FAQ for OS X

When I click on the Ardour icon, the program will not start

First, check a few basic issues:

  1. Are you running at least OS X 10.3.4 ?
  2. Did you install Apple's X11 application? (see below for version info)
  3. Did you install a suitable version of JACK (jackosx >= 0.72)?
  4. Did you start JACK running before trying to run Ardour?
    (Typically this is done using a JACK control app like JackPilot or qjackctl.)

If the answer is yes to all of the above

  1. Launch "Console", which can be found in the "Applications->Utilities" folder
  2. Look at the console log in the Console app. Press the "clear" button to remove any previous messages.
  3. Try to launch Ardour again
  4. Cut and paste the entire contents of the Console window (including any data stored in the scrollback) into an email message, and send it to the Ardour development team at osx-support "@" ardour.org. Include details of your OS version and processor type.
  5. If you can find the words "lazy binding" in the output, see the next question.

Apple's X11.app doesn't startup correctly

For OS X 10.3, you can install X11.app from the OS X install disk, or get the version available via download from apple.com.
For OS X 10.4, you must install X11.app from the OS X install disk.

Ardour reports "dyld: lazy symbol finding failed"

If the console log (see above) contains this message: 

    dyld: lazy symbol binding failed: image not found for lazy pointer
    dyld: image not found for lazy pointer

then you likely have a problematic VST plugin installed that is being found by Ardour at startup. You have two choices:

  1. rename the VST-enabler that comes as part of Ardour for OS X. This is dangerous and not recommended but it can be faster than the second choice. The file to rename can be found in Ardour.app/Contents/resources/lib/ladspa/, and is called VST-enabler.so. Giving it any name that does not end in ".so" will disable VST support.
  2. move all your VST plugins out of /Library/Audio/Plugins/VST and move them back in one at a time to find the one(s) that have problems.