maverick Meerkat will contain qjackctl-0.3.6 which contains bug fixes.

Additionally, I have built qjackctl-0.3.6 for 10.04 Lucid Lynx in my PPA.

Ardour
Ardour also had a significant bug "recently".  I believe the bug has possibly existed throughout the entire Ardour 2.8.x series but has only been filed in Ubuntu lately.

This bug renders the track mute button disabled.  The immediate fix is to right click on the mute button and select the which of the various mute options you want to enable, but any new track will also be originally disabled.

Editing the ~/.ardour2/ardour.rc file will fix any new tracks in existing projects and tracks for all new projects.

You can read more about it at Bug #584786.

A patch was applied to ardour-2.8.7 (also a new upstream version) and is included in Ubuntu Studio 10.10 Maverick Meerkat.

However, I have not placed this into my Lucid PPA yet because upstream has resolved the issue and released Ardour 2.8.8.

I will contact Adrian Knoth shortly to ask if he can get ardour-2.8.8 into Debian so we can sync if for Ubuntu.  Not only is Mr. Knoth a member of the Debian Multimedia Team but he has also been very helpful in the past to get Ardour built and into Debian.  Hats off to Mr. Knoth.

Disabled Network Interface
Sometime back, Ubuntu Studio choose to abandon network-manager because it induces additional and appreciable latency when recording audio.  A less dynamic solution was found in gnome-network-admin.

However, it was not recognized originally that the user interface had been disabled in gnome-network-admin preventing users from actively configuring their network connections.

You can read more about it at Bug #570828.

Sadly, this bug has not been resolved as of this post.  Someone has been contacted about removing the patch that disables the user interface but action has not been taken yet.

Our goal is to have this bug resolved in time for 10.04.01 and 10.10 Maverick.