New MusE crash on big project.

[Impostor]

It was indeed one of the Surge instruments, one I no longer use. I still use other Surge instruments, including one I made myself.

I have attached the fixed version.

This time when I save and load it, no crashies. B-)

Your fixed project still crashes here! Still due to the exact same <source track="10"/> routings. How weird is that?

Edit: Since Yoshimi is on port 10, I installed Yoshimi, and now the projects do load without crashes! So the absence of the Yoshimi plugin with the presence of its routings caused the crash here, while your crash was apparently unrelated.

[onefang]

Now Tim has two crashes to figure out.

[Impostor]

Now Tim has two crashes to figure out.

I can only imagine the delight.

[onefang]

Wish I had made a backup before I started today. Interesting the SetTheControlsForTheDrumAndTheBass_128_fluidyoshimi.med.backup is from June 4th, which would be before I updated to the current git head that I'm using. Ah I see that "Auto save" is turned off, might have fallen through the cracks when I updated since June.

Hmm, auto save still isn't working.

And I may have been confused, did that .med.backup get created automatically in June, or did I copy it manually then?

[Tim E. Real]

Hi @onefang Thanks for the song files.

I got Surge 1.7.1 LV2 installed.
I am seeing crashes with your file but it is not clear if they are the same crashes that you are getting.
As soon as I got Surge installed it started crashing. Previously it was not, even with Yoshimi installed.

So... There are a few things going on here.

1) Your original song file is missing some tracks.
Or, more precisely, there are mixer strips and routing connections in the song file that reference non-existent tracks.

I counted 63 tracks total in the song:
1 AudioOutput
37 MidiTrack
1 AudioInput
9 WaveTrack
9 SynthI (6 Surge-LV2)
1 AudioGroup
5 newdrumtrack
0 aux track

Thus, a valid track index which other items in the song file can reference is 0-62.
And yet, there are mixer strips and routing connections in the song file that reference track indexes 63-67, which are invalid.

The cure is not a simple matter of removing the references to track indexes 63-67, because the missing tracks
seem to be scattered among all the other tracks. I tried that.
For example a routing connection is expecting a midi track at say, index 40, but the track currently at index 40 is not a midi track.
Thus it seems some tracks are missing, scattered throughout the list of tracks, not just at the very end of the list.

This is puzzling. Not sure how tracks could go missing, while invalid mixer strips and routing connections were kept in the file.

2) I tried removing the excess track references, and all customData tags (which can cause problems if a newer version
of a plugin is being used - the existing customData might be alien to the new version).
No luck, still crashing.

3) I tried replacing all Surge LV2 instances in the file with the latest Surge XT LV2.
Well, no luck yet, it crashes my desktop, likely due to runaway memory use, I probably have done something wrong
and I think I may have to remove all the controller tags to make it work. Jury is still out on this one...

4) I am now recalling that we have been down this road before, here on LM, with @Impostor 's bugs.
It seems too many multiple instances of Surge might be causing a problem.
For the record, the crashes are occurring in the audio process call when we ask Surge to process audio.
This is not good, and indicates the same problem @Impostor was having, if I recall correctly.
The crashes are not occurring in our code, they're in Surge.
Seems multiple Surge (and others?) are fussy with MusE, possibly something about the track order makes it happen.
I note that I can make a project with multiple Surge XT and it runs fine so far, but I suspect that if I add more,
or arrange the tracks a certain way, it will crash. That seemed to be the case with @Impostor 's bugs as well.
I will try to make that happen here with XT...

Still investigating this mystery.

Sorry about the trouble.
I hope you were able to get some work done this weekend.
T.

[onefang]

When I haven't been busy moving house twice this year, or sitting in dentists for hours multiple times, I have been working on this project.

It's a big project. It's what I'm using to learn the ropes with all this fancy new music creation stuff that didn't exist in the '70s. So lots of experiments, lots of things added, rearranged, taken away. Generally staying on top of your changes with compiling from git head.

One of the major things I did was to replace some Surge instruments with Fluidsynth and Yoshimi Multiple instruments. Surge is still cool for some things though.

So I'm not surprised it's a big mess. As an experienced developer, I know that sometimes you need someone to make a big mess to help sort out issues and corner cases in your code. I've been happy to have two such people in my life.

I cleaned up this project enough with meld that I could continue with it. I got about half of my 16 bar blues sorted out now. Cleaned up the volume levels. Experimented with things that can do what Roland Space Echo does, and ended up with Airwindows TapeDelay2, but it's having similar problems with MusE that Surge does. Now I'm getting further with putting the TapeDelay2 in a Carla rack. Which basically moves complex routing out of MusE and into Jack.

When I started this journey to become a musician again, I threw my torture test at all the FOSS music creation software, coz I knew I'd be dealing with big complex projects, coz that's the sort of music I enjoy. A Tubular Bells MIDI file I happened to have laying around for years, or Tortuous Balls as I call it now. MusE handled it the best, most managed to crash or screw up badly with basic stuff, or required way to much work just to get it into a playable state. I've heard people say that all of it sucks, but so far MusE sucks the least. B-)

I'm sure you'll use this opportunity to make it suck less.

Thanks Tim.

[Tim E. Real]

New tag line: "MusE: It sucks less."

[Impostor]

@Impostor 's bugs.
Surge might be causing a problem.

Yeah, there seemingly was something wrong with their prebuilt versions. When I built the git master, both the lv2 and vst2 versions seemed to work correctly. But I tend not to use Surge at all in my projects, so I haven't tested them extensively.

Edit: those new versions were built with Juce7, the older ones not. That could have made the difference.

[onefang]

So now I have basically rebuilt this project from scratch. Exporting and importing the MIDI tracks, and one case copy pasting the text events for one track automation. That let me get on with things, and there's basically two bits of 16 bars left to put some music into, and then playing around with TapeDelaay2 to make it sound cool. I may even get to play it at the reggae festival tomorrow.

For those not paying attention, it's a really long song, 2 x 16 bars is a tiny part of it. lol

I'll write it all up as some sort of tutorial later.

[Impostor]

So now I have basically rebuilt this project from scratch. Exporting and importing the MIDI tracks, and one case copy pasting the text events for one track automation. That let me get on with things, and there's basically two bits of 16 bars left to put some music into, and then playing around with TapeDelaay2 to make it sound cool. I may even get to play it at the reggae festival tomorrow.

For those not paying attention, it's a really long song, 2 x 16 bars is a tiny part of it. lol

I'll write it all up as some sort of tutorial later.

Have fun tomorrow!

[onefang]

I managed to get my song played, but not on one of the big sound systems, only on the youth stage which only had two small speakers but at least a semi decent sub woofer. Coz they had plenty of time between setting up and having to actually play what they are supposed to play (child musicians performing live).

The only audience was the two sound engineers, but I was only wanting to listen to it so I could hear it played on something other than my headphones. Sounded good, and they said it was good music.

Pink Floyd often do funky things with phase, and I did notice there was funky phase things, which I had somehow managed to add by accident. Phase tricks don't work on headphones, coz they rely on the sound waves interacting in air, there's no air there just head. Might work if I was an airhead.

Another accident, which I had decided to leave, was that one of the echoes on the lyric "greed of the rich" was put down half way through the word "rich", I plonk them down crudely then zoom in to adjust them more exactly. So that ended up "greed of the rich sh sh sh", which I kind of like the implications of that, and so did others. B-)